Rising income inequality makes us want to bomb the crap out of everyone

by Joshua Holland .

War has long been seen as an endeavor urged on by the elites who stood the most to gain from conflict - whether to protect overseas assets, create more favorable conditions for international trade or by selling materiel for the conflict - and paid for with the blood of the poor, the cannon fodder who serve their country but have little direct stake in the outcome.
That was certainly the perception of the Vietnam War when Creedence Clearwater Revival hit the charts with "Fortunate Son" in 1969. Millions of poor kids were drafted and sent overseas to fight and die in the jungle while children of the affluent got deferments to attend college. (Dick Cheney famously said of the five deferments he received during that time, "I had other priorities in the 60?s than military service.")
Much has changed since then in terms of how and when wealthy democracies like the US make war. MIT political scientist Jonathan Caverley, author of Democratic Militarism Voting, Wealth, and War, and himself a US Navy veteran, argues that increasingly high-tech militaries [sic], with all-volunteer armies that sustain fewer casualties in smaller conflicts, combine with rising economic inequality to create perverse incentives that turn the conventional view of war on its head. His research looks at public opinion and military aggressiveness, and concludes that it's the working class and poor who are more likely to favor military action today. And that bottom-up pressure makes wealthy democracies more aggressive.
BillMoyers.com spoke with Caverley about his research. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
Joshua Holland: Your research leads to a somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion. Can you give me your thesis in a nutshell?
Jonathan Caverley: My argument is that in a heavily industrialized democracy like the United States, we have developed a very capital intensive form of warfare. We no longer send millions of combat troops overseas - or see massive numbers of casualties coming home. Once you start going to war with lots of airplanes, satellites, communications - and a few very highly trained special operations forces - going to war becomes a check writing exercise rather than a social mobilization. And once you turn war into a check writing exercise, the incentives for and against going to war change.
You can think of it as a redistribution exercise, where people who have less income generally pay a smaller share of the cost of war. This is especially important at the federal level. In the United States, the federal government tends to be funded largely from the top 20 percent. Most of the federal government, I'd say 60 percent, maybe even 65 percent, is financed by the wealthy.
For most people, war now costs very little in terms of both blood and treasure. And it has a redistributive effect.

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