Hell, No, They Didn't Go
Peter Robinson ·
Jun 27, 2011 at 5:16am
Over on ChrisBlattman.com, the results of a new study by political scientists Robert Erikson of Columbia and Laura Stoker of Berkeley (with a hat tip to Meir Kohn of Dartmouth):
Males holding low lottery numbers became more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft. They were also more likely than those with safe numbers to abandon the party identification that they had held as teenagers. Trace effects are found in reinterviews from the 1990s.
"I was always puzzled," Chris Blattman, a political scientist at Yale comments, "why someone did not do this paper sooner."
Could it be that so few in academia wanted to hear the answer?
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Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
I was in the very first lottery. At Berkeley College at Yale, we gathered to watch it take place. There is nothing in this study that was not obvious to me then. What distinguished the sixties generation from our predecessors is that we were self-righteous about our comfort and our pleasures, and that quality distinguishes us still.
Edited on Jun 27, 2011 at 6:27amJun '10
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
I'm puzzled why this study was done at all.
Gee, do you think the men most likely to be drafted into an unpopular war would be the most resistant? Do you think the seminal event in a young man's life might impact his belief system and voting patterns? Kind of a no-brainer.
Even my delicate mom, who operated factory machinery as second job to help the war effort in the early 1940s, was an isolationist largely because her four brothers were serving in the Pacific.
Apr '11
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
And then they went on to be professional students, and then college professors, and we all lived not so happily ever after. #EduLeft.
Feb '11
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
Peter, I don’t see why a leftist in academia would be troubled by this answer. Here’s one way a he could explain it: Coming face to face with the violent structures that support the “American” way of life have a tendency to shift political opinions away from atomistic individualism.
May '10
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
I think this study is very important. I am one generation removed from the Vietnam draft and this thesis had not occurred to me until I heard a special on the topic by Michael Medved. Mr. Medved's argument was bolstered by the fact that the end of the protests coincided with the end of the draft but his argument was still anecdotal. If social science can back up the thesis, it lends more credence to the conservative argument that the majority of the New Left wasn't ideological, it was merely selfish and entitled.
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
Paul A. Rahe: I was in the very first lottery. At Berkeley College at Yale, we gathered to watch it take place. There is nothing in this study that was not obvious to me then. What distinguished the sixties generation from our predecessors is that we were self-righteous about our comfort and our pleasures, and that quality distinguishes us still. · Jun 27 at 5:26am
Edited on Jun 27 at 06:27 am
Agreed. The baby boomer gerneration, something they technically put me in but I resist, has made a mess of things by being self righteous about their pleasures. That's what I've always maintained has public finances in such a mess. Pensions and free health care for life is the product of the "me" generation.
Feb '11
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
Pat in Obamaland, why does this support a conservative critique of the New Left more than it might support a new left critique of Conservatism — Ie, the majority of conservatives who supported the war did so only because they weren’t the people who had to pay the terrible price of war? Why, in other words, aren’t we the selfish ones?
(I include myself there, basically because I’m a conservative, not because I was a conservative in the 60s — that was an era well before my birth.)
Feb '11
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
Peter Robinson:
This should more properly read, "Some of the males..." I drew one of the thirties. It made not one iota of difference. The same is true of my numerous friends and acquaintances from that period. I don't recall a single exception. Did the respondents to this survey really change, or did their lucky or unlucky draw do little more than reinforce, if even that, their predisposition?
By the way, was this study done with a government grant? It's galling to think that the hapless tax payers might be on the hook for nonsense like this.
May '10
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
SMatthewStolte: Pat in Obamaland, why does this support a conservative critique of the New Left more than it might support a new left critique of Conservatism — Ie, the majority of conservatives who supported the war did so only because they weren’t the people who had to pay the terrible price of war? Why, in other words, aren’t we the selfish ones?
(I include myself there, basically because I’m a conservative, not because I was a conservative in the 60s — that was an era well before my birth.) · Jun 27 at 7:50am
You make a good point. I realize I'm painting with a broad brush and I cannot speak for the Vietnam generation but I would counter only that the vehement anti-war position was novel in both its scope and ideological roots. The "support" by conservatives (and working class liberals and many other political groups) was not a radical break from American norms while the rise of the New Left was only made possible by the anti-war movement.
Dec '10
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
By the time the lottery was introduced, it was becoming increasingly obvious that we were not in the war to win. (Read the first volume of The Age of Reagan to drive that point home.) The prospect of imminent military service brought that point home to a lot of my contemporaries. To me it is unsurprising that, faced with the immediate prospect of personal hazard for unspecified, vague, and poorly articulated goals, a lot of them had second thoughts. At the time the left was making a much more coherent, and cogent, case than the right. Back then we lacked the advantage of hindsight.
Sep '10
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
My college boyfriend drew number twenty. The next day, transformed from looking like a member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience to a head-shorn lad stuffed into an ugly brown straightjacket, he was a member of ROTC and thereby got a deferment until after college (luckily the war ended just weeks later). He never protested against the war. We were completely unpolitical. But he did not want to go to Southeast Asia and risk being shot or killed or maimed for a goal that was never explained to him. Two days after that, he and I and his roommate, who was already in ROTC in order to get his college paid, were walking across a field toward LSU campus, both young men in uniform, when a bright red Mustang convertible drove past us and the two young people inside yelled "Baby killers!" We all looked at each other and laughed: Who? US?!?!! In my experience it was mostly the rich kids who protested, not working-class kids, however high or low their lottery number.
Jul '10
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
This squares with my experience, too. I had a golden draft number - and I believed in our goal to stop communist expansion. But it was clear our leaders lacked the will to win. Who wants to die for an effort that's so obviously doomed by political fecklessness?
Jul '10
Re: Hell, No, They Didn't Go
Personal recollections. I had a fairly high draft number but, though drafted, didn't get inducted. (It's a long story, and I still have a soft spot for Nixon.) But as for the civil unrest, I thought, without any empirical justification, that the antiwar movement lost it's momentum when Nixon said, if memory serves me, that you wouldn't go to Vietnam unless you had volunteered. And that when the all volunteer Army came along, civil unrest pretty much had gone away. I believed at the time, and still do, that Tocqueville was correct in his worry about whether we could sustain a lengthy war because it would interrupt private pursuits of individuals.
The big exception to civil unrest during this period was the Kent State incident which I believe and believed was the dying spasm of protest movement. I was in law school in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, and the school actually permitted students to skip finals with an automatic pass under the somewhat explicit urging that students should protest. My belief was that some in the administration wished for the civil unrest to continue and used that incident to foster it.