On Mud and MAGA

You can't buy your way into the club, but millions of men think you can

If you didn’t grow up devouring military history, you may never have heard of T.R. Fehrenbach, but he wrote some good stuff. His history of the Korean War “This Kind of War,” is foundational to understanding the American perspective in the war, and perhaps stands alone as seminal history, at least from an American perspective. But don’t take my word for it. Then, SECDEF James Mattis was asked about the possibility of war with North Korea and plugged it: “There’s a reason I recommended T.R. Fehrenbach’s book,” Mattis replied, “that we all pull it out and read it one more time.”

My favorite quote (I’m not alone in choosing it) is this:

“Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.”

Fehrenbach’s book was an early shot in the war against conscription in the United States. His argument, that Americans absorbed unnecessary and unimaginable losses on the Korean peninsula, was a direct result of the tradition of citizen-soldier, and its corollary, massive demobilization when not at war. Raising an army takes time. Training an army takes time. And Fehrenbach believed, through lived experience, that in a world where American military primacy and the threat of atomic weapons would result in both frequent conflict in the brushfire post-colonial wars, it was necessary to have a professional, permanent, and deployable force. He wrote this in 1962, three years before LBJ deployed the Marines to Vietnam.

The professional, and since 1972 , all-volunteer force has incredible strengths as a concept for the defense of the nation. Highly skilled, trained, and without the baggage of selecting citizens for involuntary service in a time of war in any manner at all which could be construed as unfair. But inherent in its strength is its fundamental flaw: it is dependent on volunteers. And this is what Fehrenbach had to say about that: “Citizens fly to defend the homeland, or to crusade. But a frontier cannot be held by citizens, because citizens, in a republic, have better things to do.”

So, how do we get people to volunteer? Well, when I was 17, I raised my right hand because I wanted to be special, and the military sold me that if I joined, I would be. I’d venture that most of us who joined did so, at least in part, for that. There were various financial incentives, money for college, that sort of thing. But volunteers volunteer because they either want to do the thing (shoot guns, jump out of airplanes, fly jets) or they want to be special for doing the thing (every USMC commercial ever).

Which brings me to where men in America are today, and the genius of MAGA’s marketing. MAGA sells to men that they’re special if they join up with MAGA. To be sure, MAGA isn’t the only one doing it. So are the gun manufacturers and the pop-up veteran coffee companies and the endless testosterone advertisements. They know many men feel insecure about their masculinity at baseline. Even having served in uniform isn’t necessarily enough if you weren’t “apex cool” and doing direct actions with an AC-130 overhead. And if you’re an accountant, or sell real estate, or just don’t fuck as much as you think Instagram-bros do after scrolling through their feeds which sell exactly that, you’re the mark.

It’s bizarre that we question masculinity in a way we never would for femininity. We don’t tell teenage girls you’re “not a real woman unless you rep brand X or support X political party,” at least not in the way we do to men. But it works, and in switching to the all-volunteer force to keep pace with the demands of modern warfare Fehrenbach foresaw, we tied comfort with violence and brutality to masculinity. When that is done through military service, one could argue the juice is worth the squeeze. When it’s sold as a shortcut to manhood to those who never served but have disposable income, it’s not.

But it’s how we got here.

I’d never argue we ought to send our men into the mud for anything other than necessity. But the mud does have a way of clarifying what’s important. The genius of MAGA is in selling two generations of men the absurdity that purchasing your own set of body armor and showing it on social media comes with its own mud. The really scary part is when they realize it doesn’t, and they start to look around America for a way to get dirty.