For years, Charles Moskos has been churning out impassioned arguments for creating an American system of compulsory civilian and military service. The Northwestern University sociologist is widely recognized as the intellectual guru behind the national-service movement. But until recently, his idea seemed doomed to remain one of those noble proposals with almost no political appeal. It made antigovernment conservatives cringe and civil libertarians shudder. No one knew quite how it could be sold to the young people of America who would be asked to serve. Throughout the 1980s, it remained far outside the political mainstream, championed primarily by Moskos and out-of-power centrists at the Democratic Leadership Council. In 1990 the libertarian Cato Institute reported with evident relief that national service was "but a gleam in the eyes of a handful of philosophers and politicians."
Now with the new war on terrorism, national service has suddenly become ahot topic. Some commentators have called for reinstatement of the draft; othersadvocate an emphasis on civilian volunteerism. The Washington Monthly, a longtime proponent of national service, recently published a piece by Moskos and current editor-in-chief Paul Glastris calling for "a new kind of draft"--a version of which then popped up on The Washington Post op-ed page. And a bill in Congress sponsored by Arizona Senator John McCain and Indiana Senator Evan Bayh is winning a respectful hearing. The "handful of philosophers" that the Cato Institute worried about in 1990 has become more than a handful.
National service was one of the early animating proposals of the DLC. It drewsporadic interest from centrist politicians during the late 1980s. In 1988, whilewriting Citizenship and National Service--a booklet that became the blueprint for the DLC's position on the issue--Will Marshall, now the director of the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute, had wrestled with the question of whether to propose compulsory national service or, instead, a voluntary program of service opportunities for youths. It was a difficult choice: A national-service program that was not compulsory ran the risk of becoming just another marginal outpost for volunteerism. But the idea of compulsory service ran contrary to the strong libertarian spirit of American culture and would no doubt be a hard sell. Marshall's solution was to call for "universal" national service--a voluntary program appealing enough that young Americans would want to join, thus making national service a cultural rite of passage, though not quite a mandatory one.
The first significant step forward came following Bill Clinton'spresidential-election victory in 1992, when advocates of national service finallyhad a sympathetic ear in the White House. AmeriCorps, a civiliancommunity-service program that Clinton created in 1993 and modeled after thePeace Corps, would sponsor 50,000 service opportunities for young Americans peryear--hardly the revolution some had envisioned but, says Marshall, an important"beachhead" nonetheless.
Given early Republican hostility in Congress, AmeriCorps might not haveamounted to much more than a small experiment. But a funny thing happened on theway to the program's irrelevance: It began to succeed. Even skeptical Republicangovernors warmed up to it. When the maverick Republican presidential candidateJohn McCain started to champion the issue, it got an important boost.
McCain's candidacy crystallized a split between traditional conservatives andthe group that had become known as national-greatness conservatives--among themwriters, such as William Kristol and David Brooks of The Weekly Standard, and refugees from the far right, such as former Ralph Reed aide Marshall Wittman. One reason the issue was embraced, according to Brooks, is that in the ashes of the failed Gingrich revolution lay a new understanding that conservatives had to support a more dynamic notion of citizenship than mere commerce and private life--and national service filled that need well.
For his part, McCain had long been sympathetic to national service; he andMoskos had first met at a 1988 luncheon to celebrate the release of theprofessor's book A Call to Civic Service. While Timothy Noah was interviewing the senator about another topic in 1987, the conversation turned to a piece that Noah had written a year earlier for The Washington Monthly calling for a draft: "McCain said very straightforwardly that he believed in compulsory national service," Noah recalls. As the de facto leader of national-greatness conservatism, McCain began to sound themes in his 2000 election campaign that led advocates of national service to believe that they might have a new ally in their corner.
Marshall saw an opportunity: As the nation's attention focused on Florida inNovember 2000, he convened a summit. In attendance were members of thenational-service establishment (John Gomperts of the Corporation for NationalService and Alan Khazei of CityYear), their traditional patrons in the DLC (EdKilgore, the DLC's policy director, and legislative staff from Senator Bayh'soffice), and their new friends in the national-greatness movement (Kristol andWittman, as well as a staffer from Republican Congressman Christopher Shays'office).
In the past, some national-service supporters had been most interested incivilian service; now, members of the Marshall group argued for an increasedemphasis on military service as part of their joint initiative. "Thecivilian-service people," says Wittman, who attended as McCain's representative,were "very amenable to a military component." That first gathering brought theoutlines of what would become the McCain-Bayh "call to service" bill into focus:quintupling the size of AmeriCorps over the next nine years, creating a new18-month military enlistment option, and providing incentives for collegestudents to perform community service. The group continued to meet; by thesummer, the bill was almost ready.
Then tragedy struck--and a proposal that had looked innovative and ambitiouson September 10 suddenly looked necessary, logical, perhaps even politicallyviable. September 11 tempered some of the ideological differences that hadseparated sectors of the national-service alliance. At the one pre-September 11meeting he attended, Brooks says, "a lot there reminded me why I'm a conservativeand not a liberal." He felt that some of the civilian-service positions beingcontemplated were unnecessary. But September 11 made it seem that there was noshortage of worthwhile civilian tasks.
Whether the political calculus has really changed for nationalservice is another question, one that depends largely on whether the McCain-Bayhnational-service expansion catches the imagination of young Americans. If itdoes, and only if it does, national-service advocates may be able to consider theultimate goal--universal national service--within their reach. The biggestchallenge is convincing young people that national service is worth a year oftheir lives. Jon Van Til, a Rutgers professor who has written extensively oncivic service, says that the name recognition of AmeriCorps, among potentialapplicants and the public at large, is too low. If for no other reason than togive AmeriCorps the kind of cachet that would make it look good on arésumé--the kind of cachet the Peace Corps has--marketing theprogram aggressively must become a top priority.
Others point out that for national service to become a unifying rite ofpassage, elites will have to serve alongside everyone else. "If you did haveprominent people--à la Chelsea Clinton--it might send ripples down thesocial ladder," Moskos says. On Marshall's desk at the Progressive PolicyInstitute is a photo of Elvis Presley in his GI uniform--a reminder, he says,that the burden of national service must be shared equally.
Alas, there is the problem of the military, which, ironically, has somethingof a historical antipathy to proposals like McCain-Bayh. "People in the militaryget a lot of expensive training, and it's cost-effective to try to get a fairlylong return on that investment," explains Beth Asch, a senior economist whospecializes in defense manpower at the Rand Corporation. "The services would bereluctant to have this be a major program." Short enlistments--as proposed byMcCain-Bayh and endorsed by Moskos and other backers of the concept ofcitizen-soldiers--would address the socially dangerous gap between those whodefend the country and those who benefit from their labor. But the military, Aschsays, isn't interested in sociology; it's interested in defending the country.Short enlistments, she argues, don't necessarily help.
There is also continuing disagreement within the national-service movement asto whether the true goal should be compulsory service. Marshall and Brooks arenot in favor of compulsory service; Glastris and Moskos, among others, are. Theendgame for national-service advocates may or may not be restoration of thedraft; but either way, it's a long road from quintupling the size of AmeriCorpsand creating short enlistments to inspiring a generation and a nation--as McCainvowed to do this fall in The Washington Monthly. The AmeriCorps expansion sounds dramatic, but even with 250,000 slots, says David Hammack, an expert on nonprofits at Case Western Reserve University, "you're still not talking about a very large percentage" of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 participating.
For his part, Moskos has no illusions about the prospects for making nationalservice compulsory: He thinks they're slim, at least for now. (Not everyone does."It may be sooner than we think," Wittman, the McCain adviser, says bullishly,"depending on what the needs are in this war." Glastris, too, is optimistic: "Ithink the draft would be terribly unpopular among a very vocal minority ofAmericans," he says. "But my gut instinct is that, in a qualified way, a majorityof people would go for this.") Moskos knows that the draft may never beresurrected. But thanks to an unusual partnership--and in the wake of unexpectedtragedy--he and his allies have managed to put their issue on the politicalagenda. The McCain-Bayh bill will likely be taken up by Congress early this year.If it passes, national-service backers will have their most expansive beachheadyet.
