By John Worsencroft John Worsencroft is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana Tech University. A former US Marine, he is a veteran of the Iraq War. April 29, 2020 at 7:12 AM EDT
It wasn’t long into the global coronavirus pandemic before President Trump took up the mantle of “wartime president” against “the invisible enemy,” covid-19. In this war, health-care workers, grocery store and food workers, and delivery people now constitute the “front line.”
Americans know what to do when the nation goes to war. To “support our troops,” every night at 7, New Yorkers go to their windows to cheer the hospital workers coming off their shifts. Work that was once ordinary is now “essential,” and the rest of us, wanting to recognize the considerable personal risks they are taking to keep society operating, are hailing them as heroes and warriors.
But our country’s service members know that while such cultural rituals may be heartwarming, they all too frequently come without tangible benefits and services. The withering of real support for essential workers over time has been replaced with extravagant rituals of thanks, practices that have come to stand in for the benefits that we have stripped from them. This enables us to spread the burdens of protecting our society in a very unequal way, as today’s essential workers are experiencing acutely.
The hallmark of real support in exchange for service was the G.I. Bill — a piece of legislation passed during World War II that was originally intended to give generous benefits to all Americans who had served the war effort, civilians and military alike. In an industrial total war, the factory worker making bombs and bullets became as necessary as the bombardier and infantryman. In the end, however, the G.I. Bill provided benefits for a more narrow portion of the population, leaving out civilians and some veterans, including many eligible African Americans and servicemen who received “bad paper” discharges for being gay.
Still, millions of service members received monthly cash payments after they mustered out of the military, accessing low-interest loans to start businesses, as well as low-cost mortgages and, the most celebrated benefit, money for college. This not only recognized the scale of their contributions to the United States, but because of the sheer size of the returning veteran population, the G.I. Bill became an engine of postwar economic growth in the United States.
The modern social safety net — and the welfare state that administered it — grew in tandem with the military in the United States. In the early years of the Cold War, the umbrella of “national defense” cast an ever-widening shadow, and the military-industrial-university complex secured a link between the obligation of military service and access to public benefits and the good life.
In the Vietnam War era, as the United States expanded the safety net to include Medicare and Medicaid, federally funded health insurance programs for the elderly and the poor, the connection between military service and benefits remained. “I feared that as long as these citizens were alienated from the rights of the American system,” Lyndon Johnson recalled of the civil rights movement, “they would consider themselves outside the obligations of that system.” In short, benefit programs both encouraged and rewarded civic service.
But the folly of the Vietnam War and the economic crises of the 1970s opened a window to opponents of the New Deal and Great Society. It was well-heeled libertarians like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan in Ivory Towers, not young radical leftists protesting the war in the streets, who finally convinced Richard Nixon to end the draft, which they understood as part of the infrastructure supporting the social safety net.
Business Republicans made common cause with evangelical Christians and anti-communist conservatives, and this “New Right” coalition elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, who ushered in an assault on the social safety net. His administration sought to shrink the size and spending of government and deregulate industry to spark economic growth and cut taxes.
It took less than a decade after the end of the draft in 1973 for the historical linkages between citizenship, obligations and benefits to break. As fewer Americans served in the military, the civilian social safety net also eroded. Now uncoupled from a draft that would compel military service, more Americans were assumed to be undeserving of support, like “welfare queens” — a cruel and racist euphemism — who needed to be weaned off the government dole; the free market would sort them out.
Reagan’s simultaneous project to salvage the reputation of the military from the wreckage of Vietnam meant the benefits of citizenship were now reserved exclusively for that ever-shrinking percentage of Americans who donned a uniform in the all-volunteer force. But because the warfare and welfare state grew up together, the safety net for service members withered under the same ideological war on the civilian sector — although military benefits remained a step up from what many civilians have.
In recent years, military families have witnessed a significant decline in the potency of their military benefits. In 1996, Congress voted to privatize on-base housing. Proponents argued that the private sector could more efficiently manage housing construction, leasing and maintenance than the Department of Defense. This has not been the case. Military families were initially given an allowance for housing to cover 100 percent of the cost of renting, but beginning in 2015, the DOD began pushing more of the burden onto families, including putting caps on how much the government will pay for utilities, making families pay for renter’s insurance and no longer covering the full cost of rent in many locations.
Service members have watched their once-vaunted military retirement system get whittled away, as well. Until a couple years ago, if you served 20 years honorably in the military, you were entitled to a pension equal to roughly half of your pay from when you retired until the day you died. Now, military members are required to pay into a system similar to a civilian 401(k), exposing military retirements to the whims of the market. Veterans are also witnessing ongoing efforts to fully privatize the Department of Veterans Affairs.
But paradoxically, while our government has provided less and less to service members and veterans, our cultural obligation to venerating and thanking the troops has only grown. We give vets standing ovations at airports and sporting events, preferred parking spots at hardware stores and discounts at restaurant chains. Americans must fervently say “Thank You for Your Service” and suffer the consequences if they are judged to be insufficiently patriotic.
The military has always been an institution that is revered, with the work of national defense seen as essential and worthy of respect. But because military service is not a universal obligation for Americans, our admiration for it now takes place at a distance. The work, we recognize, is essential, but the people serving in those roles may not be visible to us; they may not be members of our families or residents of our neighborhoods. This distance has made public veneration a requirement, while allowing for the degradation of real benefits for service.
Essential work, at least in the military, was once rewarded with generous benefits. But we have stripped these away over time. As veterans have learned over the past 40 years, and health-care workers may soon experience, a free spin around the buffet at a chain restaurant does not take the place of tangible supports and protections.