Faire un mauvais coup. Non ou Oui?

. . . a friend, André Gide once said, is someone with whom you would be happy to faire un mauvais un coup.

—Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia”

Flight to Canada. “Cadet Bone Spurs.” “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong, they never called me Nigger.” Conscientious objectors. (Then there were those who could not avoid the draft or did not want to do so. “Apocalypse Now”: “The horror, the horror.” John McCain—“Hanoi Hilton.”) Escape; draft dodging; public resistance; pacifism (and the Conradian specter). A mere sample of the various strategies employed by Americans to avoid the Vietnam draft; or to register opposition to U.S. militarism; or to remain true to one’s religious convictions. One way or another, the goal was simple: evade conscription into the Vietnam War. Do so through whatever means necessary. Dissent carried its own political cachet. Then there were those, most of whom were rich, who claimed physical incapacity. In relation to military conscription, such is our understanding of the political milieu that we have designated “1968.”

However, in light of Fredric Jameson’s essay “An American Utopia,” it seems worth considering whether the radical potentialities of military conscription have for too long been overlooked. Is it possible that Jameson, venerable and stalwart theorist of the left, is playing a trick, a clever, provocative one, all right, on us? If not, then why is Jameson suggesting that democracy has much to learn from the “stereotypes of army life”? For Jameson,

barrack life, the life of the recruit or the draftee, always involves being thrown together with people utterly unlike you, from wholly different and incompatible backgrounds, classes, ethnicities and even sexes. The instantaneous dislikes and distasteful cultural unfamiliarities, the inescapable elbow-rubbing with people whom you have nothing in common and would normally avoid—this is true democracy, normally concealed by the various class shelters, the professions, or the family itself . . . warded off by wealth in its gated communities and walled estates.

The army as the new model for democracy. The army, notwithstanding its constitutive, concomitant militarism, is what democracy must now aspire to be. The army: the time and space in which democracy is produced through difference. At every level, regardless of class, ethnicity, race, or geopolitics, it is precisely the hard and harsh realities of difference, “incompatible backgrounds, instantaneous dislikes and distasteful cultural unfamiliarities,” that assures society that it is only out of this cauldron of conflict that democracy can emerge.

A new rallying cry for the champions of democracy is now necessary as it addresses the elite. No longer is it a matter of duty, patriotism, or honor to serve one’s country. Let us be done with the plaintive imprecations of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Instead, an unprecedented logic is being proffered for our consideration. Let us hear it in its unadorned timbers: Enlist, you who have been “warded off by wealth”; you have nothing to lose but the cause of your difference, your privilege. The promise is not death, like that endured by Owen’s “beggar-like” soldiers marching toward a brutal gassing, but life in a political register that will shock the ears of 1968 veterans. The world turned upside down, by Jameson’s proposition, easily rendered as that old Status Quo song, “You’re in the army now.” All of you. All of you, although you don’t quite know it yet, are just friends separated by difference. Après différence, amitié universelle. In this transcription of Jameson, how does one not hear that most resonant echo of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort!,” that historic slogan that marked the birth of modern democracy? The French Revolution, 1968, our moment—the difficulty is the same: how to make democracy, to make a society democratic. The question is the same because it always demands first that we address the task of how and where to begin to achieve such a society.

The army is where difference goes to die.

In this regard, Jameson’s is an innovative—and provocative, even misguided, some might argue, and not without historical support...