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Are you implying that consent will be manufactured by "extending the plebs courtesy"?
By what metric? US dividedness could well be argued to have the Shepard tone nature. Also, it might be worth noting that we are talking about the UK here.
To begin with, if anything the level of division regarding US adversaries seems to be lower now. Back during the cold war, it's widely known that Western societies were suffused with Soviet sympathisers. Nowadays, even on a contrarian forum like this one, the vast majority of people is enthusiastically aligned with the establishment position on Russia and China to the point that disagreeing will get you a wall of downvotes and actual social censure.
Wasn't the dissent there carried by a faction of elites, rather than plebs? They've learned their lesson; Harvard kids will probably not get drafted again.
I routinely and vociferously disagree with the elite consensus on these issues, but based on the number of downvotes it seems like there are more people opposed to criticism of nuclear power.
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No, I'm implying that any consent that can be manufactured is going to be very limited. The entire reason the elite has hollowed out the military is because expanding the military (and the manufacturing base needed to support it) also necessarily expands the middle class, which since they'll ultimately use some of that money to enact politics the elite doesn't like is obviously a challenge to their power.
Thus I predict a reaction of "oh look at that, all of a sudden you do need us after all; well, we don't come cheap any more, cost of living has risen mainly because of you so there will be no more of that and the F-15s you would want to use to force us to go anyway seem to be occupied at the moment". I don't think they'd sign up for the wages they pay now and, while a massive salary for a private [more for officers] that far outstrips what Buc-Ees can offer would fix that problem real quick, that puts the elite in a tough spot as far as what they want to fund: their foreign policy goals, or their domestic ones.
I don't believe that, in the 1970s, the urban power bases were even capable of outright saying they wanted to wage war on the half of the nation they don't like because they don't share the same aesthetics. By contrast the sitting President today has said outright that this would be desirable.
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Selective service just got expanded ro include women.
if you think the draft was unpopular when it was men coming back in body bags, then you haven’t seen anything yet
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Yep, the actual plebs beat up anti war protestors.
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