Mandatory national service is a terrible idea

Why domesticating the draft won't build meaningful community

Recruits.
(Image credit: AP Photo)

Every few years, some politician too old to be personally affected by his own proposal trots out a new pitch for mandatory (or, at least, strongly encouraged) national service for America's youth. In 2002, it was Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.); more recently, John McCain and Hillary Clinton outlined plans for service schemes they described less as compulsion and more as opportunity.

Now presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has taken up the cause. He liked his time in the military, Buttigieg told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow this week, especially for how it connected him to "very different Americans," people with "different politics, different generation, different racially, different regionally." And he would like more Americans to experience that same sort of "social cohesion" without having to go to war.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.