The Politics of Sacrifice
By Albert B. Kelly
I was listening to some commentator on the radio interviewing a guy who wrote a book about the current mess we’re living through when I heard the phrase “the politics of sacrifice”. They were talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global fallout from the invasion and national service and refugees, and higher gas prices and some potentially hard times ahead.
But all of it got me wondering what precisely would we be willing to sacrifice and for whom? Would we be willing to pay much higher gas prices if it meant slowly choking off the resources used to sustain the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Would we be willing if it meant averting armed conflict with Russia? I know we’re tired from the pandemic, but imagine the sacrifices of the generation that had the depression and then WWII.
The truth is, I can’t really imagine the culture that once existed that would persuade a president, in peacetime no less, that it was actually alright to challenge the American people with “ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country”. And I’m certainly not able to wrap myself around the spirit of that time when such words actually inspired some of the hearers to join the Peace Corp with everything that sacrifice entailed. Though I suppose there’s sliding scale for sacrifice.
I’d like to think that if we were attacked as Ukraine was that there would be an ample supply of those stepping up to make the sacrifice to defend the homeland. After all, when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941, hundreds of thousands of men signed up in the months immediately afterwards to defend the nation. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, slightly more than 254,000 individuals enlisted in active duty or the reserves in the year following the attacks.
But other than invasion by a foreign power, we largely lost our capacity for sacrifice. If you doubt that, consider that in the mid and late 1970’s, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter called on Americans to sacrifice in peacetime and both were one-term presidents.
In the case of Gerald Ford, it was fighting inflation and he called on citizens to turn down their thermostats, carpool, and start vegetable gardens. All of this was part of his “Whip Inflation Now” or “WIN” campaign. He lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter.
In the case of Jimmy Carter, it was not a specific theme like “WIN” as Gerald Ford had proposed, but it was his pushing the American people to confront the fact that we had become a nation of consumers measuring our value not by what we did, but by what we owned. He called it a “crisis of Confidence” and it was part of a bigger framework of conservation to address the energy crisis. The final nail in his coffin was the hostage crisis. He lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan.
My point is that somewhere between JFK’s “ask not what your country can do for you” and Jimmy Carter’s “crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will” we began to lose whatever it was that allowed us to not be offended at the idea of sacrifice.
I say that because short of an attack on the homeland, I’m not at all sure that we would tolerate being asked to sacrifice let alone enduring the many hardships that come with sacrifice. Yet sacrifice may be the only thing that saves us.
In the name of combating global warming and climate change, will we pay higher energy prices to support renewables or change our “on demand” consumption habits or drive less? In the arena of health care, whether it’s not wasting resources or controlling spiraling costs, will we make sacrifices in terms diet and exercise? Would we be willing to go back to wearing masks and limit gatherings in the name of public health?
We lament the gun violence that is a common staple of American life, yet how much of a difference might be made toward lowering the number of gun-related homicides if we were willing to make some sacrifices?
In all these areas I’m talking now about a simple willingness to compromise knowing that for many, compromise feels like a sacrifice so we’ll take it if that’s the best we can do right now.