More precisely: The only way that you can staff a military that is loyal and superior to the slave armies of the East (and therefore to ensure your own survival), is to permit the exercise of all individual liberties, to include the maintenance of liberal government, when people become teenagers (subject to qualifications such as literacy, civics, etc.).
We again have seen in Ukraine, how poorly slave armies fare against people motivated to fight for their survival and freedom; we talk about effective military superiority of 3 to 1 or more, if both sides have technological and materiel parity. This modern episode recapitulates the long history of conflict, including “live and let live” in World War I. The motivation of the popular army remains critical to a government’s survival (and of the people governed by it).
We should not consider that fear for one’s life is sufficient to provide a high level of motivation and consequent effectiveness; the Russians use conscription and blocking units to force their men into combat. Moreover, although overall the current Russian regime is more lenient than previously, it still terrorizes, kills and imprisons large numbers of innocent people. Therefore the population also lives in fear. Fear of government consequences is a motivator, but its motivation is much weaker in a military context than that of the fear of free people about annihilation and slavery.
In order for the soldiers to view themselves as fighting for their freedom, they must have knowledge of freedom vs. slavery. They have to be taught, and must have some means for independent verification, that they relatively are free and the enemy relatively are slaves. This is quite difficult (economics of shipping everyone to the enemy countries aside) since modern slave states do not permit the inspection of their most egregious acts, and maintain propaganda regimes and censorship to cover up the rest of their subjugation. Thus the soldiers personally cannot inspect to determine whether they or the other people are slaves. Consequently, the soldiers instead have to be taught to look for the signs of slavery, such as in sex slavery and trafficking, ties to the land, peonage, punishment of dissidents, class immobility, and refusal to allow inspections/censorship. This is no simple programme of education. Moreover, such a programme cannot be carried out as soon as a surprise attack occurs; the population immediately must be mobilized. Therefore, the programme of education and the lessons of personal experience must be taught in advance. Consequently, the structural means of the freedoms of the press, association and movement, employment, marriage and sex, and all such daily liberties, must be granted; you could propaganda all day, but you won’t convince enough people, even if they cannot articulate what slavery means, that they should choose to fight and die for their country.
If propaganda and censorship were enough, the North Koreans, mainland Chinese during Mao, and the Soviet Russians, would have formidable armies and economies; there would have been no military humiliations and they wouldn’t be buying grain from the West. To get the motivation, the people have to live the freedoms.
There is a need for specific tenets of political education to implement the preceding paragraph, but this writing focuses on the structural support.
Since conscription inherently is temporary slavery, and we only draw the distinction by the war aims of eventual liberty vs. the permanence of slavery, this means that the eventual lot of the surviving population must be better than that of slaves. To persuade the mass of people that their lot is temporary, several things, aside from the knowledge of the enemy’s slavery, are required:
- They cannot currently be slaves, unless their fight is against their own masters/government, or unless they credibly are promised liberation from their current status (which requires some pre-existing level of liberal government, that could do away with such subjugation)
- They require some level of confidence in current leadership, or some agency over its future decisions (which implies confidence in the current leadership to e.g. hold fair votes).
Clearly, current leadership cannot be dissolute or arbitrary, nor can it be perceived as power-hungry/seeking to dominate the mass of citizens.
To the first point, the current government might not implement “good government”, but it requires some basic operating competency. Part of that competency is going to be the means to identify and remediate corruption; practically, that means dissenters are rewarded or at least not punished, which requires some level of proper operation of the justice system, and there is a substantial amount of freedom of speech. That is not so difficult for an autocrat to provide.
The primary difficulty in an autocracy or other limited-franchise system, is in persuading the population of the benevolence of the leadership, while at the same time they deny them the franchise. Inherently, the denial of the franchise is an indicator of slavery, and in any event it is a means of domination of the mass of the people, by the elites (however determined, e.g. by meritocracy vs. blood). Hence the decisions of the leadership must at least be equal to those made by the universal franchise; but, practically speaking, for the people to be able to see that the leadership’s decisions are superior to their own will, the decisions of the leadership clearly must be superior to those of the population’s. To see this distinction, the population must have freedom of speech and association, to see that their baser elements (e.g. illiberals, criminals, malingerers, cheaters in marriage and other betrayers and fraudsters), are so numerous, that to grant the universal franchise would give them free rein (or at least an unacceptably high risk e.g. of demagogues running the government) for e.g. spending the government into bankruptcy. All that is to say, that in order to deny the franchise, the autocrat has to deliver grossly superior economic, security, etc. performance, relative to other countries, to offset/mitigate/justify the use of the dominant approach of denying the franchise and individual agency. Moreover, the autocrat must provide enough liberty for the people to realize that these positive outcomes result from the wise leadership of the elite.
We then should be able to answer: what is “grossly superior” performance? If you say, starving Africans in the desert vs. Moscow, that is clear. However, we have in the historical record, the American Empire, which is a massively wealthy, but also universally franchised, country, that at one point (~the year 2000) balanced its budget, and had the most powerful military. Moreover, Europe has many countries with universal franchises; Japan is trickier but still adheres to a number of the same operating principles. These are the benchmarks one would include, in addition to e.g. India, Brazil, Beijing East Asia. The historical path (not to say that this was mechanically inevitable) is that relatively liberal countries, which happen to include a large franchise, outperform everything else. Therefore, for an autocrat to deliver grossly superior results, you would have people with better-than-average-American living standards, working e.g. 20 hours per week, at the same time that they maintain a nuclear-powered military with all the modern jet fighters, submarines, etc.
It is not obvious that economically, such a result is feasible; there is serious doubt that we even can improve on the existing affluent society by top-down means, vs. e.g. more free time, better public morals, etc. none of which would result in a substantially better material situation. Indeed, many shortcomings of the affluent society e.g. car dependence, would be addressed by means (e.g. more effective urban planning/transit modes) that, from an economic perspective, reduce material consumption/are more efficient (though the people would benefit from the alternative system).
Moreover, given the continued struggles of modern liberal governments across the world to e.g. balance their budgets and maintain acceptable military strength, the matter of whether an elite government is needed (or capable in the long-run) to ensure good government, remains an unanswered question. But, if that is an unanswered question, then we cannot consider that the average person would accept the loss of the franchise (especially in the history of descent e.g. Weimar Germany, into slave states) as necessary to achieve goals. Taking an unnecessary action that also increases one group’s domination over another, helps to convince the people that they are or will be slaves.
Consider another argument for the elite in its modern context: that there is a standing army to mitigate surprise attacks, and a system of conscription to supply manpower to win the war. Consider first that the standing army has the right to vote, and the mass of the population does not. This establishes an overclass and underclass, in which the underclass effectively obeys all war and foreign policy decisions made by the standing army’s soldiers.
The first problem is about the scope of the franchise: structurally, how would you avoid the situation in which a citizen repeatedly is called up to die in war, yet their tours of duty, being on the order of a year or two, do not keep them in uniform long enough for them to cast votes? How do you mechanically distinguish the standing army’s work from the citizens’ work?
- If you do it by experienced/realized hazard, such as fighting in trenches and having your buddies get killed, then even the standing army cannot have the franchise in a peacetime society; there are not enough people physically voting in the government. Moreover, all citizens called to service who experience hazards, therefore gain the franchise. A significant portion of the standing army also never would gain the franchise, even though they work at military bases and therefore are likely targets/at-risk.
- If you do it by potential hazard, then in any conflict with a superpower (which is basically all conflicts after World War II), people in the largest cities also are at hazard (e.g. by nukes), and gain the franchise.
- If you consider it by the processes of screening into the standing army, such as physical fitness, political loyalty, ability and desire to accept the pay and remote postings, etc. then typically you do not distinguish the standing army from commercial consultants, CEOs, and a number of other civilian professions. Nor does this address the reality that the strongest military force also needs to be a strong economic power, which requires that a large number of highly capable citizens cannot be in the standing army.
- You could just say that the standing army’s soldiers and veterans get the franchise, disregarding any sophisticated approach; but this means the citizens have no control over the decisions that cause them to die; and the inability to avoid personal hazard/orders to be maimed or die, is one of the primary markers of slavery.
We already see how difficult the process is, even at the basic level of specifying a non-arbitrary system. If we eventually determine that elite rule clearly is correct and that a limited franchise is indicated, it will not be a simple matter to implement or to communicate.
The next issue is the matter of Spartan bleed-out: if the elites constitute, say, 10% of the population, that means that in all war-fighting and similar activities, the army cannot suffer more than ~50% losses. To give context: in a country of 200 million people (a gross overestimate, say of Stalinist Russia), losing the entire elite would mean 20 million people died. As it happens, 20 million deaths is the order of magnitude estimate for the Soviet death toll from World War II. Historical examples such as these indicate that a 50% limit is not viable, as it was not viable for the Spartans who had no rapid means of repopulating the army or the ruling class generally. The army must be repopulated, and it must be repopulated by the uneducated, underclass masses. At that point, either you can accept that the elite is not defined by military service (effectively making them e.g. a bloodline royalty, which over time will attrit/shrink to an unworkably low level as did the Spartans), or you have to compromise your elites with the unqualified rabble. To mitigate the problems of the unqualified rabble, of course you would provide them with e.g. the education, necessary for them to make good decisions; but in order for them not to immediately tank the postwar order, you would have had to promote them beforehand. That is to say: you know you are going to have to rely on some large portion of the masses, so you need to adopt the practices e.g. the liberal government and franchise, that are going to allow you to train and vet them.
I will conclude by acknowledging that there always will be a theoretical argument for a Fuhrer or an enlightened corps; concentrated leadership can and has succeeded in the short run. However, the need for popular motivation and a sustainable military personnel structure go beyond the industrial requirements of modern warfare, which demand the involvement of too many people at levels of sophistication that are far too high for a small elite to direct and to oversee. Marshaling all of that support in a militarily and socially productive way requires you to grant the franchise and other general liberties.