When asked whether they’d flee or fight an invading force, far too many Millennials and Gen-Zers give the wrong answer.
When asked whether they’d flee or fight an invading force, far too many Millennials and Gen-Zers give the wrong answer.
A s part of a recent survey of attitudes toward Russia’s execrable invasion of Ukraine, the polling firm Quinnipiac asked Americans whether they would stay and fight if the United States were invaded by Russia. The results make sobering — and often disgraceful — reading. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans said that they would “stay and fight,” with 25 percent indicating that they’d run away. Among independents, those numbers are 57–36. Among Democrats, they’re in negative territory, at 40–52. Among 50- to 64-year-old men and women, the stay/leave numbers are 66/28. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, they are 45/48. Or, to put it another way: A majority of the prime-aged Americans whom the United States would need were such a crisis to arise imagine that they would flee if that crisis ever came.
For shame.
Lest the excuse-makers try to find nuance where none exists, let us note for the record that this is the most elemental question that a free man can ever be asked. There are no caveats or complexities here, and there is barely any politics, either. If the United States were to be invaded by Russia, America’s defense of itself could not plausibly be construed as “imperialism” or as “interventionism” or as a “foreign war” or “conflict of choice.” Nor could skeptics, à la Rupert Brooke, meaningfully complain that they were being asked to fight and die in a “corner of a foreign field.” In such a circumstance, we’d be protecting home, and all who cherish it. To demur when called upon to defend that home from conquest is to willingly turn oneself into an exile. The seas, oceans, beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets, hills, and air of which Winston Churchill spoke in 1940 were not random pictures on a map; they were the living quarters of millions. Flee? Never.
I do not write this out of gung-ho jingoism or self-aggrandizement. If the United States were to be invaded, it would, without a shadow of doubt, be the worst thing that had happened to the world in my lifetime, as well as the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I have never wanted to be involved in a war of any kind, and I am under no illusions as to the likely limits of my own martial ability. But if an invading force came to our shores, that choice would be taken away from me. When I became an American citizen in 2018, I took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” as well as to “bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law.” And I meant it. But I didn’t need this promise to know what would be expected of me. America is where my life is, where my wife and children are, where my friends are. My kids go to school here, to church here, to the diner here, to tee-ball practice here. America is where I vote and complain and celebrate. America is where I help and am helped. America, per Fitzgerald, is a “willingness of the heart.”
I can conceive of only two reasons that an able-bodied man might tell a pollster that he would run away in the face of a foreign invasion. The first is that he believes America is not worth fighting for, because it is less worthwhile than dictatorial rule under the invader. The second is that he believes that, if he flees, someone else will do the fighting on his behalf. Neither is acceptable. To fail to grasp one’s extraordinary fortune as an American is to be guilty of historical ignorance and chronic ingratitude, while to believe that America is worth defending while you remain unwilling to pitch in is to be guilty of cowardice as most perfectly defined.
As a matter of basic civic hygiene, the number of young American men declaring their readiness to resist in case of an attack on their country ought to be approaching 100 percent, for, without them, our abstract commitments to ideals such as liberty, democracy, and equality mean nothing. Matters of state are almost never clear-cut or simple, but this one truly is. The question asked by Quinnipiac was, “If you were in the same position as Ukrainians are now, do you think that you would stay and fight or leave the country?” There is no wiggle-room here. The “position” that “Ukrainians” are in — the one that the United States would be in in Quinnipiac’s hypothetical — is stark: At the behest of a dictator who wishes to install a puppet government, their country has been invaded by a foreign army that has proven willing to kill at will. If an eventuality such as that can’t get all American men to say “hell yes, I’d pitch in,” then . . . well, America has a profound problem with its heart.