You may have only recently heard: As of this coming December, all American males will find themselves “automatically registered,” upon the occasion of their 18th birthdays, for a prospective military draft.

Given current events, that prospect understandably gives off sinister vibes — “but without a draft, who would do the necessary work of murdering Iranian elementary school students and Venezuelan fisherme … er, ‘narco-terrorists?'” —  so you might be surprised to learn that it’s old news.

On December 30, 2024, then US president Joe Biden (or maybe his autopen?) signed the National Defense [sic] Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025, which included the relevant provision.

Reaction from the general public: Yawn … hey, the Chargers clinched a wild card playoff berth! OMG, Jimmy Carter died! NDAA? Whazzat?

War has a way of retroactively refocusing the mind, doesn’t it?

In reality, “automatic registration” is even older news, though.

By the time Biden signed that NDAA, 44 states and US territories already “automatically registered” young males with the Selective Service System when they applied for driver’s licenses or state ID cards.

But wait! It’s even older!

For nearly a century, the Social Security Administration has issued identification numbers to nearly every American (these days, that usually happens at birth).

Those numbers are linked to birth years, and the databases associated with those numbers include information on employment so as to track tax payments into an associated Ponzi scheme’s accounts.

In other words, a second “registration” with the Selective Service System has never been necessary for, nor these days would it really even represent an inconvenience to, implementation of a military draft. I’m not an especially skilled computer programming, but even I could probably figure out how to make a database produce a list of names and likely addresses within a given age range.

“Draft registration,” it seems to me, has always been about something else.

It’s not a matter of “military necessity.”

It’s a power play.

It’s a way to remind us who’s in charge.

It’s a threat.

At any moment, the threat implies, our lords and masters can change our status from “tax serf” — generously allowed to make a living (so long as we hand over a substantial cut of every dollar earned), travel (so long as we “show our papers” and submit to groping on demand), etc. — to “military slave,” obligated to shed others’ blood and perhaps our own on command, at risk of death should we obey and on pain of death should we refuse.

While I’m opposed to conscription ON principle, neither it nor the bureaucratic games that come with it are different IN principle from the larger system they’re embedded in. We can have political government or we can have freedom. We can’t have both.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Generally speaking, I’ve always considered myself a “techno-optimist,” sometimes perhaps to the point of  Panglossianism. As a teen, I embraced those new-fangled “microcomputers,” and as a 20-something the World Wide Web, with enthusiasm.

The Information Age, like the Industrial Revolution before it, was a rising tide that lifted all boats: More things, more cheaply, for more people. In general, anyway. In the specifics, we’ve lost a few things as well, and it’s not always obvious whether those losses are good things, bad things, a mixed bag, or a price worth paying.

Lately, the loss I have in mind is the suffocating “no backsies” environment we’ve created via global social media and its seeming permanence.

As humans, we’ve always found ourselves haunted by our past mistakes, both as a personal matter of guilt, shame, or embarrassment and as a communal matter of reputation (up to and including potential ostracism).

On the latter front, I’m old enough — and I’m not THAT old — to remember a time when anyone but the most public of public figures could mitigate, or at least hope to mitigate, the latter phenomenon.

People with earned reputations for abusing alcohol and loved ones could give up booze, get divorces, move to another county and start over, among new neighbors who neither knew of, nor had any reason to suspect, their prior violations of social norms. Clean slates, and if they nailed the “sin no more” part of “go and sin no more,” new and better lives.

Even people who’d done REALLY bad things, perhaps things deserving of severe punishment, could get that fresh start if they moved fast and were able to keep their heads down for the rest of their lives.

How many Nazi murderers died  decades later, of old age and “surrounded by loved ones” as low-profile pillars of communities far from the scenes of their crimes?

For that matter, how many “average Germans” who adored and actively supported Hitler between 1933 and 1945 spent the rest of their lives lying to their kids and grandkids about their attitudes back when?

That kind of thing can’t really happen today … and for the last 20 years or so we’ve been watching what happens instead.

Say you’re a musician, an actor, or politician just on the cusp of prominence and success.

If you posted a racist tweet when you were 13 years old and lived in Memphis, or got a DUI when you were 19 years old and lived in Boston, everyone’s going to know about it, even if that was long ago and you’re living and working in Hollywood or Dallas now.

And that increase in both the archiving and flow of information seems to come coupled with a decrease in the tendency toward commiseration and/or forgiveness. There but for the grace of god I might have gone? You’re sorry? So what? Pile on!

We’ve removed “flight” from the “fight or flight” menu.

If a mistake must inevitably follow you no matter where you go, and if admitting that mistake is just an invitation to kick you when you’re already down, the incentive becomes  clear:

Whatever you did, deny it was a mistake at all. Double down. Proclaim your vice a virtue and defend it to the death.

No, that’s not a new problem. If you don’t believe me, consider the continuing popularity of the “Lost Cause” mythology that rose from the ashes of the War Between the States, bedeviling American politics even today.

As with so many other problems, technology has made this one faster-moving and more personalized.

Solutions? “Love your neighbor as yourself ” is the only one that comes to mind.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

A New York Times columnist offering pointers for “Pitchfork Pat” Buchanan-type populists on “the isolationist right who thought Trump shared his views” might seem akin to a mad scientist named Frankenstein offering a road map to a pitchforks-and-torches peasant mob.  Yet Michelle Goldberg does just that in “The President Was Never Antiwar” (March 2).

While maintaining that Donald Trump was indeed the embodiment through which “the once marginalized politics of Patrick Buchanan became a dominant force in the Republican Party,” Goldberg insists that “Trump was never Buchanan’s heir when it came to foreign policy.”   While “it is true that he broke with key elements of neoconservative ideology,” he hasn’t distanced himself from even “the most fanatical of neoconservatives,” preferring instead to discard the ideology’s “notion that American power should ever be constrained by a veneer of idealism.”  The end result is “less a repudiation of neoconservatism than a mutation of it.”

Trump might, as Goldberg suggests, be “attracted to right-wing cranks of all stripes.” But “paleoconservatives who are skeptical of foreign entanglements” can trace their views back to Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.  As Franklin Foer highlighted in The New York Times, during another rash Republican administration garnering “fierce loyalty from conservatives” to the point where rightist “backlash against the war may seem unexpected,” the Buchanan who “vociferously opposed Bush’s campaign against Saddam Hussein, just like he had opposed the one waged by Bush’s father” was drawing on a tendency that included Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy, “not just angry farmers and protofascists.”

If none of those four forefathers were that peaceful as presidents, neither were they real-life versions of the reactionary rule of Charles Lindbergh as imagined by Philip Roth in The Plot Against America (what was for Foer in 2004 a “new counterfactual novel” dramatizing a dystopia of paleocon precursors).  Contemporary conservatives who “bemoan feminism, immigration and multiculturalism” have given up hope of a USA unshaped by such movements to the point where “they see no point in exporting its values abroad.”

By contrast, Goldberg points out that Trump being “anti-immigrant, hostile to free trade and given to John Birch Society-style conspiracy theorizing” is taken to show that he will cut off military maneuvering at the borders as well.  That doesn’t just ignore the longstanding observation by laissez-faire radicals that voluntary relations across state lines tend to defuse rather than fuel international tensions.  It’s almost as if Perseus didn’t bother with his painstaking tracking and taming of the mythological winged horse Pegasus in Clash of the Titans, but was satisfied with a particularly malodorous pile of manure.

Goldberg is on to something in noting how Trump’s persona evolved in an environment with “no real cost to his belligerence” … not even mentioning his 2000 interview in The Advocate magazine defining his politics in opposition to, not imitation of, “the things [Buchanan] had written about Hitler, Jews, blacks, gays, and Mexicans.” As Herculean as the task may seem, we don’t need a Greek demigod to clean up the political horse race.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Neo-Trumpers: The Next Mutation?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, March 9, 2026