Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
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There’s a sense of fairness to Drift that has won some unexpected hearts and minds
“It’s not a conspiracy, there aren’t rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It’s been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that.”
For the better part of a decade, pols, pundits and wingnuts have all but held séances to make it look like their side was the one our infallible founding fathers had in mind back in the day. It’s been more truthiness than truth, which is a shame because a lot of this stuff can be put to rest with solid research and a little perspective. For Drift, Rachel Maddow — a Rhodes scholar best known for her lefty news shows on MSNBC and Air America — did her homework, dropping James Madison quotes the way Skrillex drops the bass.
This carefully researched and unimpeachably reasonable book examines the way this country has lost control of its military. It’s sometimes funny. It’s often funny-sad. In the beginning, the United States had no use for a standing army, and everybody liked it that way. “America’s structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something’s gone wrong. It’s not a bug in the system. It is the system,” Maddow writes (and reads; hooray for author-narrators).
Or it was the system. But, after two-centuries-plus of warfare, we’ve somehow become a country proud of its standing army and military-industrial culture. Drift is about how we got here, how we allowed each mile marker (Vietnam, Grenada, Iran-Contra, Iraq, Afghanistan) to steer us off the path. How we became a nation more eager to go to war even as our distaste for it was growing. How the legislative branch has demurred to the executive. How we’ve managed to tune out the wars our country is involved in today.
Maddow’s approach is a bit drier than Sarah Vowell’s, but she has Bill Bryson’s skill for making the complicated feel accessible. Above all, although Maddow makes no bones about her liberal predilections, there’s a sense of fairness to Drift that has won some unexpected hearts and minds. The Ron Paul people are down with it, as is Roger Ailes, president of Fox News.
