Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

Rachel Maddow

Mar 2012 · Sold by Crown

About this ebook

The #1 New York Times bestseller that charts America’s dangerous drift into a state of perpetual war.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring Reagan's radical presidency, the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the scope of American military power to overpower our political discourse. 

Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seri­ously funny, Drift reinvigorates a "loud and jangly" political debate about our vast and confounding national security state.

Ratings and reviews

Conservatives flock to bomb this comment block based on the same ridiculously shameful philosophy they use to justify rewriting Wikipedia pages and burying positive liberal articles on Digg. You guys are so manic about what you believe you run around trolling the Internet laughably thinking that the more plentiful your position is the truer it is. It isn't. Literally, that makes it more cancerous. By the way, Google, it's an obvious mistake to allow people to post reviews if they haven't purchased the product from you.

Rachel does a good job of tying together a long piece of our collective past and showing how it is affecting our current situation. The fact that she is able to do this from a politically centrist voice tells a lot. She is even advocating true 'small c' conservative ideas - we ALL need to have a vested interest when we decide to engage our military. Interesting side note: I find it humorous that the people posting 1 star reviews are using very short sentences that attack Rachel personally but don't speak to anything in the book. It's very clear they haven't read the book and just stumbled upon this review area in their quest to sperad their bitterness & vitriolic musings.

From the book's preview (page 23 or so) : "We were a country that could afford to be generous to our returning veterans, and more than sixty years later we're still reaping the benefits of that generosity". RM then goes on to extol the virtues of all the governmental handouts (college, home loans etc) to people/vets after WWII (GI Bill stuff). Of course she thinks it's OK to spend other people's money (OPM) on the vets (it's akin to kissing babies) but there were a lot of downsides to this spending. Once the gov't got involved in subsidizing housing and college tuitions, the costs couldn't help but rise. We are still paying for this today. But RM thinks we got nothing but "benefits" from it.

About the author

Rachel Maddow has hosted the Emmy Award–winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC since 2008. Before that, she was at Air America Radio for the duration of that underappreciated enterprise. She has a doctorate in politics from Oxford and a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford. She lives in rural western Massachusetts and New York City with her partner, artist Susan Mikula, and an enormous dog.