My biggest eye opener was that $7 trillion of our $15.6 trillion national debt was run up by the nuclear weapon industry. Many of the book’s factoids are incredible. Unfortunately, much has become structural. As Eisenhower said half a century ago, 'Beware of the military - industrial complex.' Not much has changed since then. The research is superb and presents a fact-based rationale to support her thesis. Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seriously funny, Drift will reinvigorate a 'loud and jangly' political debate about how, when, and where to apply America's strength and power - and who gets to make those decisions.Īs expected from Rachel Maddow, DRIFT presents another way of looking at substantive things our country has come to take for granted. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national security state to overpower our political discourse. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan's radical presidency. 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 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. 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, with all the financial and human costs that entails. Neither Jefferson nor the other Founders could ever have envisioned the contemporary national security state, with its tens of thousands of 'privateers' its bloated Department of Homeland Security its rusting nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to dismantle and its strange fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine.

'One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier,' Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792.

Drift by Rachel Maddow