Thursday, March 21, 2019

3 (political) things

1.

The American Conservative is one of my favorite political journals. Since I don't intend to do much political blogging here, I probably won't be mentioning this often, but TAC does consistently good work, say I. One of the reasons is that Andrew Bacevich writes for them. His latest is a discussion of the anti-war position of historian Charles Beard in the run-up to WWII. It's a fascinating story, and very relevant to our current situation. Says Bacevich along the way:

While World War II may have been necessary, it was not good. It was an epic tragedy from which Americans can learn much with relevance to the present day. 

 TAC is consistently skeptical about militarism and is really one of the few voices of sanity on this issue.

2.

Speaking about skepticism toward militarism, there is this from presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. I probably disagree with her on a thousand issues, but I'm grateful that she will be making this case in the Democratic primaries. 

3.

In Foreign Affairs, Jill Lapore's A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story is fascinating. Here's a snip:
When the United States declared its independence, in 1776, it became a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, after having waged a war against Great Britain, just about the last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Britishness. Long after independence, most Americans saw the United States not as a nation but, true to the name, as a confederation of states. That’s what made arguing for ratification of the Constitution an uphill battle; it’s also why the Constitution’s advocates called themselves “Federalists,” when they were in fact nationalists, in the sense that they were proposing to replace a federal system, under the Articles of Confederation, with a national system.

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