Next year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. There’s going to be the usual fight over what that anniversary should mean to Americans, and what lessons we should draw. For example, the Ken Burns series on “The American Revolution” starts this Sunday night on PBS. I’ll be watching it. If it comes close to his series on the U.S. Civil War, it should be interesting and informative.
There are so many lessons we could take from the American revolution (or war of independence). Speaking as a retired military officer, I might stress the citizen-soldier tradition, the ideal of the Minuteman, the rejection of tyranny, the suspicion of large standing armies, the desire for independence and liberty, the courage to affix one’s name to a declaration that could end with your head swinging in the air.
I don’t know what lessons Trump & Crew will be selling, but something tells me they won’t be salutary. Lots of flag-waving, of course, along with American exceptionalism.
We know America was founded as an imperfect union. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness wasn’t granted to slaves. Or indigenous peoples. Or women for that matter. (Let’s not forget women couldn’t vote for president until 1920.) The founders were mostly white men of property, with some holding “property” in slaves. For African-Americans, the “revolution of 1776” certainly didn’t prove revolutionary for them.
I would stress the idea of striving toward a more perfect union, recognizing the early republic was, in so many ways, imperfect. And that’s putting it gently. I’d stress as well what Benjamin Franklin said. As a form of government, a representative republic is better than most but also difficult to keep. And there’s the rub: today our representatives, our public servants, serve the owners and donors, the power brokers, rather than the people. A revival of the republic isn’t going to come from either major political party—they’re both beholden to money.
So how can we end this “tyranny” without a bloody revolution? Is a national revival possible without years and years of domestic conflict and strife? Meanwhile, can America reject its embrace of militarism and imperialism? Can it advance the rule of law as represented by the U.S. Constitution? Can we be touched, as Abraham Lincoln wrote, by the better angels of our nature?
1776-2026. 250 years of glorious imperfection. We can be better. We can do better. Let’s strive to live up to the promise of America.
Today is Veterans Day, though of course November 11th was originally Armistice Day to mark the end of World War I on the 11th hour of the 11th day in 1918. Back then, it was hoped that the World War would inaugurate an era of lasting peace. Tragically, instead it inaugurated a state of more or less permanent war.
When I think of Veterans Day, I recall a grizzled veteran who spoke to me and a group of other young men (we didn’t want to be called “boys”) at Boys State in Massachusetts in 1980. I told the story 16 years ago at Huff Post, and I think it bears repeating today in 2025.
One Grizzled Veteran’s Dream
On this Veterans Day [in 2009], what if we began to measure our national success and power not by our military arsenal or number of recruits, but rather by the very opposite of that?
Writer, History Professor, Retired Lieutenant Colonel (USAF)
Thirty years ago [Now, 45 years ago], I attended Boys State. Run by the American Legion, Boys State introduces high school students to civics and government in a climate that bears a passing resemblance to military basic training. Arranged in “companies,” we students did our share of hurrying up, lining up, and waiting (sound preparation, in fact, for my career in the military). I recall that one morning a “company” of students got to eat first because they launched into a lusty rendition of the Marine Corps hymn. I wasn’t angry at them: I was angry at myself for not thinking of the ruse first.
Today, most of my Boys State experience is a blur, but one event looms large: the remarks made by a grizzled veteran to us assembled boys. Standing humbly before us, he confessed that he hoped organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars would soon wither away. And he said that he hoped none of us would ever become a member of his post.
At first, we didn’t get it. Didn’t he like us? Weren’t we tough enough? (Indeed, I recall that one of our adolescent complaints was that the name “Boys State” didn’t seem manly enough.)
Then it dawned on us what the withering away of organizations like the American Legion and the VFW would mean. That in our future young Americans would no longer be fighting and dying in foreign wars. That our world would be both saner and safer, and only members of an “old guard” like this unnamed veteran would be able to swap true war stories. Our role would simply be to listen with unmeasured awe and undisguised thanks, grateful that our own sons and daughters no longer had to risk life or limb to enemy bullets and bombs.
It pains me that we as a country have allowed this veteran’s dream to die. We as a country continue to enlarge our military, expand our foreign commitments, and fight seemingly endless wars, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other far-off realms of less-than-vital interest to us.
As a result of these wars, we continue to churn out so many new veterans, including so many wounded veterans, not forgetting those who never made it back.
Collectively, we Americans tend to suppress whatever doubts we have about the wisdom of our wars with unequivocal statements of support for our troops. And on days like Veterans Day, we honor those who served, and especially those who paid the ultimate price on the battlefield.
Yet, wouldn’t the best support for our troops be the achievement of the dream of that grizzled vet who cut through a young man’s fog thirty years ago? Shouldn’t we be working to achieve a new age in which the rosters of our local VFWs and Legion posts are no longer renewed with the broken bodies and shattered minds of American combat veterans?
Veteran’s grave, Williamsport, PA (Author’s photo)
Sadly, as we raise more troops and fight more wars, we seem committed to the opposite. Our military just enjoyed its best recruiting class in years. This “success” is not entirely surprising. It’s no longer that difficult to fill our military’s expanding ranks because many of our young men and women simply have little choice but to enlist, whether for economic opportunity, money for college, or benefits like free health care.
Many of course enlist for patriotic reasons as well. Yet the ease of expanding our military ranks during a shooting war is also a painful reminder of the impoverishment of opportunities for young, able-bodied Americans – the bitter fruit of manufacturing jobs sent overseas, of farming jobs eliminated by our own version of corporate collectivization, of a real national unemployment rate that is approaching twenty percent.
On this Veterans Day, what if we began to measure our national success and power, not by our military arsenal or by the number of new recruits in the ranks, but rather by the gradual shrinking of our military ranks, the decline of our spending on defense, perhaps even by the growing quiet of our legion posts and VFW halls?
Wouldn’t that be a truer measure of national success: fewer American combat veterans?
Wouldn’t that give us something to celebrate this Veterans Day?
I know one old grizzled veteran who would quietly nod his agreement.
War and rumors of war dominate the headlines. Venezuela. Nigeria. Iran. Somalia. A “new Cold War” involving Russia and China. What are we to believe?
The events of the 62 years of my short life (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, peace dividends that never arrive, military budgets that keep soaring, U.S. domination of the world’s weapons trade, the National Security State as America’s fourth and arguably most powerful branch of government, and on and on) make me highly suspect of official narratives about any war, especially as those same Pentagon budgets soar and those same arms exports keep flooding the world in the (false) name of democracy.
Nevertheless, warmongers in our country continue to shout and bray for more war. Those who make the most noise are typically the furthest from the fighting. Typically, the closer you are to the fighting, the more you want it to stop. Especially if you’re doing the fighting. Consider Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.” When the main character, Paul, a frontline grunt, goes home on leave, he realizes the blood-thirstiness of the REMFs is far different from the war he’s seeing at the front. (REMF, rear-echelon mother-fucker, is a colorful and meaningful military acronym.)
Often those who talk about war use the most bloodless expressions. So, for example, I’ve read that Ukrainians must “prosecute their war of defense,” helped by generous supplies of American-made weaponry. When I think of war, I think of the concrete. Blasted bodies, a poisoned environment, disease, dead animals, PTSD and TBI, moral injury, atrocities and war crimes (because wars always produce atrocity), and so on. Phrases like “help Ukraine prosecute their war of defense” strike me as Orwellian in the sense of his classic essay on politics and the English language. It sounds good and noble, but how ready are those who support Ukraine to join the cause in the trenches?
An American president now speaks of “the enemy within” and city streets as a training ground for U.S. military action. When everything is war, nothing is safe as the worst crimes and atrocities become possible.
As a young man, Cheney had “other priorities” than serving in the U.S. military. Later, the further he was from battle, the more hawkish he became.
Postscript: As I was writing this, I learned that Dick Cheney has died at the age of 84. NBC News described him as the “Iraq war architect,” as if he was a highly skilled and creative builder instead of a war criminal. A reader sent along a BBC headline that suggests there was “faulty” intelligence leading up to the Iraq war in 2003, as if Cheney had no hand in manufacturing a malicious and mendacious narrative of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Even warmongers like Cheney, proud of their mailed fists, get treated and fitted with kid gloves by a fawning media. Of course, Cheney, when he had an opportunity to serve in Vietnam, famously said he had other priorities.
Maybe the American people, collectively, need to say we have other priorities than waging war around the globe.
America’s overseas wars, with all their capricious and vicious violence, have indeed come home. For decades, our leaders projected power abroad under the banner of fighting evil — whether Communism, terrorism, or tyranny. Yet in doing so, they helped cultivate an authoritarian mindset that has now turned inward. The “enemy” is no longer some distant foe in a foreign land; it is “the enemy within.” For Donald Trump, that means the mythical “radical left,” a variation of the 1950s fantasy that a Communist was hiding under every bed. The irony, of course, is that the real danger then, as now, comes not from a phantom leftist menace but from a radical right-wing movement willing to strip Americans of their rights in the false name of security, safety, and patriotism.
Joe McCarthy (L) with Roy Cohn
Today’s moment is more perilous than the McCarthy era. In the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy could destroy reputations and careers, but he was still just one senator. Today, we face a president who channels McCarthy’s demagoguery from the Oval Office, using the full power of the executive branch to punish dissent and reward loyalty. He is surrounded by a coterie of opportunists, lackeys, and lickspittles who feed his vanity, echo his grievances, and amplify his baseless conspiracy theories. The machinery of government — the same machinery once used to surveil and target foreign “enemies” — is now being aimed at our fellow citizens.
The global war on terror, it seems, has finally gone global in the truest sense — extending to America’s own streets, courthouses, and universities. Trump and his allies portray Democratic cities and progressive movements as breeding grounds of chaos and sedition. In his mind, anyone who resists his will — even through the most lawful and constitutional means — is an “insurrectionist.” He has long shown contempt for the Constitution he swore to uphold. Trump is often exactly what he appears to be: a dangerous blowhard with a vindictive streak, ignorant of the limits and responsibilities of his office. Yet others in his orbit, people like Stephen Miller, harbor more deliberate and insidious designs on American democracy.
What is to be done? Congress is paralyzed, fragmented, and largely disempowered. The Supreme Court is dominated by ideologues nursing grievances and eager to reshape the nation along reactionary lines. Who, then, will check a president determined to rule rather than govern?
The American experiment in self-government has endured many crises but rarely has it seemed so fragile. As journalist Nick Turse recently wrote in TomDispatch, the United States now stands on the precipice of authoritarian rule. Many Trump loyalists appear eager to leap — to wage an internal war against their fellow citizens under the guise of saving the nation.
Never has Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning, “Only Americans can hurt America,” been more prescient or more tragic. The enemy within is not a phantom of the left or right — it is the creeping authoritarianism that grows when fear conquers freedom.
As Master Po reminded us in Kung Fu, “fear is the only darkness.” My fellow Americans, we are in a very dark place.
Last Tuesday, I appeared again on Judge Napolitano’s show. We talked about the Russia-Ukraine War and President Trump’s efforts to foster a peace deal, as well as the so-called Deep State and (briefly) the CIA.
The show’s lede raises a provocative question: Can America be rid of the CIA? Anything is possible in theory; the problem is the sprawling size and enormous power of the so-called intelligence community, or IC. (This idea of “community” was already a euphemism in the 1970s, as the movie “Three Days of the Condor” reveals; I’ve always liked how Robert Redford’s character scoffs at the “community” conceit.)
There are eighteen (18!) agencies that make up the IC with a combined yearly budget just north of $100 billion. For all that spending on intelligence, America has not fared well in recent wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. A bureaucracy of that size and reach is difficult to corral and control, especially since its budget keeps rising. Threat inflation is a major component of these rising budgets; you’re not going to get a threat assessment from the IC that says, well, actually, America’s pretty safe, let’s spend money on infrastructure, education, and social uplift.
As Chuck Schumer once said about Trump’s efforts to challenge the IC, the community has “six ways from Sunday” to get back at the president. That is, of course, more than worrisome. POTUS is supposed to command the IC; the IC is supposed to serve the president while upholding the U.S. Constitution. The IC shouldn’t scheme to “get back” at the president—any president.
My guess is that Trump has learned that lesson from Schumer. He’s appeasing the IC by giving it more and more money. Meanwhile, a Trump loyalist, Tulsi Gabbard, is trying to exert a measure of control as DNI, or Director of National Intelligence. I can’t imagine the in-fighting going in within the “community” as Gabbard releases files that suggest elements within the IC put their thumbs on the scale against Trump’s runs for president.
Eighteen agencies, $100 billion, and less than impressive results suggest a deep state that is out of control and in urgent need of major reform. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden’s revelations show a power structure that is more than willing to illegally spy on and surveil Americans.
For democracy to prosper, Americans need privacy and the government should be transparent to and controllable by the people. Instead, the IC is shrouded in secrecy and Americans are the ones whose lives are transparent to and controllable by the IC.
Of course, I’m not suggesting the IC is peeking under every door—unless you’re some kind of crazy dissident who believes genocide is wrong and the military-industrial complex is dangerous. You know—someone like Dwight D. Eisenhower.
America’s war budget now exceeds $1 trillion a year—an almost unimaginable sum.
The Pentagon plans to spend $1.7 trillion “modernizing” a nuclear triad that should instead be downsized. A proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system may cost $500 billion while making nuclear war more likely. And a “new” Cold War with China and Russia is already underway, with threat inflation as one of its defining features.
With military spending so high—and the military so valorized—Washington offers it as the solution to nearly everything: crime in D.C., eliminating drug cartels south of the border, containing China and Russia, “winning” in Somalia, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—the list is endless. Supporting and defending the Constitution, however, is rarely mentioned.
War has become America’s new normal. “Peace” is now a word that dare not speak its name. According to the Pentagon, the only peace worth pursuing is “peace through [military] strength.” A warrior ethos is marketed as if it were synonymous with democratic virtue.
I once called for a 10% reduction in Pentagon spending. That’s no longer enough. We need a 50% cut—we need a military dedicated to genuine national defense, not imperial dominance. Surely we can protect America for $500 billion a year rather than the $1 trillion we’re spending now.
Changing the narrative is crucial. Why do we need 750+ bases overseas? Why expand our nuclear arsenal when we already have 5,000 warheads? We don’t need these things—they are the hallmarks of wasteful militarism. They escalate tensions, endanger us, and drain the nation’s wealth.
And why do we have 17 or 18 intelligence agencies? Despite all that intelligence, we still lost in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Where is the accountability? Why are no generals relieved of command for such failures? In fact, they’re more likely to fail upwards.
“All governments lie,” as I.F. Stone warned. Combine that with the truth that war’s first casualty is truth itself, and you begin to see the rot in America today. Perpetual war fuels deception and government overreach. Almost anything can be justified when the cry is, “We’re at war!”—even when the reasons for going to war are false.
Consider the Gulf of Tonkin incident—revealed later as phony—and the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Consider Iraq’s mythical WMDs. Consider the lies revealed in the Afghan War Papers. Consider the weasel words of generals like David Petraeus, forever hedging “gains” as “fragile” and “reversible.” Consider the U.S. military’s record since World War II—generally ineffective because there’s been little accountability for failure. (And yes, civilian leaders share the blame.)
The military-industrial complex grows ever more powerful, sidelining the American people while democracy withers.
Something is rotten in the States of America.
Many thanks to Judge Napolitano for asking me to discuss some of these issues on his show, “Judging Freedom.”
Donald Trump has a dream: a “golden dome” over America to defend the country against nuclear missiles. It’s a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s dream, the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars” after the movie. The problem is that the dream represents a nightmare.
How so? Golden Dome would be dangerously escalatory, wildly expensive, and unlikely to work as a “shield” to America. It is worse than a mistake: it is a crime. It represents a massive theft from those who hunger and suffer in America. As Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953, wasting enormous resources on weapons systems is no way of life at all. It is humanity crucifying itself on a cross of iron. Crucifixion is not made more pleasant when the cross is golden.
A new golden idol occupies his mind
Put differently, the Golden Dome is a golden idol, a false god, one that by making a massive nuclear strike more likely endangers all of us and God’s creation.
Golden Dome is a grotesque example of makework militarism and warfare as welfare for weapons makers. Though it’s unlikely to work, if it did (partially) it would make a massive nuclear strike more likely, not less, endangering the world with the ecocidal terror of nuclear winter.
Golden Dome and the so-called investment in America’s nuclear triad are both examples of socio-technological madness–America’s leaders are like the mutants in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” worshipping the bombs that twisted them and which can only destroy what’s left of civilization.
Some Christians today await the apocalypse when Christ is supposed to return–but the most likely apocalypse features not the second coming of a God-man but a third world war featuring bomb-gods of thermonuclear destruction.
As Daniel Ellsberg once noted, U.S. nuclear attack plans in the early 1960s envisioned 600 million killed, or 100 Holocausts (before we knew such an attack would lead to nuclear winter). We’re lucky this insanity never came to pass. The only sane policy is to cancel Golden Dome and end “investment” in a new nuclear triad. Disarmament, not rearmament, is what’s needed.
*****
The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space has released a statement against Golden Dome that you can read here. You can add your name to the statement, as I have. Here are some bullet points released along with the statement:
Golden Dome is financially reckless and unsustainable. Early cost estimates range from $550 billion to several trillion dollars over two decades. This dwarfs even the Pentagon’s annual budget and adds to the US’s $37 trillion national debt—a price tag that makes the project fiscally indefensible.
Experts overwhelmingly agree that 100% effective missile interception is a fantasy, especially against complex attacks involving decoys, hypersonic missiles, and maneuverable warheads. Even Israel’s Iron Dome has been bypassed by more rudimentary drone and missile attacks.
Golden Dome includes space-based interceptors—effectively weaponizing the Earth’s orbit and triggering an arms race. This violates the spirit of the Outer Space Treaty and pushes nations like China and Russia to accelerate space weapons development.
By giving the illusion of first-strike survivability, it runs counter to the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine that has prevented so far a nuclear holocaust and incentivizes other powers to retain or expand their nuclear arsenals, blocking disarmament efforts permanently.
Thousands of rocket launches for satellite interceptors would further damage the ozone layer, could generate dangerous orbital debris (Kessler Syndrome), and will harm our already fragile space environment.
The only guaranteed winners of Golden Dome are weapons giants like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Palantir, which stand to profit enormously regardless of the system’s effectiveness or risks.
The trillions funneled into Golden Dome could be used for urgent domestic priorities—such as healthcare, infrastructure, climate action, and education, directly benefiting millions of Americans.
In short, Golden Dome is a massive, dangerous, and futile vanity project, cloaked in patriotism but driven by profit, politics, and illusion.
When you have an unrepresentative government, or, put differently, a government that represents oligarchic interests and corporations, as well as being heavily influenced by lobbyists, domestic and foreign (AIPAC), you get Trump and Congress conspiring to decrease Medicaid, to cut food support for the poor, while funneling more money upward to the very richest Americans.
American workers essentially have no agency, no ability to act in meaningful ways in the political realm. Along with no agency, Americans also have fewer liberties, especially if you should choose to criticize U.S./Israeli policies and otherwise challenge the imperatives of the powerful.
Be careful shouting “Give me liberty or give me death!” in these times. Death may be far easier to achieve.
Hannah Arendt
What is the answer to regaining our agency? In “Between Past and Future,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote how French resisters to the Nazis during World War II discovered themselves—their true nature—in and through action. In resisting the Nazis, they seized control over their own agency by exercising it in the face of danger. They chose risk, they fought to effect change, they took stands that often meant life or death.
Through action, these resisters lifted themselves out of “normal” time, Arendt argued, entering instead a realm between past and future, a realm of true existence, a present of dynamism, of possibilities, of clarity of commitment.
Political agency is not going to be given back to the people. If we regain it, it will only be by seizing it ourselves, through action, through commitment, through risk-taking, and perhaps most of all through large-scale organized resistance.
Hopefully, that resistance can remain non-violent. I prefer reformation or restoration to revolution, recalling the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that revolutions unleash the most elemental barbarism.
Are we living through a nightmarish simulacrum of reality, a Hollywood without happy endings? If so, let’s call it “Trumpwood.”
You may know that Donald Trump, who’s appeared in movies and had his own popular TV show, The Apprentice (where his signature line was, “You’re fired!”), has his very own star on Hollywood’s walk of fame (and shame). It’s rather amazing to recall that Trump was once seen as an entertaining billionaire buffoon, a friend to the Clintons, among other liberal A-listers. The relatable billionaire, so to speak, whose vulgar tastes ran to golden toilets. As they say, who cares if it’s true—go with the legend!
He’s a star! A star!
Trumpwood, I’d argue, is a twisted and bizarre version of Hollywood, where the Oval Office is just a set to him, where the world is just a stage where he manifests all his hatred and trauma and egotism. The rest of us are just bit players (or scenery, easily changeable and discardable) in his psychodrama.
It’s all show business to The Donald, all centered on himself, where he is (at least in his own mind) the ultimate A-lister. He is the “very stable genius,” the most powerful man in the world with the biggest nuclear button, the man who craves attention but who also demands obedience. Adoration is what fuels him. Without adoring masses, without his trumped-up towers to himself, he would wither away.
Trump is the ultimate taker, feeding off the adoration as well as the hatred of the rest of us. I wish we could ignore him, but he is the president, after all, so we can’t just wish him into the cornfield.
Perhaps in 2028, assuming we last that long, Americans might care to elect a public servant rather than a self-centered scene-stealing “star” as president. A man can dream.
P.S. Check out Tom Engelhardt’s latest at TomDispatch, which helped to inspire these thoughts of mine.
A patriotic song I was taught in my youth was “You’re A Grand Old Flag,” written by George M. Cohan in 1906. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it, but it flashed into my mind the other day because of its lyrics, especially the refrain:
You’re a grand old flag, You’re a high-flying flag, And forever in peace may you wave. You’re the emblem of the land I love, The home of the free and the brave. Ev’ry heart beats true ‘Neath the Red, White and Blue, Where there’s never a boast or brag. But should auld acquaintance be forgot, Keep your eye on the grand old flag.
Forever in peace? I second that sentiment, except America is constantly at war or preparing for war. An America that doesn’t boast or brag? Amen to that, except presidents from Bush to Obama to Biden to Trump boast and brag about America having the world’s best and strongest military, with Obama adding that America has the best military in all human history. How’s that for a boast?
Cohan’s song, of course, is nakedly patriotic, with its references to marches and pride. Yet even this stanza is more resonant of democracy than America’s actions today:
Here’s a land with a million soldiers, That’s if we should need ’em, We’ll fight for freedom!
The song speaks of U.S. military potential (“a million soldiers”) but adds only if we should need them, in which case they’ll fight for freedom.
When was the last time the U.S. military truly fought for freedom? World War II, I reckon.
This song’s references to peace, to humility, and to fighting only if we should need to in the defense of freedom, mark it as a true museum piece. How do we recover that version of America?
Bracing Views 