What seems obvious about ourselves can become deeply puzzling if we actually stop to think about it. It is obvious to most Americans that the United States is a peace-loving country. Americans are natural if mostly unschooled Tocquevillians, understanding the security afforded by the U.S. position in the Western Hemisphere and implicitly endorsing the interests of the citizens of a mass democracy in peace and prosperity. But what is obvious is wrong, hence the puzzle. Not only has the United States been frequently involved in war, most of these wars are of the kind that, in theory, it should have been least likely to fight: aggressive wars, civil wars and imperial wars.

The United States conducted a very popular war of aggression and conquest against Mexico in 1846. It fought a Civil War that killed 2 percent of the American population. The United States should be the most anti-imperialist of all democracies on account of the conditions of its birth, and yet, at the end of the 19th century it picked a fight with Spain and acquired an overseas empire.

The 20th century saw more of the same. The United States had on principled grounds abjured interest in the endless wars of the European powers for pre-eminence, and Woodrow Wilson campaigned successfully for re-election in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” Yet he ultimately rejected the message of George Washington’s Farewell Address and involved the United States in the great European war.

Since World War II, the United States has frequently employed war as an instrument of statecraft, in striking contrast to the increasingly pacific nature of the rest of the wealthy world. Since the end of the Cold War, moreover, the pace has if anything quickened—two major wars in and around Iraq, one in Afghanistan now spreading into Pakistan, two in the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), lesser uses of force in Somalia and Sudan, and, rather below the line of public sight, in Syria and the Philippines, too. Why is this so? And will it continue to be so in the future?

The United States will remain an unusually warlike nation in the years to come, and the reason is that we are in fact an unusually warlike people, despite having become wealthier and more multi-ethnic over the years. Our warlike nature resides in the lingering influence of the early environment and demography of British North America, subsequently reinforced by the impact of the War for Independence, the Civil War and World War II. My argument is that the United States had two near-simultaneous foundings, one by Scots-Irish people ready to fight when challenged, and one by Puritans ready to use force when legally authorized. The founding experiences of the Frontier and the Revolution mingled the distinct but mutually reinforcing predispositions of these two groups, producing an American national culture united in the idea that being an American citizen meant being ready to fight and die in its wars. What divided these two groups, and divides them still, was not the question of whether to fight, but of when.

My argument is one that privileges culture and historical experience over theory and ideology, and it is because we live in an unusually ideological society that few will recognize, let alone credit, that argument. Far more popular is the well-worn political theory that democracies in general should be more peaceful than other political systems, at least once they pass through a characteristic juvenile bellicosity. The United States, a democracy long happily ensconced in its own hemisphere with weak neighbors, populated by a people constitutionally devoted to the pursuit of wealth and happiness, should presumably be more peaceful than most democracies. Our touchstone in this matter is the aforementioned Alexis de Tocqueville.

At the very beginning of Democracy in America, Tocqueville notes that kings and nobles pursue glory and wealth through public wars with and against each other, while commoners pursue them through commerce. The United States, a real republican democracy, had difficulty sustaining even its own War of Independence because its commoners, on whose behalf its nobles strived, had little taste for common sacrifice:

At the beginning of that long war, there was an extraordinary show of enthusiasm for the country’s service. But as the struggle was prolonged, one saw individual selfishness reappear: money no longer came to the public treasury; men no longer presented themselves for the army; the people still wanted independence, but they recoiled before the means of obtaining it.¹

And once independence was won, any possible reason to engage in war disappeared. Thus, it was not surprising to Tocqueville that “since that period, the United States has not had a single serious war to sustain.”

The idea that Americans were a sober and mercantile people, uninterested in military glory, recurs again and again in Tocqueville. He theorized, too, that in democracies “the disposition to pity that equality inspires; the coldness of reason that renders one barely sensitive to the poetic and violent emotions that arise among arms—all these causes unite to extinguish the military spirit.” And so “warlike passions will become more rare and less lively as conditions are more equal.” Indeed, this lack of a military sentiment would also certainly preclude long or bloody civil war:

Men who live in democratic countries do not naturally have a military spirit; they sometimes take it up when they are brought despite themselves onto the fields of battle; but to rise en masse by oneself and to expose oneself voluntarily to the miseries of war, and above all those that civil war brings, is an option to which man in democracies does not resolve himself. . . . One can therefore accept as a general truth that in centuries of equality, civil wars will become much rarer and shorter.

The subsequent warlike nature of the United States is the despair of modern political scientists, who have never been able (nor wished) to best Tocqueville’s impeccable but unavailing logic. George Kennan bemoaned for decades the way in which his policy of containment was transformed into a predominantly military strategy. Bruce Russett wrote in No Clear and Present Danger (1972) that American intervention in World War II (and American military intervention in general) was unnecessary, ineffective and unfortunate. The “tragedy of great power politics”, John Mearsheimer wrote, is that the United States cannot be content to remain safe behind the ocean barriers that protect it.² John Mueller’s Retreat from Doomsday (1990) concluded that major war had become obsolete and predicted that the United States would eventually behave accordingly. But, as Mueller well knows, it hasn’t quite turned out that way.

Why does the United States not behave the way democracy theorists and other academics think it should? What explains the puzzle? Robert Kagan has argued that countries with an abundance of military power will find ways to use it, while those that lack military power will seek both to use other forms of power with which they are better endowed and to constrain the military power of those countries that have it.³ While the possession of military power surely is a pre-requisite for its use, Kagan’s argument begs the question of why wealthy European countries choose not to invest in building more powerful armed forces in the first place.

A second way to answer this question is to note the obvious differences in the American experiences in World War I and World War II. War for the United States has often been successful, in contrast to the experience of European and Asian nations. Many more Europeans and Japanese died in the great wars of the 20th century than did Americans, and their countries sustained far greater damage. That they should now be more averse to war than the United States is natural. This is clearly only part of the story, however. The Civil War was materially catastrophic; yet it did not turn the United States against war. Besides, the mere lack of bad experiences does not explain why the United States had a martial spirit to begin with, nor why, with the accumulation of bad experiences such as that in Vietnam, our warlike nature has not subsided.

A third argument is that the United States is an unusually, even preternaturally, ideological nation devoted to the spread of its values, by force if warranted. The United States is unusually ideological, true, but it is clearly animated by a liberal ideology whose proponents generally oppose the use of war as an instrument to spread liberal values. The most distinguished political scientist of our generation, Samuel Huntington, initially described the “American creed” as being above all a dedication to liberty and equality, and for most of his career he could fairly have been described as a Democratic hawk. But he ended his academic career arguing that Americans should leave other civilizations and cultures to their own ways, forsaking military efforts to spread American values and the American style of democracy abroad. His view kept faith with a tradition going back to Washington’s Farewell Address and John Quincy Adams’s injunction that America is a friend of liberty everywhere but the defender only of its own. It is also consistent with the long-dominant strand in liberal political theory—one stretching from John Stuart Mill to Michael Walzer—that counsels non-intervention in the affairs of oppressed peoples, who must ultimately liberate themselves. And yet even American liberalism, despite the clear pacific prescriptions of nearly every significant liberal theorist and statesman, has taken on a military cast.

In short, none of the reasons why America should be reluctant to make war—its Tocquevillian domestic circumstances, its Civil War scarring, its anti-bellicose liberal traditions—has actually made it reluctant. And none of the reasons that purportedly explain its warlike nature—its mere possession of the instruments of war or its supposedly ideological cast of mind, for example—stands up to serious scrutiny. So then what does explain the historical record?

As I have already hinted, the answer lies in an understanding of the people who settled North America and the nature of the environment in which they settled. But to see the origins of the American social and political regime, we must dig down below generalities. The settlers of British North America were of course Englishmen for the most part, but what kind of Englishmen were they? David Hackett Fischer’s splendid ethnography Albion’s Seed (1989) provides considerable insight into this question.

Despite what so many schoolbooks have told us about Plymouth Rock, the Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill and all that, by far the largest cohort of early American settlers came from the England-Scotland border area, or had immigrated from there to Northern Ireland before coming to North America. This cohort, which came mainly to the vast swath of land south of the Delaware River, is conservatively estimated to have numbered from 200,000 to 250,000, with higher estimates ranging up to 400,000. By contrast, the size of the Puritan cohort that came from East Anglia to New England numbered 21,000, and the Quaker settlers who came to the mid-Atlantic region numbered 23,000. Royalists settling in Virginia numbered about 45,000.

Clearly, then, the fiercely independent Scots-Irish settlers described in Jim Webb’s book Born Fighting (2004) were demographically and culturally dominant in America for many years, and nearly all the early formative years. They were “born fighting” for two reasons. First, they came from a border area that had been constantly at war over control of land, religion and cattle since 1040. Northern Ireland, to which this population was transplanted, was also embroiled in endemic sectarian warfare. They were fiercely loyal to clan and sect, and they knew as if by second nature that survival and success depended on the willingness to fight in response to challenges to property or status. They cultivated reputations for martial skill and prowess, for they knew that concession counted as a display of weakness that would be ruthlessly exploited for all it was worth.

Once established, child-rearing practices in both Scotland and America perpetuated this culture. In contrast to the “will breaking” educational practices of New England—which were designed to root out infant depravity and routinely included sending children out to live with other families in order to improve obedience and manners—child-rearing among the Scots-Irish was, in Fischer’s words, “will enhancing. Its primary purpose was to foster fierce pride, stubborn independence, and a warrior’s courage.”

The second reason subsequent generations of Scots-Irish were “born fighting” is that endemic warfare against indigenous Americans reinforced the social values they had brought with them to North America. These proud people, sensitive to offenses to their honor and willing to fight to preserve it, were not welcome in Philadelphia, their common port of disembarkation. They were encouraged to leave and settle in the “back parts” of the country on the frontier, where powerful and warlike Indian nations created a dangerous, contested environment without established government; to the Scots-Irish, this was home.

The Scots-Irish also had more children than other English settlers. The 1800 census showed that the fertility rate in the southern highlands was 40 percent higher than in the Delaware Valley. The earlier demographic dominance of New England (35 percent of the total population in 1700) and Virginia declined as the populations of Georgia and the Carolinas grew more rapidly. The birth rates of the western United States remained 15–20 percent higher than in New England and the Middle Atlantic states in 1860. In the areas they settled, therefore, they were demographically as well as culturally dominant.

As noted, this isn’t quite the picture schoolchildren get from their sanitized textbooks. The schoolbook story either has friendly Indians welcoming the Pilgrims, or Indians dying from disease and disappearing only to somehow re-appear out West at Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee. In reality, warfare against the Indians in British North America was longer, more intense, and more important as a social shaping phenomenon than ordinarily understood. Early American frontier society was not merely the rustic democracy described by Frederick Jackson Turner. It was a place of endemic conflict that required citizens, if they were to be good citizens, to be ready to join up and fight when challenged by Indians.

This is not to say that early American society was aggressive or predatory; rather, it was characterized by the paramount importance of being ready to strike back violently and mercilessly when threatened. As Kyle Zelner has observed:

there was either a declared war or a conflict for 79 of the 179 years from just before the founding of Jamestown until 1785, nominally the end of the Revolution. That number grows if we include backcountry skirmishes and frontier raids, to say nothing of the times spent preparing for or recovering from war. In effect, American colonial society was in an almost constant state of conflict.⁴

Almost every contemporary European observer and almost every American military historian overlooked the wars with the Indians because they were not wars involving regular armies in open battle. They were mere “skulking” wars of raids, ambushes and, worse, bloody campaigns against non-combatants whose purpose, on both sides, was to massacre or drive out their opponents. This was the form of warfare in which American society was born and raised—irregular wars, but hardly trifling ones. The First Indian War (1622–33) alone killed 30 percent of the European settlers in Virginia. Wampanoag and Narragansett Indians burned 10 percent of the housing in New England during King Philip’s War in 1675: These tribes also killed 10 percent of the male English population.

The importance of endemic warfare as one of the fundamental conditions (along with social equality) that shaped American society helps us understand our own origins. The spiraling pattern, in which a group of people are socialized into a set of values, receive rewards for displaying those values, select leaders who embody those values and finally create a set of socially shared expectations that determines who will be selected as their successors, makes initial social conditions and experiences self-sustaining. It is this self-perpetuating set of habits, values and expectations that Aristotle calls a “regime.” It is what Samuel Huntington referred to in American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1983) when he argued insightfully that the early English peoples of North America were not immigrants, but settlers who created the society to which immigrants later came, and to which they conformed in order to prosper.

The main competitors of the Scots-Irish for cultural hegemony in English America were the Puritans of New England. They were very different from the Scots-Irish in their social behavior and considerably less wild. Levels of violent crime were much lower in New England than in the rest of America from the early settlement days onward, with murder rates there half that of the Chesapeake Bay area. The Puritans emphasized social order, and crimes against order were heavily penalized.

But a more orderly society does not mean a less violent one. New England was a violent region, but the violence, often brutal, had to be socially authorized before it could occur. As Fischer describes it, New England

was always the most orderly region in British America, but it was also very violent in its ordering acts. This typical Puritan paradox of private order and public violence was specially striking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For many generations, individual order coexisted with institutional savagery that appeared in the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches and the crushing to death with heavy stones of an old man who refused to plead before the court.

There was mob violence, too, but the mobs of New England were “public mobs”, authorized rampages directed against violators of the public order. The composite picture of the Puritan community, then, was “collective order and institutional violence.”

The Puritan experience in the War of Independence reflected this institutionalization of collective violence. The war in New England was a righteous war, authorized and often organized by the New England “black regiment” of Calvinist clergy. As Charles Royster wrote in A Revolutionary People at War (1979), “both those who admired the American Protestant ministry and those who ridiculed it could agree that preachers carried the revolution to large numbers of Americans.” Royster quotes Royal Army Major Harry Brooke, a soldier deployed to Boston who was eloquent on the subject of the clergy and the rebellion: “It is your God damned Religion of this Country that ruins the Country; Damn your religion.”

New England Puritans were not pacific, but violence when employed had to be sanctioned by a legitimate authority: namely, the moral and political elites in the New England social hierarchy. The elites not only authorized the war; they forced the gentry to mass military mobilization, an accomplishment, John Hall and Charles Lindbloom have pointed out, “made easier by the fact that many ordinary Americans were already in the habit of personally defending themselves against American Indians.”⁵

Thus, the Puritan view of war was distinct from that of the Scots-Irish, but the American Indians and British brought both groups into war, albeit different kinds of wars. This pattern, in which differing social values nevertheless lead to war in their own way, recurs throughout U.S. history. This was certainly the case in the Civil War.

In the context of this social environment characterized by two foundings and two cultures, the intensity and duration of the Civil War is more easily understood. Indeed, without a grasp of the divided cultural environment, the war is as hard to fathom as it was difficult for Tocqueville to predict. With that grasp, it is easy to see how both North (Puritans) and South (Scots-Irish) behaved according to script.

The secession of the South and the attacks on Federal forts were, as New Englander Henry Adams wrote, “treason”, a violation of social order deserving of the harshest punishment a Puritan state could administer. Ordinary citizens in the South were to be protected by the conquering Union Army if they were loyal to the Union or, at a minimum, willing to obey orders and did not help rebels. But rebels—in particular, the instigators of the secession in South Carolina—were to be punished. As Sherman’s March neared South Carolina, the General wrote to General Henry Wager Halleck: “The truth is the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina.” One soldier in Sherman’s army from Ohio wrote even more plainly of South Carolina: “We will let her know it ain’t so Sweet to secede as She thought it would be.”⁶ This was Puritan morality and violence at arms in full display.

Southerners, on the other hand, even those who did not own slaves, fought fiercely in response to an external invader, even in the face of utter and certain devastation. They did not need elite authorization to fight, and it is indeed doubtful that they could have been prevented from fighting even had the Southern aristocracy ordered it. The same proclivities help explain why so many Southerners refused to be “reconstructed”, why so many refused to lay down arms after Appomattox, preferring instead to hightail it out West, beyond the grasp of Union occupation. It was truly a clash of two cultures, if not of two civilizations.

The outcome of the Civil War was as interesting and portentous as its origins. For the North, it was not only a re-affirmation of the Union, but the actual creation of union through the mass military mobilization that created Americans out of different social groups and classes.

Students of the Civil War on the left and the right, from Edmund Wilson to Harry Stout to Robert Bellah, agree that the war to preserve the Union also created a new civil religion. The sacred texts of this new religion were Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his second Inaugural Address, which borrow the cadences of American Christian sermons to equate dying for America with dying for one’s faith, and which sanctified the duty of citizens to die for the sacred values of their country.⁷ This new military patriotism, born of war and dedicated to American ideals of equality and liberty, was one of the factors that limited the political impact of the social divisions created by industrialization. As Hall and Lindholm put it, “loyalty to the established democratic state was increased by participation in the Civil War: workers had successfully fought, after all, for the world’s only democracy, and they had done so against the old regime of the southern aristocracy.”⁸

But what of the South? The destruction and death of the Civil War, the elimination of slavery as a system of property, and the military occupation of the South might have been expected to have fostered among the Scots-Irish population of that region a commitment to a perpetual war of resistance to the North rather than a commitment to military patriotism in the service of the Federal government. That it did not appears to be the result of decisions made by the officers and ordinary soldiers of the Union during the war, and the policies of occupation and symbolic politics that followed it. In an exhaustive survey of the war in the South, Mark Grimsley found much destruction and seizure of slaveholder property by the Union soldiers, but no cases of rape or murder of white Southerners (though African Americans were often abused):

The war on Southern civilians did not degenerate into savagery . . . as war with Indians had. The careful treatment of white Southerners occurred in part because [Union] statesmen and generals wished it so. But that was only part of the story. It also survived because tens of thousands of union soldiers, toughened by war, hungry for creature comforts, and often angry at the civilians in their midst—nevertheless understood the logic and abided by it.⁹

After the war, the re-integration of the South into the American military was reflected in the symbolic politics of the U.S. Army after the war. Statues of General Lee as well as of Union generals were constructed at Gettysburg. The memorial to the West Point officers who died in the Civil War includes the names of Union and Confederate alike. The South benefited from numerous military bases and military production contracts in both World War I and II. The result, intended or not, was the re-integration of the American South (and Southwest) into the American military. One might put the matter this way: Northern soldiers behaved themselves out of prudence (they were greatly outnumbered) and because their leaders did not order them to do otherwise, while the Southern Scots-Irish did not remain permanently alienated from the postwar Union because their honor as warriors was acknowledged and given a new outlet. It was an arrangement that worked beautifully for Americans; its effect on Indians west of the Mississippi, however, when formerly Northern and Southern guns were both turned their way, proved calamitous.

How is this thread of many years length playing out today? And how will it play out in the future? The first response of many Americans might be to say that “everything is different now. The counterculture captured the universities and media, and the Vietnam War turned ordinary Americans against government’s exercising war powers. The mess in Iraq has merely reinforced a general change that was making America more pacific.” Is this reading of recent history true?

Perhaps not entirely so. America has had 300 years of history during which the idea of warfare as a legitimate response to security challenges at home and abroad has become embedded in American culture. There has, however, always been disagreement about which wars were and are legitimate. That disagreement predated the Vietnam War and is likely to continue in future conflicts, but so is the general acceptance of war itself as a legitimate activity for America and military service as an honored duty of American citizens.

The Scots-Irish treated warfare in response to challenges as a matter of individual honor and self-respect. The New England Puritan tradition treated warfare as righteous if authorized by a higher legal or moral authority that upheld the larger community’s need to enforce or restore order. The musings of Lyndon Johnson to Richard Russell as he considered what to do in the Vietnam War after American soldiers had been killed by Viet Cong clearly reflected the values of the Scots-Irish society he grew up in. LBJ said that he had to fight in Vietnam; that one of his Texas neighbors had told him that the American people would forgive anything in a President but weakness. This was the Scots-Irish culture at work. But the Puritan culture had not disappeared. It insisted on legal authorization of violence; hence the efforts of the U.S. government to portray the Vietnam War as a valid response to the violation of the 17th parallel, a recognized international border legally mandated by U.S. treaty commitments, and as consistent with a general international consensus embodied in allied military support. All this reflected the need to speak to the Puritan culture. Those appeals were never compelling, however, and did not command the respect or support of that culture, which turned against the war in a way Scots-Irish culture never did.

One reading of the first war in Iraq is that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a clear challenge both to the United States and the international legal order as judged by the United Nations, and was thus a war that united both Scots-Irish and Puritan cultures. The attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 roused the Scots-Irish culture in a massive way and would have legitimated almost any action taken in its immediate aftermath. As no follow-up attacks occurred and the immediacy of the challenge receded, however, the Puritan culture recovered its natural influence. Since Iraq in 2003 had not invaded any other country, and may or may not have violated any number of United Nations Security Council resolutions, war would have been legitimate only if legally authorized by the United Nations and the international community. But that final authorization was not forthcoming, so the Puritan-descended community by and large opposed the war. The discovery that Iraq was not in clear violation of the United Nations resolutions regarding weapons of mass destruction sealed the case against the war for this group. The Scots-Irish, on the other hand, were not so concerned about legal niceties. We were in a fight, our reputation and honor depended on killing and winning, end of discussion.

What does the future hold? The Scots-Irish appear to have been culturally and demographically dominant up through the 1980s, with more Presidents than any other ethnic group. American voting patterns are increasingly understood in terms of southern and western “red” states versus “blue” coastal states. This red-blue tension is increasingly understood in cultural rather than economic terms, involving religion and family size rather than simply income. Red state residents tend to have families with more children, attend church more often and in greater numbers, and express support for the Iraq war.¹⁰

The trends in the balance of political power between red and blue states in some ways seem to still reflect the division between the Scots-Irish and Puritan cultures, but new elements in the demographic equation of American politics have diluted the old dualism to some degree. Certainly, the dominance of the American South as a source of recruits for the American military has declined, suggesting that regions may be becoming less important as a predictor of attitudes toward the military and war.¹¹

Education, too, is an important part of a changing scene. It is commonplace to say that the Left began to gain control of the faculties of American universities in the 1960s, and this seems indisputable. But what effect do those faculties have on the social values of the students? We can first look at who attends college. The clear trend is for increasing numbers of women to attend college: 43 percent of women 18–24 were enrolled in college in 2005, while only 20 percent were enrolled in 1967. The proportion of young men in the same age group has gone up and down but remained roughly the same since 1967, at about 35 percent. Hispanic men attend college at lower rates than African-American, white and Asian men, with the figures being 21 percent, 28 percent, 39 percent and 62 percent, respectively.¹² Thus college does not affect the bulk of American males.

It is harder to assess the impact of college education on the basic social values of those who attend, and the impact that college-educated citizens have on society through the media and government. Many assume that higher education correlates positively with more antiwar attitudes. Data show, however, that this assumption is flat wrong. College education correlated positively with support for the Vietnam War; contrary to the public image of antiwar college students, poll data show that higher levels of education consistently predicted higher levels of support for the war. Older people supported the war less than young people. Overall levels of public support for the war through 1970 tracked general assessments of whether progress was being made in the war.¹³

Have things changed since? It appears not. A March 2003 Gallup poll showed modestly higher levels of support for the Iraq war among those with college education as compared to those with some high school education. A 2008 telephone poll of respondents in western North Carolina showed that those who were male, higher-income earners with higher levels of education were willing to accept higher levels of casualties in pursuit of American goals in Iraq.¹⁴ Overall levels of support for the Iraq war tracked with observable progress in the war, so it is not surprising in the least that support for the war recovered dramatically after the success of the surge (though support for the initial decision to invade went down and stayed down). It was not unreasonable for the American people to have been dissatisfied with the way the American government was conducting the war in Iraq in 2007 and to have been frustrated by a war against weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to be there. This did not mean, however, that the American people had rejected war any more than they had done so during the Vietnam era.

Stepping back, the general picture of the future seems to be like the present. Scots-Irish culture, what Walter Russell Mead referred to in Special Providence (2003) as the “Jacksonian” wing of American foreign policy culture, will continue to run strong through the national veins, and it is likely to run even more strongly relative to ethnic groups who have fewer children. Puritan culture will remain strong, too, but there seems to be no reason to think that increasing attainment of college education will make Puritan culture stronger in the future than it was in the past. America will continue to be united about wars that respond to challenges to the United States and are internationally authorized. It will be divided when war is not so authorized. But the United States will not become a post-bellicist, postmodern political culture akin to that of its West European allies. Rather, we will continue to praise Tocqueville, while acting in ways that prove him mistaken.

¹Tocqueville quotations in this essay are taken from Democracy in America, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, translators and editors (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
²Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (W. W. Norton, 2001).
³Kagan, “Power and Weakness”, Policy Review (June/July 2002).
⁴Foreign Policy Research Institute, Wachman Center Newsletter (August 2008).
⁵Hall and Lindholm, Is America Falling Apart? (Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 22.
⁶Quoted in Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians 1861–1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 201.
⁷Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. xvii-xviiii.
⁸Hall and Lindholm, Is America Falling Apart?, p. 49.
⁹Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, p. 4.
¹⁰See Andrew Gelman, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (Princeton University Press, 2008).
¹¹Charles Brown, “Military Enlistments: What We Can Learn From Geographic Variations”, American Economic Review (March 1985).
¹²Mark Mather and Dia Adams, “The Crossover in Female-Male College Enrollment Rates”, Population Research Bureau (February 2007).
¹³John Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (John Wiley & Sons, 1973).
¹⁴Mark West and Donald Diefenbach, “Support for the War in Iraq: American Casualties as a Survey Item”, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Association, Miami, Florida, October 10, 2008.