The major issue seems to be that, as a nation, we’ve become comfortable with essentially endless foreign wars. We’ve moved from a peaceable-by-nature country (the founders tried to build in ‘peaceable-by-nature’ by making Congress responsible to declare war, leaving state governments in charge of their own militias, and having no standing army).

They were concerned that, as the glories of a successful war accrue to the head of state, presidents would tend, from the nature of that office, to be more warlike.

Rachel Maddow does a spectacular job of explaining how we got from ‘Congress declares war’ to the current situation in Drift. If you’re wondering “how are we OK with this?”, that’s the book to read.