States without romance

Excerpt

I first encountered The Calculus of Consent in the fall of 1972, my second year at the University of Pennsylvania. Four years before, I had graduated by the skin of my teeth with a degree in humanities and engineering from MIT, at the time a kind of consolation prize for those who couldn’t quite make it to the end of a more typical major in science or engineering. In the midst of my struggles, I’d thought about leaving school for a while to regain my bearings, but this meant exposing myself to the draft and a tour in Vietnam, a prospect that confused and frightened me. I considered it honorable to fight, and die if necessary, for my country—my father and millions like him had done so 20 years before, and thousands more were doing so just then. But I couldn’t see just how the national interest was at stake in this particular war; indeed, I couldn’t see the national interest at all. Many people were in favor of fighting the war, and it was clearly in their interest that it be fought, if not by them then by others for them. But many others were opposed to the war, and it was equally clearly not in their interest that it be fought, by themselves or anyone else. We Americans had a political process to decide whether wars were to be fought or not, but there too, decisions seemed to be made in the interests of some but not others, in a way that everyone seemed to accept, at least until that moment. But, I could see, saying that the government of the day had duly decided to fight the war was not the same as saying that the national interest required it. The national interest, whatever it was, was nowhere to be seen, until the fighting and dying began, when it was vaguely invoked to justify it all. …