A Review of Bill Kauffman’s Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 304 pages, $25.00.

“War: What is it good for? . . . I’ll tell you what it’s good for. It’s good for taxes; it’s good for day care; it’s good for year-round schooling; it’s good for the metric system; it’s good for Daylight Saving Time; it’s good for the Interstate Highway System; it’s good for divorce; it’s good for school consolidation and the space program and the IRS. In short, it’s good for nothing that a genuine conservative might cherish.” This line opens a mere chapter of Bill Kauffman latest book, thereby hinting at the vast wealth of topics awaiting readers considering reading all of Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. In it, Kauffman delivers what his subtitle promises—a well-documented, historic account of American conservatives who have resisted empire building throughout the entirety of United States history—but, he provides so much more as well. Reading Ain’t My America will leave one informed, outraged, encouraged, and frequently sore from laughter.

For the uninitiated, Bill Kauffman is a radical conservative who defies easy, and certainly standard, political labeling. He has authored six previous books including With Good Intentions? Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America and Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists, the latter correctly named one of the best books of 2006 by the American Library Association. As with his politics, Kauffman’s writing style defies convention and odds by successfully combining serious research with a scathing wit and popular culture allusions. As I have noted elsewhere, Kauffman “may remind readers of comedian Dennis Miller. The crucial difference being that unlike Miller, Kaufmann has a point.” In his latest book, his point is deadly serious as he examines the disappointing absence of substantial conservative criticism of current American war policy and the unhistorical, but now commonplace, association of the Republican Party with aggressive foreign policy or even imperialism.

Based on the title, Kauffman’s thesis may at first seem simple and straightforward: he considers the current War in Iraq a monumental blunder and deeply regrets that Republicans and so-called “conservatives” have been the strongest and longest supporters of the war. Obviously, Kauffman would be thrilled if his work helped avoid similar future mistakes and reminded political conservatives that their beliefs, traditions, and legacies have, since the days of Washington, placed them in the non-interventionist camp rather than the imperial one. Unlike President Bush, Kauffman doesn’t believe the value and legitimacy of that position perished in September 11th’s fires.

A straight-forward reading of Kauffman’s work provides an accurate and extremely valuable perspective, particularly if it helps eliminate knee-jerk support by true political conservatives for President Bush or the Republican Party. However, careful readers will note there is even more than anti-imperialism on Kauffman’s insightful mind. Midway through the manuscript, Kauffman writes perhaps the book’s true encapsulating thesis: “The lack of roots is the single most disabling malady plaguing America, and we will never begin the long healing until we diagnose the illness.” While Kauffman acknowledges that the “instruments of . . . dislocation are many” he asserts that “the most devastatingly powerful is war.” Kauffman continues the connection between dislocation and war by quoting Robert Nisbet who stated that “nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind.” Ain’t My America then, is, at its deepest level, a cultural diagnosis revealing the devastation wrought when neighborhood, family, and religion are assailed. “Undermine this trinity,” Kauffman writes, and you “set individuals adrift without their anchorage, and you reduce society to a faceless welter of listless and anomic consumers.” For Kauffman, “Mobility is the great sickness afflicting America. . . . the real division in America is not left and right, or rich and poor, but mobile and immobile.”