Michael Brenes, "For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)

New Books in American Studies · Dec 3, 2020 · 1h 4m

Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan rhetoric about the country being unsafe or the military being underfunded plays well, it obscures an important reality about the relative size of U.S. military funding. The United State spends more than the next ten leading countries combined. The Democratic Party, while often criticized as soft on defense, generally supports high military spending. This seems to contradict many statements made…