In the Review’s July 18 issue, Marilynne Robinson writes about how the violence in America’s history has brought us to an angry present:

My subject is the rage and rejection that have emerged in America, threatening to displace politics, therefore democracy, and to supplant them with a figure whose rage and resentment excite an extreme loyalty, and disloyalty, a sort of black mass of patriotism, a business of inverted words and symbols where the idea of the sacred is turned against itself. I will suggest that one great reason for this rage is a gross maldistribution of the burdens and consequences of our wars. If I am right that this inequity has some part in the anger that has inflamed our public life, in order to vindicate democracy we must acknowledge it and try to put it right.

Below, alongside Robinson’s essay, we have collected from the archives four articles and two letters about war and our national identity.

Marilynne Robinson
Agreeing to Our Harm

We ignore at our peril the rage that animates Trump voters and threatens Biden’s chances this fall.

Suzy Hansen
Twenty Years of Outsourced War

“A nation left flailing in the emptiness of evil becomes one in which that evil never ends.”

—October 19, 2023

Fintan O’Toole
The Lie of Nation Building

From the very beginning, the problem with the US involvement in Afghanistan lay essentially in the deficits in American democracy.

—October 7, 2021

Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stuart Hampshire, Noam Chomsky, and others
A Special Supplement: The Meaning of Vietnam

Norman Mailer: The responsibility for the war is entirely ours…. The critical question for America is then not our-role-in-the-world but the nature of the democracy we can or cannot create here…. It is whether America can improve, whether we can come to grips with industrial pollution, and the psychic pollution of high-rise and suburban real-estate overdevelopment, with automobiles and freeways, with the voids of synthetics, with the buildings of the last twenty years which have to be the worst architecture in the history of the world, with the packaging of food—it may yet prove the most unhealthy food in the history of the world—with the shriek-zones of electronics and media glut, and all of our lack of participatory democracy, yes, all of our political impotence.

—June 12, 1975

Noam Chomsky, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, Howard Zinn, and others
The Covered Wagon

“The Covered Wagon Coffeehouse, in Mountain Home, Idaho, organized by active duty servicemen and women and civilian supporters as part of a GI project, was burned to the ground on Sunday, November 21…. We feel the GI Movement must have the support of all people who desire a quick end to the war in Indochina…. We want to help them re-establish a new center.”

—December 30, 1971

Paul Goodman
“We Won’t Go”

“Then on some watches it was eleven and some of the students were burning their draft cards. The line managed to keep out a goon who wanted to punch the heads of draft-card burners…. The star, who got a round of applause, was a Special Forces reservist from a midwestern college, wearing his uniform and his green beret.”

—May 18, 1967

Gary Rader
Draft Resistance

“I would like to take this opportunity to identify myself and tell my story, since I have met many people in the peace movement who have been considerably heartened by the fact that a former student at a conservative university, Northwestern, and a current member of the Army’s CIA, the Green Berets, went out and took this stand.”

—September 14, 1967

Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for e-mail newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305