I suppose one bright spot in this otherwise dismal time is that both the left and the right mostly agree that we shouldn't be dropping bombs on people.
You mean in terms of voters, right? Because in terms of politicians, there seem to be an awful lot of hawks on both sides.
Our foreign policy is directed by people who do not care what the american people think.
The Europeans ignored many of the lessons of the civil war (the first modern war in many ways) because they figured that a bunch of amateur generals fighting with conscripts were not worth learning from.
Edit: fat thumbs typed 18 instead of 19.
I don't think the attitude was the same regarding a standing Navy. Standing Army, yes; the founders were clearly against that. But a major reason for having a standing Navy is to keep conflicts elsewhere from getting to the point where you need an Army--for example, protecting American merchant ships sailing abroad (since the British Navy would no longer protect them), which was what buying the original 6 frigates was for.
Can you give any specifics to support this? From my reading of the writings of the founders, I see them talking about the dangers of a standing army all over the place, but I never see them talking about similar dangers of a navy.
> Your rationalization was well after the fact
No, it was the reason given at the time. The reason it wasn't done first thing when the Constitution was adopted is that navies cost money and the early Federal government didn't have a lot of it, so they only agreed to finance a navy when the losses to American merchant shipping became large enough to make it a worthwhile expense.
1812: The Navy's War by George C. Daughan
and the history of the Naval Act of 1794
'Deep state' is being thrown around a lot these days. It's proper meaning is in relation to things like Italy's Propaganda Due lodge: a tightly-connected network of people who are in a strong sense anti-democratic, who are not publicly known but have something of a veto over the actions of an elected government.
Some of those features apply to the anti-Trump official world in the US, but only in a much weaker form. And this isn't to do with it, not least because Trump is the one pushing the button.
The idea that the actions of the state don't correlate with the desires of the people is more-or-less deliberate in a representative (rather than direct) democracy, incidentally. As a political scientist I find it rather offensive that the word 'democracy' has been repurposed to mean a kind of replaceable oligarchy rather than government-by-the-people, but that ship sailed decades ago.
They are distinct but not disjoint; the “deep state” concept is a specific form of unresponsive elite.
> The idea that the actions of the state don't correlate with the desires of the people is more-or-less deliberate in a representative (rather than direct) democracy
No, it's not, in general; the purpose of representative democracy is to allow the actions of the state to give effect to the desires of the people, on the premise that even most people with the requisite ability to effectively decide how to give effect to their desires aren't optimally employed spending all their time figuring out how the state should do that.
It's true that the US federal model of an unusually large number of barriers and unusually undemocratic selection and allocation of representation is designed to prevent government from representing the desire of the people, but the US system isn't the Platonic ideal of representative democracy.
That's one argument for representative democracy (and, I think, the best one for why participatory democracy is tricky) but it's not the intention behind existing representative institutions, at least in the US and the UK (and the countries who inherited different parts of our systems).
Edmund Burke's address to the electors of Bristol contains one of the most famous declarations of this principle: 'Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.'
The Federalist papers show that the US model was also not designed to operate as an efficient aggregator of citizens' opinions, but more as a means of the public endorsing competent and honest representatives to govern on their behalf.
The classic book-length exposition of this model (which is basically modern elite orthodoxy) is 'Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy', by Joseph Schumpeter. David Held's 'Models of Democracy' is a good comparative text, though there are lots of those to chose from.
I think it's important to clarify, or read from context, whether people mean voters or politicians (which I often use to include political operatives and partisan organizations).
While I understand this sentiment I've come to the conclusion that it's wrong and maybe even dangerous. Ultimately it got us Trump. I think this perspective on our current time is mainly cause by how the need cycle works. Someone on the a16z podcast claimed that shorter new cycles lead to more negative reporting. He suggested the thought experiment of a need paper only published every 100 year. It would contain awful stuff like WWI & II, but lots of positive we never think about like the number of diseases that have been eradicated. We have fewer military conflicts, unbelievably better build mortality, fewer famines, more individual freedom. It's not all great but it's so much better than we tell ourselves. According to Russ Roberts a study found that even economists who are pessimistic about our current situation will answer that they'd want to be alive right now when they are asked at what time in history they'd want to live. While I find myself more upset with the current state of things than ever before I must agree.
Edit: formatting
(Whoa! I really just meant to raise the questions, especially in the case of justification for recent US military conflicts. I'm not advocating for anything!)
Each of this items, alone, would justify many countries in the world to suddenly attack US.
Better not confuse the concepts of attack and defense.
Once in a while you have a case where it makes sense, but very seldomly.
Most of the time you are much better at defending against uncertainty and economic hardship by putting some money assied rather then building a bunch of tanks.
Each of these notions are but rationales used to start a fight, not defend against one.