Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

Overview

Rachel Maddow traces a decades-long shift in how the United States conducts and authorizes military force, arguing that the power to make war has slowly migrated from Congress and public deliberation to the executive branch. She frames this shift as a "drift" away from constitutional checks and balances toward an ever-expanding national security apparatus that normalizes emergency powers, secrecy, and unilateral actions. The narrative moves through historical episodes to show how small decisions and legal innovations accumulated into a fundamentally different posture toward war.

Central Argument

The central claim is that American democracy has been eroded not by a single conspiracy but by a series of incremental choices and institutional habits that concentrate war-making authority in the presidency. Maddow contends that presidents, often with the acquiescence of courts, lawyers, and Congress, have repeatedly stretched their powers under the banner of necessity, urgency, or plausible deniability. Over time those exceptions become precedents, and precedents harden into routine practice, allowing military action to proceed with diminished oversight.

Historical Narrative and Case Studies

Maddow walks through pivotal moments to make the pattern visible: how early Cold War covert operations and executive decisions set precedents; how the Gulf of Tonkin episode and subsequent resolutions enabled large-scale escalation in Vietnam without sustained legislative debate; how more recent administrations have relied on executive memoranda, secret legal opinions, and covert operations to justify interventions abroad. These case studies show a throughline from mid-20th-century crises to post-9/11 policies, illustrating how different eras borrowed and amplified earlier practices rather than correcting them.

Mechanisms of Drift

Secrecy, legal reinterpretation, and institutional incentives figure as the mechanisms that produce drift. Maddow examines the role of legal counsel and the "lawyering" of national security decisions that reframe limits as flexible tools. She highlights how intelligence agencies, special operations forces, and private contractors expand the practical reach of military power while operating in legal and political gray zones. The result is a system in which action can be taken quickly, quietly, and with scant public awareness, making meaningful congressional oversight more difficult.

Consequences and Warnings

The consequences Maddow describes are both constitutional and moral. Constitutional norms that require debate, consent, and transparency are weakened, creating a system where accountability is diffuse and public input is marginal. Morally, the human costs of covert or unaccountable actions, civilians affected by interventions, legal rights curtailed, democratic consent bypassed, are presented as inevitable outcomes of this drift. Maddow warns that normalization makes it easier for future leaders to expand exceptional powers still further.

Call to Action

The framing implies a need to reclaim democratic control of war-making: reinvigorating Congressional responsibility, increasing transparency, and restoring legal and institutional checks that prevent unilateral escalation. Maddow urges public attention and institutional reform to reverse the momentum of drift, emphasizing that restoring balance requires conscious choices rather than passive acceptance. The book functions as both a historical diagnosis and an exhortation to reassert constitutional guardrails over the use of military power.