Much in what he says …

… Isolationism is a noble American tradition. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As a North Carolinian remarked of US intervention in the first world war in Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929), ‘It’s not our fight. I don’t want to send my boys three thousand miles across the sea to get shot for those foreigners. If they come over here, I’ll shoulder a gun with the best of them, but until they do they can fight it out among themselves.’

‘Why are we over there?’ is the question asked around the dinner tables of working-class and rural families — the Deplorables whose sons (and now daughters) are vastly overrepresented in the US armed forces. No one at elite levels bothers answering them: the exigencies of empire are not fit subjects for the hoi polloi. Go back to your lottery tickets and stock-car races!