For my entire adult life the American conservative movement has been in a "crisis."  That is at least what has come from the pens of various pundits for at least the last 25 years or so. This may or may not be true (I suspect it is), but if one wants to read an intriguing book by an intriguing man, it would be worth the time to pick up Bill Kauffman's book, Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism (Metropolitan, 2008).  Kauffman stands in the noble tradition of those conservatives who have been skeptical of an interventionist foreign policy.  In the not-too-distant past it tended to be liberals of various sorts who would advocate for a large-scale interventionist foreign policy.  Indeed, as Richard Gamble argues in his The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI, 2003), it was the "progressive" Christians who saw the U.S. in messianic terms and who used messianic terminology to describe the role of the U.S. in the world (a viewpoint now generally found amongst "conservatives"--although "liberals" chime in along these lines fairly often as well).  Indeed, it is fascinating to realize that some of the strongest and most principled resistance to various twentieth-century wars has tended to come from various persons on the political right.  For interesting speeches and essays in this regard, one can turn to the work by Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (Basic Books, 2008).  But Kauffman is a provocative and engaging writer, and in a world full of double-speak and spin, it is helpful to have such a no-nonsense writer to turn to.

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