Some readers will come to Rachel Maddow’s first book expecting an entertaining left-wing screed against the military. They may be surprised to discover instead a lively but serious argument about American history.

Fox News fans will be taken aback to find a blurb from none other than Roger Ailes, that conservative channel’s creator, declaring that “Drift” offers “valid arguments” and is “a book worth reading.” Meanwhile, devotees of Maddow’s liberal MSNBC show may raise their eyebrows at her declaration that “my generation of veterans” is “a huge part of why I’m bullish on America’s capacity to adapt, lead and succeed in the 21st century.”

If the book lures readers briefly from their political silos, it will be because Maddow’s thesis crosses ideological lines. Like the Tea Partiers, she believes that the United States must return to the lost principles of the nation’s founders — in this case a suspicion of standing armies and a deep reluctance to go to war. “America’s structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something’s gone wrong,” she declares. “It’s the way the founders set us up.”

Maddow cites Thomas Jefferson, in a presidential message to Congress: “Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible in our horizon, we never should have been without them.” She quotes James Madison saying that “the Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the ­Legislature.”

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But especially in the last half-century, Maddow argues, the decision to go to war has become too easy. Congress’s constitutional prerogative to declare war has routinely been ignored. Only a tiny fraction of the American population serves or sends a family member to war, permitting a majority to remain oblivious to its grisly human price.

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Contractors supply the battlefield support that once was the work of soldiers. A bloated security industry profits from the near-permanent state of conflict, sharing proceeds with pliable members of Congress. And now robotic drones carry out combat from an antiseptic distance.