Rogue Columnist

Since the election, the meme has been that a defeated Republican Party must change or face becoming a permanent minority, a regional party in a changed America. But that's not how it looks in real life. The most substantive legislative victory since November has been the passage of legislation making Michigan a "right to work" state, a staggering Republican victory in a state where the modern labor movement was born.

Meanwhile, the "fiscal cliff" negotiations go on without end, with President Obama almost pleading that he has gone "at least halfway" to give House Republicans "a fair deal." That doesn't sound like the victorious leader of a party of the future. If the election was about anything substantive, it repudiated efforts to roll back Social Security and Medicare, endorsed "nation building at home" and affirmed that taxes on the rich must go up. Why should Mr. Obama go anywhere near halfway, for in doing so he once again betrays the values of those who elected him.

The Republican position on maintaining the Military-Industrial Complex at all costs perseveres unless we are fortunate enough to go off the fiscal cliff. Meanwhile, the president left Susan Rice twisting in the wind amid the despicable character assassination by wealthy Republican Sen. John Sidney McCain III, R-Fox News. McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election badly, will apparently determine who serves in Mr. Obama's cabinet.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D.H. Lawrence

I was raised in Western gun culture. From an early age, I was taught gun safety, including an NRA safe hunter course in the eighth grade at Kenilworth School. My friends and I would go target shooting in such places as the then-empty desert around Pinnacle Peak. My scoutmaster showed me how to fire my first semi-automatic rifle. As important as the shooting was always checking to make sure a gun was unloaded, knowing that if you dropped the magazine (not a "clip," unless it was an M-1 Garand rifle), a round might still be in the chamber. Where was the barrel pointing? How to cross a fence safely. How to carry a shotgun (breach open).

"Don't point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them," my mother said. In addition to being a concert pianist, she was an expert shot and would not have hesitated had we been at risk. She did not like handguns. To her mind, a handgun could be too accessible while one was still angry. Through all this ran a thread of deep seriousness: A firearm was deadly, must be treated with respect and care, and its watchful possession was a sign of adult maturity. Needless to say, this culture existed in a West with many fewer people than live there today. Still, I own guns. I like them. If I had the money, I would buy more. I'm not a hunter like my uncle and grandfather. But I do like target shooting.

In the 1960s, liberal sociologists explained rising crime as the outgrowth of "the sick society." Then it included racism and lack of economic opportunity for minorities and many lower-class Americans. But that society was healthy compared with today's. These endless cavalcades of mass shootings — taking place while overall violent crime is falling — are telling us something important. I don't claim to know all the answers, but I have some suspicions.

I spend all day in front of a computer screen. The last thing I want to do for pleasure is read on a Kindle or Nook. Joe Queenan nicely encapsulates the love of books in a Wall Street Journal article: "No matter what they may tell themselves, book lovers do not read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time. They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world. A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not constantly say things like 'Have a good one!' and 'Sounds like a plan!' A world where men do not wear belted shorts…" But however you enjoy reading, here's a relatively short list of books to buy for friends or ask Santa for.

One fad in historiography is that the Red Army primarily won World War II. Rick Atkinson is having none of it in his majestic Liberation Trilogy about the U.S. Army in Europe. An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle are the two completed works and they are the finest military history I've read in recent years. This is the way history should be written, the way that has been beaten our of three generations of professional historians. To give the Red Army its due, check out Thunder in the East by Evan Mawdsley and Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale. A terrific read about World War II in the Pacific is Evan Thomas' Sea of Thunder, about the greatest naval battle in history.

We're coming up on the centennial of the conflict that changed everything, World War I. The must-read here is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, a World War II American combat infantryman, focuses on the British troops in the trenches of the Western Front and the things they carried, especially the literary influences that reached into the lowest ranks. This is one book every educated person should read: Deeply learned, highly moving, surprising and written with the attitude, as Fussell said, of "a pissed-off infantryman." Two others are both seminal and thrilling: Dreadnought and Castles of Steel by Robert Massie, about the battleship arms race and war.

When Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks, he hoped to provoke an American overreaction that would bleed us to death with unending, futile military adventures and alienate the Muslim world from the thrashing giant. He dreamed of bringing out our worst.

Mission accomplished.

One of the fascinating aspects of the so-called fiscal cliff "negotiations" — as well as the presidential campaign — is the hysteria surrounding reduced or even stable military spending. We have become such a garrison state, and an economy so dependent on war, that we can't even imagine another reality. Or at least our elites and a large number in the media can't.

America didn't commit national suicide in the presidential election. Rogue readers are well aware of my frustrations with President Obama. But there was no choice but to support him against a crazy Republican Party. Wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney may have been the most dangerous candidate fielded by a major party in modern American history. Never before would we have had to wait until after the election to find out what he really stood for, besides his own ambition. He couldn't even be forthcoming about his faith, the most important thing in his life. The refusal to release tax returns was only the tip of a Titanic-sinking iceberg. What was clear: He had spent recent years wooing the Tea Party extremists, theocrats, Randians, racists and homophobes. And unlike with Reagan, they would bring their "revolution" to "take their country back," and with Paul Ryan and others had a very specific agenda. As I say, it would have been suicide.

Now we will see if the president can finally steel himself to the battles that face us. The "fiscal cliff" will be an early marker. He was elected by people who want to see tax rates on the rich revert to Clinton-era levels, if not higher. They do not want to see the safety net further shredded to fix the dreaded deficit — not when we've been spending about a trillion a year on all the facets of the national security state and big companies pay no taxes even as they ship jobs overseas. If Obama caves to a "compromise" framed by the right, this will be another four years of weakness and slow erosion of the commons, the middle class, and American competitiveness.

Watch also to see whom he names as Treasury Secretary to replace Tim Geithner. If he chooses the odious Erskine Bowles, he of the sell-out Bowles-Simpson Commission, we will see more power flow to the oligarchs. Bowles is a corporate shill and member in good standing of the Rubin wing of the Democratic Party, which has been panting to "reform entitlements." Translation: Betray Social Security and Medicare for the middle class. Also, watch out for Peter Orszag, former Obama budget director and now at, natch, Citigroup.