Michael Brenes is  Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His new book, For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy, asks important questions about the disturbing connections between militarism, austerity, and democracy that mark the post-Cold War era, and how those trends both continue and accelerate the ideological and practical structures of American anti-communism. In this conversation, Brenes shares some of the book’s more startling revelations and reflects on how his historical and political imagination has evolved in the Trump era.