What is unique about our moment is that we live under a regime that has come to believe that the government itself can produce this result for us if we only give the government enough power, money, and managerial discretion to accomplish this goal.
The Left is the major voice criticizing the war on terror, while the Right, much to my dismay, has enlisted in ways I could not have imagined back in the 1990s. The Right has led the call for war abroad, and called for speech controls, domestic spying, and more power to the president to arrest, jail, and even convict people in military courts without the slightest concern for human rights and liberties. Countless times I've had to explain to people who otherwise are suspicious of government that it is not a good thing to give the US government the power to overthrow any government in the world or torture people abroad or pass out trillions in reconstruction aid.
When the Left makes a case for total government management at home and yet nonintervention abroad, while the Right argues for free markets at home and a global war on terror abroad, there is some sort of political schizophrenia alive in the land. People who have doubted the power of government to do much at home seem to take leave of their senses when it comes to war abroad. And it is hardly a surprise that they have been proven wrong.
The debates about the war on terror have typically involved great detail about the validity of intelligence reports, investigations of terror networks, discussion of the reliability of this or that foreign regime, and the like. But none of this is really necessary if you want to make a sound judgment about whether to support the war in question. What we really need is more general knowledge about the nature of government and its limits. If we understand how it will lose the small wars against things such as cigarettes and liquor, we can more clearly understand how it loses the large wars.
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