I feel like my role as a voter and a cog in the economy gives me some (very, very little but still real) voice in how decisions are made on a lot of domestic issues, but I've never felt that way about our foreign policy - particularly with respect to our military (though foreign trade also seems un-democratized) spending and engagements. And that feels pretty supportable by looking at the utter marginalization of the anti-war movement. 9-11 just destroyed it. Chris Cuomo is more likely to host an explicit, avowed communist than somebody taking the normal and morally obvious position: war is bad and we shouldn't do it. Try supporting that with the observation that the last seventy years pretty much proves we're not capable of intervening in other nation's affairs without destructively pushing our own interest and you sound like a crank and a conspiracy nut.

It's a giant bummer, and even outside the fact that our military engagements are expensive, dangerous, and evil, it also lacks political foresight because it gives that ground to the populist right. Tucker Carlson's already revising Trump's anti-intellectualism with moral language even though he's clearly coming from an evil and cynical place. The left *needs* a robust anti-war movement to keep these centrist melts from using endless war and troop-respecting to burnish their "pragmatic" credentials and punting away things like "peace" and "not intentionally doing genocide" to a cynical right who just doesn't care.

An easy start is refusing to acknowledge voices who supported the Iraq War. Support for that absurdly destructive lie should disqualify any figures from speaking publicly about what is good and right for America or the world again. They're either evil or stupid.