Random, and rough, thought during work today: Liberals recognize that Americans are a non-martial people*, but they do not understand the martial reality of our imperial commitment. Conservatives** do not recognize that Americans are a non-martial people, but they better understand the martial reality of our imperial commitment.

*We verged, after two major world wars and a decade of hunger and poverty, on becoming a martial people, but the cultural revolt of the '60s and '70s (which crossed generational, class, and sex lines) not only ended but reversed the process.

**Here I mean conservatives of the mainstream, not antiwar.com readers/Buchananites/paleos, and so on.