Trump is a man of peace -- his enemies are a war machine

There is nothing natural, inevitable, or commonsensical about the interventionist worldview that the American elite holds. It’s a conditioned reflex of the mind, and it’s a freakish one. So where does it come from?

It comes from the same administrative and technocratic spirit that virtually defines the self-understanding of America’s political and opinion elite at home. This elite views other people’s lives in terms of problems, for which the elite’s calling is to provide knowledgeable solutions. But knowledge only comes from the top, and it can never be absorbed by those further down or on the outside: in theory, the technocratic ideology may be egalitarian, but the failure of egalitarianism is what serves to keep the technocrats in existence as a class. They are needed. They will save you from eating the wrong food or smoking the wrong plants (tobacco bad, marijuana good, or vice versa), or having the wrong attitudes toward people of different colors or habits from yourself. Just as society must become ever more regulated at home – if not always regulated by government, then regulated by enlightened authority in the private sphere, even the enlightened Twitter mob – so the world must benefit from our enlightened regulation as well. Within a nation, civil society and government can act with a minimum of violence to secure compliance, because most compliance is based on habit and the desire for social acceptance (or the fear of ostracism, at any rate).