Everything the left supports, defends, or does should be filtered through this context. Emphasis mine.
“The chief appeal of war to social planners isn’t conquest or death but mobilization. Free societies are disorganized. People do their own thing, more or less, and that can be downright inconvenient if you’re trying to plan the entire economy from a boardroom somewhere. War brings conformity and unity of purpose. The ordinary rules of behavior are mothballed. You can get things done: build roads, hospitals, houses. Domestic populations and institutions were required to do their part.
Many progressives probably would have preferred a different organizing principle, which is why William James spoke of the moral equivalent of war. He wanted all the benefits–Dewey’s “social possibilities” of war–without the costs. Hence, in more recent times, the left has looked to everything from environmentalism and global warming to public health and diversity as war equivalents to cajole the public into expert-driven unity.”
Jonah Goldberg – Liberal Fascism
In recent decades the word mobilization has, for the most part, been replaced by the word “organizing.”
Relevant Link: GrokTALK! Moral Equivalent of War
