"People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
~Hermann Goering, Nazi Field Marshal and Hitler henchman

Somehow I'm always a "traitor." At least according to my critics. It's a rather odd thing, however. See, I've been penning antiwar screeds for over five years, much of it done whilst still on active duty. During just under three of those years Obama was president. Back then, when I criticized Bush's old wars and Obama's new ones, my ubiquitous hate mail – "love it or leave it," "you're a communist," "you're a disgrace to the uniform" – came from the hawkish right. That much I expected.

Then my universe inverted. The moment Trump was elected, if ever I dared cheer his anti-interventionist rhetoric (though rarely his deeds), my "friends" on left attacked me with even more intensity than the neocons. But the language was mostly the same. I was still a "traitor," still "anti-American," only now I was also a "Trump-apologist," even a "Putin-puppet." Once purportedly antiwar liberals were horrified that I hoped, and sought to encourage, that Trump might end even a couple of the hopeless American conflicts. Born again hawks, these folks now rose like a mythical Phoenix to support the wars Trump theoretically opposed. As a tiny band played "The World Turned Upside Down" on repeat in my head, it occurred to me that this turn of events represented something profound: liberal thought policing, consensus disciplining, and the limits of Democrats' antiwar activism.