The shock of the news that we are at war with Iran has not worn off. I think this is because of my age; I became eligible to vote in Connecticut in 2007. That was the year that every single American appeared to remember how he had opposed the Iraq War from the beginning. The folly of the Bush administration seemed to be a settled matter of public judgement for my entire adult life. For more than a decade, it has been an almost bipartisan consensus. “No Blood for Oil” is a rare article of faith professed in common by campus progressives and MAGA rally attendees. I have never encountered a reason to revise my beliefs that one, the United States should not wage war in the Middle East, and two, after the Iraq debacle, the American people would be dead set against waging any such war ever again.

I thought that nearly everyone shared these beliefs, including the president. Last year the United States obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. Has it since grown back? The Israelis launched decapitation strikes against a hydra that lies in wait in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Here we go again. I thought that the Iranian threat, far from being an unmitigated evil, would allow the United States to bring historical enemies together. Shared concerns about Iran were supposed to drive the Israelis and the Arabs together in the Abraham Accords and, ultimately, a lasting peace. I am disappointed. Polls suggest that most Americans younger than forty-five feel similarly.

Just as in 2003, the pope now opposes an American war in the Middle East. John Paul II’s condemnation of the Iraq War was a rare bright spot in his final years. At that time, he seemed too old and decrepit to provide strong leadership amid the demoralizing sex scandals that came out in those last years of his pontificate. But finally, in his clear, forceful, and persistent condemnation of the Iraq War, I recognized the pope who defied the Soviet Union in the decade before I was born. But as soon as John Paul II stood up to defy our own superpower, many of his most long-winded admirers in America found reasons to question his political judgement. I was aghast. How could they not bring themselves to heed the pope’s warnings about George W. Bush’s obviously unjust, imprudent war? First impressions count. I formed my beliefs about the American conservative Catholic establishment with the deceptive clarity of hindsight. So did many others my age. Maybe it is time to re-evaluate our youthful instinct to take the moral anti-war high road. It has led to a cynical anti-establishment politics that, if anything, wages war more easily.

For older Americans, it was perhaps not such a surprise to wake up to the news earlier this spring that the United States and Israel had attacked Iran. A generation before the War on Terror, the Iranians were already a determined adversary with American blood on their hands. My parents remember the hostage crisis and the bombing in Beirut that killed two hundred forty-one members of the U.S. military in 1983. These associations put the war in a different light. The other day, my father told me that if we’re over there anyway, we should “finish the job this time.” Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times report that Donald Trump has always viewed Iran as a significant threat and an exception to his general preference for foreign-policy restraint.

What was immediately clear about this war was that the administration wanted to make it fun for the American people. Six days after the United States and Israel launched joint strikes against Iran, the White House posted a curious video on Twitter. It splices scenes from Iron Man 2, Braveheart (“What would you do without freedom?”), Gladiator (“Strength and honor”), and Top Gun: Maverick together with recent battlefield footage. There are some other movies and television shows in the forty-two-second mix. We hear synthesizer riffs in the background. The tweet reads, “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY [American flag emoji] [fire emoji].” The attack on Iran is associated with cool “tough guy” moments in popular entertainment. And not only heroic ones, either; we see Walter White in a black T-shirt, long past his heel turn in Breaking Bad, and hear him growl, “I am the danger,” between shots from the new Superman (“I’m here to fight for truth, justice, and the American way”) and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth himself. The video is manifestly unserious. It does not attempt to justify the war, nor is it possible to imagine how it could rally support for it. (One of my students who is an airman in the Air National Guard thinks it could help recruit seventeen-year-old soldiers.) For most people, the silly fun amounts to no more than a pre-emptive strike against earnest concerns about Operation Epic Fury.

This stupid video may have been the end of Jürgen Habermas. The thought crossed my mind the next week when I learned of the death of Germany’s greatest public intellectual. Habermas spent seventy years developing criteria to distinguish discourse aimed at agreement through rational deliberation from subtle manipulation and self-gratifying performance. He was worried about corporate power’s influence on political conversations. He was also worried about students protesting for the fun of it. In the Enlightenment ideal of the public sphere, by contrast, all reasoners are invited to a conversation about matters pertaining to our common humanity. Habermas makes this ideal the touchstone of legitimate democracy. Where people sincerely aim to come to agreement, and where this kind of public discourse justifies the exercise of power, there is democracy. He would have struggled in vain to find any valid claims in the White House’s ostensibly public video address.

As I drop my head to browse what A.I. slopaganda “about” politics is sloshing round my digital trough, I realize that the public sphere is smaller and weaker than many people suppose. Debate was the dominant context of political speech from the eighteenth century until recently. In the early 2000s, to watch someone bait the politically earnest, you would have had to turn on The Man Show or Da Ali G Show. I was not allowed to watch either of those in middle school, but I always heard the gags secondhand. Now on social media the context is extremely fluid. Is this conversation more like dueling op-eds or more like a Sacha Baron Cohen joke interview? Some discourse about politics—hyper tōn politikōn, the matters tangential to politics that Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitical”—is not meant to coordinate action at all but merely to entertain others. Perhaps you and I are aiming for agreement; then again, perhaps you are making fun of me in front of an audience that I cannot see. Is the White House’s official Twitter account debating or rage-baiting?

Most of us can’t tell. Many Americans used the same platform to express confusion about the JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY video. Why did the White House post it? The video does not address us as citizens. No facts or judgements are presented for our assent or refusal. Generally speaking, any conversation-starter at a bare minimum involves an implicit question: “You can see why I would say this, correct?” That barest assent makes discourse possible. Habermas thought that our ability to assent to conversation comes from all the background assumptions and unstated context that he calls the “lifeworld.” But the Internet is the desert of the lifeworld. Context withers. A few hardy nocturnal animals learn their way around the wasteland’s extreme ecological niches.

I have watched the slopaganda war online for weeks now and have thought about what might lie beneath its hyperpolitical surface. Clearly anyone inclined to earnestness about, for example, mass graves for children, is being trolled by cynics.If you criticize Trump for threatening death to a “whole civilization,” some others will sigh condescendingly and explain that you are too stupid to understand the president’s effective negotiation tactics. If you find blasphemy distasteful, others will be amused that Trump has baited you into taking him seriously in persona Christi. Where context is lacking about who is posting and for what purpose, it is impossible to determine which interpretations are correct.

Eighty years to the day before the JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY video was posted—March 5, 1946—Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech. The United States had become pre-eminent in military might, he told his audience at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and now stood “at the pinnacle of world power.” Churchill thought the translatio imperii from Great Britain to America was a “solemn moment for the American democracy.” He insisted that a sense of responsibility and even gravity was incumbent upon his listeners: “With primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future.” Churchill would have expected dignity from the leader of the free world. The Trump administration has failed to make the case for war to American citizens. It has been a stunning, even spectacular failure. Clowns have led us to war.

The hour is awfully late to call the “tone police” on Trump. The man is a folk hero; his famous rap sheet of outrages will live on in legend and song. After all that has happened in the last decade, who could find a red line only now, when faced with a war and thousands of casualties?

A lonely normative reason for Catholics to vote for Trump in 2024 (to the degree that Church teaching informs our political choices) was his record of foreign-policy restraint and peacemaking. The great moral hazards of mass deportation counted against him, and Trump’s pledge to support in vitro fertilization tarnished his promise as an anti-abortion candidate. Now he is crossing out the only redeeming feature of his résumé. Could Trump really “no longer” feel “an obligation to think purely of Peace,” as he wrote to the prime minister of Norway after receiving neither the Nobel Peace Prize nor Greenland? Of all the things he was not kidding about, was he serious about deprioritizing “Peace” with a capital P?

Something has changed. It is difficult for a thirty-seven-year-old to accept the explanation in the New York Times that Trump was always prepared to strike Iran. The brilliant success of the operation to seize Nicolás Maduro and the oil fields of Venezuela just after the New Year must have contributed to the decision. Faced with setbacks on immigration enforcement and tariffs, the White House must have felt like foreign military theaters had become the only places where they could “just do things.” That slogan of the MAGA faithful expresses their braggadocio, combativeness, and eagerness to exult in the exercise of power. What happened here is that in our president, in our ascendant political faction, and in our nation as a whole, some of the few remaining fibers of self-restraint have snapped.

It is impossible to say what exactly the architects of this war wanted out of it. No decision-makers seem to have believed that regime change would be an easily achievable objective. Were they willing to risk, or were they purposely trying to precipitate, a protracted Iranian civil war? Without a clear understanding of the objectives and intentions at play, is unclear how immoral the decision to attack Iran was. It is even unclear that there was a decision. Unchecked anger, frustration, and the thrill of power have their own momentum.

The realities of war, the screams and smells of burning flesh in Minab and Beirut, appear far, far away. Barring some future terrorist blowback from out of the blue sky, the painful reality of this war for Americans will be limited to its indirect cost at the gas pump or in the stock market. (Obviously, the direct cost is being put on a credit card for the unborn to pay. Projections do not show them rushing forth to assume the six-figure share of the national debt into which each will be born.) So how will we ever learn? Tehran is only too happy to co-operate with Washington in one respect: creating entertaining war-related digital content. Even the Iranians are having fun with the war online. The regime turns out to have a knack for remixing The Lego Movie, Age of Empires 2, Jeffrey Epstein, and Our Lord and Savior into A.I.-generated content for everyone’s entertainment.

Like windy Midwestern spring days that cannot decide whether to be hot or cold, the White House’s martial temperature fluctuates: It lacks the political will either to wage war or to make peace. Shortly after the on-and-off ceasefire was announced, Israeli fighter jets unleashed one of the deadliest attacks in the recent history of Beirut. Our American Caesar blockades the Iranian blockades like his predecessor walling in the walls of Vercingetorix. As funding for the war under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 expires, hopefully the Senate can restore public discussion, clarify the military objectives, and compel the president to negotiate a just and lasting peace with Iran.

As I return to the unexamined conclusions of my teenage years, I have to hand it to those neocon bogeymen. They were committed to months of solemn public discussion: Resolution 1441, W.M.D., Hans Blix, Colin Powell’s charts at the U.N., yellowcake uranium. Though they were mobilizing for a war with a much broader scope, I cannot help but contrast the global public discussion about Iraq in 2003 with the memes and videos about Iran in 2026. Bush and his cabinet addressed their fellow citizens and were addressable in turn. Some showed political courage. Their bid to perform a putatively honorable deed failed; they suffered reproach. Now fluid and context-poor digital politics opens up new possibilities for cowardice and buffoonery. The rules that applied to the Bushies are no longer in effect, and we are witnessing the consequences on our social media feeds. Regime change has taken place—in the United States. To understand how, we need more than Habermas’s diagnostic toolkit; we need Aristotle’s ancient political science and its candor about character education as a prerequisite for politics.

The Iran War is a more fundamental moral disaster than the Iraq War, whatever its geopolitical consequences will be. So the ancients might say. Aristotle argues that akrasia, or lack of self-restraint, is a thornier moral problem than vice. The person who calculates wrongly about honorable ends is “easier to cure, because he might be persuaded otherwise.” Akrasia is harder. The man who lacks self-restraint is a slave to his desires and thus unpersuadable. President Bush may have been vicious, but President Trump lacks self-restraint. In 2003, Americans miscalculated the noble course after extensive (and sometimes solemn) public discussion; in 2026 we cannot help ourselves, enjoying war-related memes and videos online and chiding those downers and dullards who cannot understand that the whole thing is a joke.

Americans increasingly lack the self-restraint for public discussion, and President Trump is the result. In the Politics, Aristotle argues, “If a lack of self-restraint exists in the case of an individual, it exists also in the case of the city.” Do not ask me to stop the war, the White House is implicitly telling us with its video. I am only having some fun with it just now, anyway. How many citizens seeking amusement behind their screens immunize themselves against persuasion? We deserve what we have gotten, and what we have gotten is worse than what we had. And we did this to ourselves: We saw through the neoconservatives’ flag-wrapped appeals to the noble ends of seizing W.M.D. and spreading democracy. We decided that Bush the Younger was too easily taken in to be as decent and honorable as Bush the Elder. Along the way, many of us became corrosive critics of decency, civility, and honor. Railing against hypocrites, we undermined the noble ends that rival the pursuit of pleasure and advantage. The problem of our lack of self-restraint is of our own making. A nation of cynics is doomed to be ruled by vulgarians.

Christians and Muslims in wiser times turned to Aristotle to build a double layer of defense against akrasia so that the pursuit of pleasure and advantage would not wreak havoc. In the first place, Aristotle downgrades pleasure in order to refute hedonism and point to the higher end of all moral virtue: the noble. He argues that pleasures are our perceptions of restoring ourselves from a painful state, felt at the moment at which we slake our thirst, satisfy our hunger, or appease our libido. But then, in the famous surprise in the seventh book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle muses, “Nothing prevents a certain pleasure from being the best thing.” Perhaps some higher pleasure, one that can be enjoyed by someone who is not in a deficient state, is possible. With this, Aristotle opens the doors to contemplation and to the infinite and continuous pleasure that God may enjoy. We find two reasons in Aristotle to cultivate self-restraint, then: first, to practice the moral virtues and enjoy the human flourishing known to the pagan philosopher, and second, to enjoy the higher pleasures of unity with God and the spiritual practices of our faith traditions.

One thousand years ago, Miskawayh studied these texts of Aristotle near what is now Tehran. The writings of this philosopher and court official have been only recently translated and analyzed by the prolific Peter Adamson. Miskawayh’s famous work The Refinement of Character is a commentary and elaboration on the Nicomachean Ethics. Here he includes only Aristotle’s lower account of pleasure as a release from the body’s deficient states. These satisfactions are no rivals to the noble. It is telling that Miskawayh reserves Aristotle’s higher account of pleasure for a separate short treatise. Two centuries before Saint Thomas Aquinas would quote from Avicenna in his quaestio on pleasure, this Persian sage was thinking through both the moral and contemplative responses to pleasure that protect us from akrasia. Recent U.S.–Israeli strikes have damaged more than fifty libraries in his country. We may be destroying the very books that we should be studying.

Our society neither demands nor rewards self-restraint. Public formality has given way to visible tattoos and tennis shoes—almost everywhere; I read that Trump is buying his cabinet ill-fitting Florsheim dress shoes (made in China) to hold the line. I am willing to take some of the blame for what I have said in public about the warmongers of yore. But technological change is the primary cause of akrasia. The Internet has made virtually everyone less self-restrained by allowing us to indulge in pleasures without shame. These include angry arguments about politics. Online we can be private-in-public, as if we were wearing rings of invisibility, and we can avoid accountability for the things we say to distant strangers. The Internet fosters our habits of unrestraint.

Long before Trump, the World Wide Web, and me, self-restraint was receding from public life. In the socialist publication the Daily Herald in 1917, G. K. Chesterton blamed modern political economy. Capitalists, he prophesied, were turning Britain into a “utopia of usurers.” Kings, priests, and artists who represented higher values—the royal oath, the Church’s God, and the creator’s beauty—were being suborned by businessmen who valued only social control and the profits of advertising. Marx thought this portended revolution, but Chesterton foresaw a disciplinary society. (His foresight resembles what Michel Foucault only saw in hindsight in 1975.) Though this world might be “socialist” in name, Chesterton thought capitalists would usher in a control society of prisons, schools, and hospitals operating in tandem to produce efficient workers. Genuine art and holidays depended on higher values. More than a century later, is there any way to re-align individual advantage with those hallmarks of self-restraint: beauty, decorum, politeness, reverence, and style? More important: Is there any way to incentivize individuals to express indignation and hold others to account for their shameful behavior?

Aristotle has some prescriptions, though I cannot imagine they will be popular ones. Abigail Staysa Thomas points out that in contrast to the modern liberal tradition, Aristotle’s politics includes early childhood education, specifically the importance of habituating young children to enjoy noble pleasures and avoid base ones. Every college freshman should know that Aristotle thinks man is naturally a “political animal.” But the habits necessary to sustain human flourishing in a community—the virtues—do not come as naturally to human beings as they come to more political animals such as ants, bees, and cranes. Young human children learn first self-restraint and later moral virtue through pain and shame. Aristotle finds deeper preconditions for sustaining political speech than Habermas does, and ultimately his is a harsher prescription for educators: shaming.

“Shame” is in bad odor. Every day we discover a new psychological excuse or trauma to absolve ourselves from personal responsibility. But I cannot recommend leaving young people to the not-so-tender mercies of the prison–school–hospital complex or to the mechanisms of social control of which Chesterton was blissfully ignorant, such as consumer debt and drug addiction. The question is who controls whom. The only alternative to self-discipline is the control of others. The therapeutic school–prison–hospital complex has made this control a gentler affair. But when everyone considers himself a patient entitled to rehabilitation, the public sphere is empty of citizens who meet as equals.

Opposing war in America today requires shaming the lack of self-restraint that leads to war. If the realities of war visited themselves upon us, we would learn moral seriousness quickly. But our technological powers insulate us from the nature of war that we inflict upon others. In 1991, Jean Baudrillard famously argued that “the Gulf War did not take place.” The simulacrum of war in Western media bore only the most tenuous relationship to the atrocities taking place in Iraq and Kuwait. This insight holds true for the relationship between the JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY video and the Tomahawk missile that struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab. Baudrillard’s goofy-sounding postmodernism is in fact a grounded truth. Nothing has changed since 2001 except further loss of self-restraint, in an endless and endlessly entertaining war against our imagined terrors. Only a god, Aristotle thought, could feel pleasure always and without cessation. We have discovered a new way to mock Him. Maybe the world did end in Y2K.

A republic cannot survive the loss of self-restraint because it cannot survive the loss of answerable speech. The problem is not that citizens argue underhandedly about war but that we do not argue at all. We consume and share war-related content for enjoyment and outrage. In the place of an unjust regime, something more volatile has emerged: the rule of impulses and the empire of the algorithm. We need a stronger and older wisdom than Habermas’s to face this problem, and then we shall need self-restraint, courage, prudence, and all the rest. It is not only ourselves whom we are amusing to death.