Why the War Never Needs an Enemy to Keep Working

A dead essayist who never saw the war end explains why every modern crisis arrives pre-loaded with a demand for obedience.

Turn on any cable news segment about the latest emergency — a border crisis, a pandemic surge, a cyberattack attributed to a shadowy foreign actor, a war half a world away that somehow requires your immediate moral alignment — and count how long it takes before someone says the word unity. Not justice. Not victory. Not even peace. Unity — that strange, frictionless word that asks nothing of you except to stop asking questions.

Watch closely and you’ll notice something else. The emergency rarely explains itself. It arrives already dressed in urgency, already assigned a villain, already equipped with the vocabulary of sacrifice — “we’re all in this together,” “now is not the time for division,” “the enemies of our way of life.” What it does not arrive with is time. Time to ask who benefits. Time to ask what quietly expanded while everyone was looking at the crisis. Time to ask why the emergency, whatever it is this month, always seems to enlarge the same thing: the reach, the budget, the surveillance capacity, the moral authority of the state itself.

This is not a new trick. It is, in fact, the oldest trick in the republic’s short life, and one man diagnosed it with such precision in 1918 that reading him today feels less like history and more like a leaked internal memo.

The Young Man Who Refused to Cheer

Randolph Bourne was twenty-nine when he wrote “War Is the Health of the State,” and he was already dying — his body twisted by a birth injury and a bout of childhood tuberculosis, his lungs about to be finished off by the influenza pandemic that would kill him within the year. He never saw the essay published in finished form; it was assembled from his notebooks after his death and printed in 1919. He also never saw the armistice, never saw the Treaty of Versailles, never saw the Espionage Act prosecutions wind down. He died mid-argument, which is perhaps the most honest way a warning like his could have been delivered — unresolved, because the thing he was warning about was never going to resolve.