Politics & Power Quote by Frank Chodorov

Chodorov’s line isn’t searching for an answer so much as it’s staging a trap: if the wars were unwanted, who exactly did the wanting, and why did the bill land on ordinary people’s bodies? The phrasing is deceptively mild - “pertinent question” sounds like civics-class housekeeping - but it’s a needle aimed at the moral soft spot of modern statecraft: consent. By framing war not as an abstract national project but as something Americans are “compelled” to fight, he drags the discussion from flag-draped inevitability to the blunt mechanics of coercion.

The subtext is anti-mystification. “These wars” implies recurrence and pattern, not a one-off emergency. Chodorov is inviting readers to notice the routine by which elites launder decisions through patriotic language, then outsource the cost to conscripts, taxpayers, and grieving families. The question also flips a common propagandistic move: rather than asking whether war was necessary, he asks whether enforcement was legitimate. That’s a sharper blade, because necessity is endlessly arguable; compulsion is harder to romanticize.

Contextually, Chodorov wrote from an Old Right libertarian and anti-interventionist tradition, suspicious of the New Deal’s expanding state and the mid-century national security apparatus that turned “temporary” mobilization into permanent posture. The sentence is built to puncture bipartisan pieties: if democracy means anything beyond slogans, it cannot treat unwilling citizens as raw material.