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Come apart, because if you go back to the middle of the 20th century, across the parties, across the genuine ideological spectrum, obviously the parties weren't as ideologically

sorted, even though they're how ideologically sorted as they're now, they both support

capitalism and imperialism, but whatever.

They weren't as like true, like they're whatever.

What stands for ideological sorting hadn't yet occurred.

But there was a consensus that you actually did need to bring the intellectuals in.

I mean, that very obviously emerges from

World War II when all these academics went into the OSS, they went into the OWI, they went into the

psychological warfare division, they went into the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, and they would

regularly interact with high-level military officials. And so the military was like, we need these guys.

And after the Joint Chiefs of Staff were created, now the military has a lot of seats at that

table. And so they were able to, you know, the head of the Army Air Forces was able to be like

we should fund the Rand Corporation or whatnot. But what do you think made that consensus go away?

Is it just the de-intellectualizing of American life?

Or is it also something to how the United States manages its empire,

which I think is a key part of your piece,

which is that how empire is managed transformed?

But I guess the first question is, and you can go into the second,

is what made this consensus come apart? Yeah, I mean, it's a good, it's a good question. I mean,

I feel like, you know, maybe, maybe just Trump, you know, and his team kind of pointing to

some fundamental realities, I guess. You can, you can defund all these, you know, programs and things and you can,

...