Valediction for Tony Judt

"The result [of three decades of uncomplicated market worship] is a politics of fear: fear of the stranger, fear of falling into the ranks of losers in a dog-eat-dog culture, fear of the future. Which in turn leads to the kind of paralysis that characterizes our national government today...It's decadent to embrace vast spending on the maintenance of a warfare state in order to, among other things, drain off resources that might otherwise be available to a welfare state."

From an excellent article in the LA Review of Books on the late, postwar historian Tony Judt.