If you haven't read Randolph Bourne's essay, you've missed out big time:

http://www.bigeye.com/warstate.htm

A taste:

"War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion
throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for
passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience
the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties;
the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly
around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really
to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty,
perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the
amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often
their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their
resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual
opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime
attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at
the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be
produced through any other agency than war."

He was probably much more the equivalent of a progressive Dem than a
libertarian (in one essay he says of a factory-owner friend: "He
trusts rights, I trust power. He recognizes only individuals, I
recognize classes."), though interestingly I just read that he
questioned the democratic process and the 'war for democracy' concept:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Bourne

(I also learned he was one of the victims of the Spanish Flu).

All this is interesting to me, as I just finished reading "Johnny Got
His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo, which is a stunning novel. What I found
really strange, though, was Trumbo's preface to the 70s edition (novel
was originally published in 1940) where he *defended* WWII though he
had (in the novel) nothing but contempt for WWI and the whole idea of
'making the world safe for democracy'. When the antiwar right tried to
get Trumbo to speak out against WWII, he apparently rebuffed them.

¶ 3:59 PM