By no means had the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gone unquestioned, but one reason there had been relatively little debate had to do not only with a widening gap between the civilian and the military populations but also with the consequences of disruptive innovation. In many parts of the country, the daily paper, with its side-by-side op-ed essays, had vanished. Voters had been sorted into parties, the parties had been sorted, ideologically, and a new political establishment, the conservative media, having labeled and derided the “mainstream media” as biased, abdicated dispassionate debate.
