A commenter asks,

Could you write more about this? Vietnam is really remote to someone like me. I guess Iraq would be the closest experience for most people, but it seems different.

I would describe Iraq as a very costly Type II error. Let us stipulate that Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), but we could not be sure of that prior to invading. All that we knew was that Iraq was defying the UN resolution requiring the government to submit to international inspections.

A Type I error would have occurred if we had not gone to war and they in fact had obtained and subsequently used WMD. Policy makers assumed that this would be a costly error.

A Type II error occurred when we went to war and they had not obtained WMD. Policy makers assumed that this sort of error would have low cost. In fact, some thought that it was not an error at all. A neocon I know who was never an official in the Bush Administration gave me this rationale early on. Not long after Saddam was killed, this fellow told me that soon Iran would be surrounded on two sides by working democracies–in Afghanistan and Iraq. I thought to myself, “Oh, dear [euphemism], if Bush believes that, we’re in trouble.” It was the cost of the attempt at nation-building, and the consequences of the failure of that attempt, that make the outcome of the Iraq war so ugly.

I believe that the fundamental reason for the bad outcome in Vietnam also was our doomed attempt at nation-building. None of the governments that we supported in South Vietnam had a strong popular base, so that the enthusiasm for fighting the war came from us, not from the South Vietnamese.

In hindsight, the big puzzle about Vietnam is why we fought a war there in the first place. President Eisenhower was offered a war in Vietnam in 1954, when the French were defeated there, and he declined. In hindsight, Ike seems to me to have been one of our great Presidents.

There was nothing strategically or economically valuable about Vietnam. Rather, the Kennedy Administration foreign policy team talked themselves into seeing it as a test of their determination and tactical dexterity in containing Communism in the Third World. They managed to show a fair amount of determination. Tactical dexterity, not so much.

The consequences for us? Eventually, the United States gave up on the war. The Communists took over, and that had zero cost to us strategically. But before that, we had lost tens of thousands of Americans killed, and many others wounded physically and psychologically.

I think that if you want to understand how badly the war wounded American culture and where today’s Left came from, it would help to delve into some of the history of the campus activism of the 1960s.

So how should you do that? Hmmm. Maybe for starters look up people like Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden on Wikipedia, and also click on links there that look interesting.

There are some movies that reflect the period. Easy Rider; The Strawberry Statement; Zabriskie Point; Alice’s Restaurant

If you prefer reading, The Strawberry Statement was originally a book. Also The Whole World is Watching (not the newer book of that title by a different author). Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night is recommended. I avidly read and re-read it when it came out.

Vietnam created political divisions that have still not healed. The war either fostered or brought to the surface a sentiment of anti-Americanism on the left, and that sentiment continues to be a major factor in polarization. It explains why “make America great again” was such a potent and divisive slogan. Since Vietnam, the left has decreed that America never has been great. Incidentally, many libertarians are on the left on this issue, and I believe that you can trace this to Murray Rothbard during the Vietnam era.

Patriotism has become something that President Trump’s supporters believe in and something that the left abhors. [UPDATE: Let me clarify. If you ask Trump supporters, “Are you patriotic?” they will answer “Of course!” If you ask people on the left, they are likely to look at you suspiciously and say, “Define patriotism.” They might be happy to call themselves patriotic if you are willing to define patriotism as support for social justice, but they will abhor the patriotism of the Trump supporter.] For the left, America can only be great when it helps the oppressed. President Trump’s order on refugees went against that, and you can see the reaction. But I think that the order went down well with people who are more traditionally patriotic, and I have seen some stories giving polling data that bears bear me out.

As economists, we tell the story of the end of the draft as a triumph for Milton Friedman and economic efficiency. But it is significant that the draft ended during the Vietnam War. As a political matter, it allowed the left to opt out of military service, which reinforced the division over patriotism.

In high school and college, I soaked up the anti-American view of the Vietnam war. You can still see the anti-American, anti-capitalist view expressed in this more recent review of Mailer’s book, but I came to discard the Chomsky “blame the capitalists” thesis.

I gradually went from being anti-American and anti-capitalist. Instead, I became anti-elitist. As I have pointed out often, a major turning point for me was reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Even apart from the historical context, it offers many insights into bureaucratic infighting and organizational dysfunction. And the lesson that smart people can do something monumentally stupid is terribly important.

I often sense that my temperament is similar to that of David Brooks, but his sympathy for elites creates fundamental differences in our political views. He is younger than I am, and the Vietnam War and the protest movement were less salient to him. Perhaps if our ages were reversed, our attitudes toward elites would be reversed, also.

My distrust of elites continues to color my views. I see many events in Vietnam terms. For me, 2008 was a financial Vietnam, for both bankers and regulators. I tend to think of Obamacare as a domestic policy Vietnam, with its architects showing the same overconfidence and the same inability to listen to dissenting voices. And, for that matter, the same denial of the need for fundamental re-thinking (during Vietnam, the Administration was constantly saying that there was “light at the end of the tunnel,” and they were constantly putting out statistics that said that the policy was working).