In 1977, conservative scholars at the American Enterprise Institute published a report titled To Empower People: From State to Civil Society on how the federal government could and should implement its policies via voluntary groups and congregations. These ideas gave Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush a template to reduce the government’s bureaucratic footprint by turning instead to what Bush later termed “a thousand points of light” in civil society.

President George W. Bush, in tacit agreement, pulled the United States out of the Kyoto treaty, the 1997 legally binding agreement that 192 countries

The reality —as Obama learned in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. — is that impressive battlefield statistics and reasoned calls for restraint mean little in the climate of fear generated by terror strikes.