Consider - "actual" warfare in this day and age means "a bunch of kids I don't know go to a country I can't locate on a map and kill people I don't know the first thing about and occasionally show up on the news until Nancy Grace finds a white girl in trouble" to most people. Actual warfare, meanwhile, has morphed to "UAV pilots in Nevada launch missile strikes in Pakistan against targets that are either Taliban or a Pashtun wedding party, depending on our intel." Does "warfare" mean "death?" Well, how many people die from shoddy healthcare? Does that not count? If a rich person lobbies for a means test on social security that ends up killing 30 people because they ate melamine-enhanced Chinese catfood to stay alive, is he more or less culpable than the Air Force pilot who maneuvers a Predator into striking distance so a CIA operative can press the trigger? I wrote this about two years ago when someone asked whether there was a fiscally-conservative but socially-liberal political party: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8d9zi/anyone_else... The TL;DR is that the only way the Republican Party can operate for its wealthy benefactors is by convincing the proletariat to vote against its best interests, and that's all about semantics. As to your aside, "climate skepticism" is the right's version of "vaccine skepticism." It is a deeply-held, irrational belief that is more emotionally investing than intellectually investing and as such, clever people irrationally cling to questionable data points in order to avoid the cognitive discomfort necessary to purge an entire regime of thought. After all, if Al Gore was right about Global Warming, he might be right about other things... and it's so much easier if Al Gore is 100% WRONG. Politics does not occupy the same place in our brains as "right vs. wrong." It occupies the same place as "Raiders vs. Packers."