The difference is violence. Violence, or the sniff of it, seemed to have an almost magical effect on the ‘thinkers’ I was reading. Any time the state picked up a gun or a baton, all the caution about big, stupid and dangerous disappeared and was replaced with open, masturbatory enthusiasm for more thuggish, more dangerous and, above all, more powerful. The government was Mr Hyde when it was a doctor and Dr Jekyll when it went on a killing spree.

As the Iraq War took off, I watched people who believed the government [Howard's] incapable of running a post office argue it could transform the Arab World into an oasis of democracy within a year. If the state built chicken factories in Alaska, paid ten times too much, then staffed them with incompetents and felons, this was socialism — the ‘fatal conceit’ that events could be controlled by central planning. But in Basrah, it was ‘reconstruction’, even as America’s own infrastructure deconstructed. Military and civilian deaths weren’t unfortunate but, instead, treated as a kind of gauge of resolve (if they were treated at all).

read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/why-im-not-a-conservative-any-more/