After the overthrow of the Taliban, a form of this mistake was made again by the George W. Bush administration, which had an ideological disdain for nation building and was distracted by the Iraq War, so that in the first years after the fall of the Taliban, only a few thousand U.S. soldiers were stationed in Afghanistan.

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Tragically, both abject dependency and a general collectivist-statist trend have been building in America for most of the past century, after corrosive ideological premises were imported from Europe starting in the 1880s.

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Analysts say they both have exercised strong consensus-building skills that could prove invaluable in a divided Supreme Court that has fractured along unpredictable ideological lines in recent years.

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