Saturday Night Live famously depicted white liberals as inhabiting a bubble in a skit that starred Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock immediately after the 2016 election. Do conservatives, a decade later, similarly walk down a staircase of reinforcing spirals that bring them uniformly to the same point but one far away from their fellow countrymen? Most of us, to varying degrees, inhabit thought bubbles that caress rather than challenge our political and cultural beliefs. This seems especially true with Republicans and the Iran War. Many on the right refuse to admit how terribly unpopular this war was. The reasons for their obliviousness include the fact that one would glean the impression that the war was quite popular if one discussed it with other conservatives, who overwhelmingly supported the president’s war. Fox News, talk radio, and conservative websites did little to disabuse them of this false impression. FoxNews.com, for instance, ran such articles earlier this year as “Iran War success gives president a Trump card to play in China meeting” and “President Trump leads the West to a big win against Iran.” A great divide exists between the great support for the war among Republicans and the overwhelming opposition to it from everyone else. If the war was not an 80-20 slam dunk like transgenders competing in girls’ sports, then it was not a 50-50 issue, either. The last 10 polls that gauged public support for the war basically showed it as a 60-40 issue. And my rounding may offer too much generosity to the pro-war side. The high-water mark for support in these 10 polls reached 40 percent in just two polls. In one outlier, just 28 percent supported the war. Five polls showed opposition at 60 percent or higher. The Siena College/New York Times poll measured opposition at 64 percent. In that and the YouGov/Economist poll, opposition outnumbered support by a greater than two-to-one margin. Republicans appeared out of step with the rest of the country. In the Fox News/Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research poll taken about a month ago, roughly three-fourths of Republicans supported the war and a quarter opposed. How does this compare to the rest of the country? About nine in 10 Democrats opposed the war, as did seven in 10 independents. The public never wanted this war. Consider that from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that ratcheted up the Vietnam War, it took the public about six years to turn against that conflict at that 60-40 level that polls on the Iran War fairly consistently showed within a month of its launch. Of the 93 polls that Nate Silver lists gauging support over the course of the war, just five indicated that the pros outnumbered the antis. Consider also that in Iran, we fought a villain straight from central casting on a Hans Gruber-Angel Eyes-Max Cady-Anton Chigurh level, and yet the public that was so quick to rally around the flag during other conflicts did not here. Americans tried to tell Republican politicians that they disapproved, but Republican politicians did not listen in the same way Democrats did not listen to the public during the Biden administration, on, say, border security. Standing against the wind, of course, stands as no sin. Conventional wisdom often strikes as no wisdom at all. But some deference to public opinion seems in order in a republic for elected officials, especially ones who claim the “populist” mantle. Why was this war so profoundly unpopular outside of Republican circles? By arrogantly bypassing constitutional norms and tradition, the president denied himself the opportunity to make the case to the American people. Even if William McKinley got “Remember the Maine!” wrong, Lyndon Johnson fudged the truth of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and George W. Bush fell for the “weapons of mass destruction” faulty intelligence surrounding Iraq, they at least made their case for war to elected officials who represented the people and the states. This enabled them to gin up support for their projects. Trump never made his case. The Middle East war fatigue, which helped separate Donald Trump from other Republicans during the 2016 primaries and gave a permission slip for Americans fed up with those seemingly endless wars to vote for him in the general election, still exists. Trump, in an almost Wilsonian “he kept us out of war” reversal, betrayed his America First rhetoric in pushing this war. In other words, he went against one of the very positions that made him popular in the first place. Beyond all this, a war to prevent Tehran from launching nuclear weapons that they do not possess with missile systems that cannot deliver such a payload to the United States never made sense to too many people outside of the president’s base. The fact that President Trump boasted that last June’s strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity did not help the credibility of his claims earlier this year that Iran stood weeks away from a nuke. The scores of Chicken Little, “weeks away” claims over the last three decades, ultimately conditioned the public not to think Iran stood weeks away from a nuke, but that Westerners routinely lie about Iran’s proximity to developing nuclear weapons. The deal to end the war looks, on paper, almost like the status quo ante. So, at war’s end, its proponents ask the same question as its opponents asked at its beginning: Why did we even wage this war? Those bellyaching over the deal, which surely contains aspects worth criticizing, who aggressively pushed for the war, ignore their own role in bringing about this moment. Iran emerges stronger, and the U.S. and Israel weaker, because we listened to Team America: World Police interventionists with nearly as long a track record of getting foreign policy wrong as Joe Biden. This war in Muslim lands, they assured themselves, would be different from Iraq’s drain of blood and treasure over a cause that proved false; from Afghanistan, which, after two decades, returned to its Taliban status quo ante as if some guy dressed as a hirsute wizard pressed a reset button; from Somalia, which looks only somewhat more inhabitable than the dark side of the moon after our early-1990s intervention; and Lebanon, whose capital earned the moniker “Paris of the Middle East” up until a few years before our 1982 arrival but subsequently lent its name to a drinking game in which participants toss ping-pong balls as though bombs into red Solo cups filled with beer. If all that did not pop the bubble that they inhabit, then their miscalculation on Iran will not, either. A bubble, after all, feels safer, happier, and more self-flattering than the real world, which rarely turns out the way our hopes envisioned. And if denizens of the bubble refuse to learn from experience, then they surely will not heed public opinion. READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Jane Fonda Praised Jim Jones Before She Protested Donald Trump’s Birthday CBS Problems Go Deeper Than Scott Pelley The Cost of Trump’s Politics of Subtraction