A mere 72 hours after Pres­i­dent Oba­ma deliv­ered an encomi­um hon­or­ing the life of Dr. Mar­tin Luther King, he announced his inten­tion to pound yet anoth­er coun­try with bombs. The oxy­moron last week was note­wor­thy for how lit­tle atten­tion it received. Yes — a pres­i­dent memo­ri­al­ized an anti-war activist who derid­ed the U.S. gov­ern­ment as ​“the great­est pur­vey­or of vio­lence in the world.” Then then that same pres­i­dent quick­ly pro­posed yet more vio­lence — this time in Syria.

Democratic Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton said a war resolution will pass not because of the supposed merits of an attack on Syria, but simply 'because of loyalty of Democrats' who 'just don't want to see (Obama) shamed and humiliated on the national stage.'

Among a polit­i­cal press corps that rarely chal­lenges the Wash­ing­ton prin­ci­ple of ​“kill for­eign­ers first, ask ques­tions lat­er,” almost nobody men­tioned the con­tra­dic­tion. Even worse, as Con­gress now debates whether to launch yet anoth­er mil­i­tary cam­paign in the Mid­dle East, the anti-war move­ment that Dr. King rep­re­sent­ed and that so vig­or­ous­ly opposed the last war is large­ly silent. Sure, there have been a few per­func­to­ry emails from lib­er­al groups, but there seems to be lit­tle prospect for mass protest, rais­ing ques­tions about whether an anti-war move­ment even exists anymore.

So what hap­pened to that move­ment? The short­er answer is: it was a vic­tim of partisanship.

That’s the con­clu­sion that emerges from a recent study by pro­fes­sors at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty. Eval­u­at­ing sur­veys of more than 5,300 anti-war pro­tes­tors from 2007 to 2009, the researchers dis­cov­ered that the many pro­tes­tors who self-iden­ti­fied as Democ­rats ​“with­drew from anti-war protests when the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty achieved elec­toral suc­cess” in the 2008 pres­i­den­tial election.

Had there been legit­i­mate rea­son to con­clude that Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­cy was syn­ony­mous with the anti-war cause, this with­draw­al might have been under­stand­able. But that’s not what hap­pened — the with­draw­al occurred even as Oba­ma was esca­lat­ing the war in Afghanistan and inten­si­fy­ing drone wars in places like Pak­istan and Yemen. The researchers thus con­clude that dur­ing the Bush years, many Democ­rats were not nec­es­sar­i­ly moti­vat­ed to par­tic­i­pate in the anti-war move­ment because they oppose mil­i­tarism and war — they were instead ​“moti­vat­ed to par­tic­i­pate by anti-Repub­li­can sentiments.”

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, this hyper-par­ti­san out­look and the lack of a more robust anti-war move­ment explain why polit­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions rather than moral ques­tions are at the fore­front of the Wash­ing­ton debate over a war with Syria.

In that Belt­way back and forth, the nation­al media has focused as much on the horser­ace (will an attack polit­i­cal­ly weak­en the pres­i­dent?) and polit­i­cal tac­tics (should the pres­i­dent have sub­mit­ted to a con­gres­sion­al vote?) than on whether an attack would actu­al­ly make things bet­ter in Syr­ia. Sim­i­lar­ly, a top Demo­c­ra­t­ic strate­gist told CNN that poten­tial Repub­li­can oppo­si­tion to a Syr­ia attack ​“will coa­lesce Democ­rats around the pres­i­dent” in sup­port of a mil­i­tary strike. Con­firm­ing that dynam­ic, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gress­woman Eleanor Holmes Nor­ton said a war res­o­lu­tion will pass not because of the sup­posed mer­its of an attack on Syr­ia, but sim­ply ​“because of loy­al­ty of Democ­rats” who ​“just don’t want to see (Oba­ma) shamed and humil­i­at­ed on the nation­al stage.”

This is red-ver­sus-blue trib­al­ism in its most mur­der­ous form. It sug­gests that the par­ty affil­i­a­tion of a par­tic­u­lar pres­i­dent should deter­mine whether or not we want that pres­i­dent to kill oth­er human beings. It fur­ther sug­gests that we should all look at war not as a life-and-death issue, but instead as a sport­ing event in which we blind­ly root for a pre­ferred polit­i­cal team.

An anti-war move­ment is sup­posed to be a check on such reflex­ive blood­lust. It is sup­posed to be a voice of rea­son inter­rupt­ing the par­ti­san trib­al­ism. When it, too, becomes a vic­tim of that trib­al­ism, we lose some­thing more than a polit­i­cal bat­tle. As the dis­tort­ed debate over Syr­ia proves, we lose the con­science that is sup­posed to guide us through the most vex­ing ques­tions of all.