Defending prestige

The American Civil War was fought because the South thought it was defending its prestige. Then WWI was fought by the European powers also over prestige. By the 1920s much of the Western world had had its fill of the defense of honor as a way to improve national prestige. The counter-culture left had by the sixties so completely disqualified in their own minds the value of honor and national glory that they could no longer even understand how once upon a time authority rested on honor and the pursuit of glory, and how those values were necessary for the proper regulation of society and the proper, de-limited exercise of power.