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The Next Conservatism?
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Reviews; Posted on: 2009-07-10 08:29:02 [ Printer friendly / Instant flyer ]
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Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind, The Next Conservatism (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009).
by Michael O'Meara
There are, in my view, only a handful of contemporary “conservative” thinkers in the US worth reading. William Lind is one of them.
Associated with the “cultural conservatism” of the Free Congress Foundation (which “advocates the creation of parallel institutions to counter the dominant left cultural forces”), Lind’s main claim to fame is the leading role he’s played in developing the theory of “Fourth Generation Warfare” (4GW), which is why I read him.
His “weekly” column “On War,” posted at the website “Defense and the National Interest,” offers, relatedly, not just one of the best analysis of America’s imperial misadventure in Afghanistan and Iraq (especially in explaining why America’s Second Generation Warfare is so inapt in its struggle against stateless 4GW guerrillas), it maps out a strategy we secessionists will need to heed, if we are ever to free ourselves from the unholy United States.
It was thus with a good deal of anticipation that I picked up The Next Conservatism, his latest book, written in collaboration with the recently deceased Paul Weyrich.
The book’s premise is that political conservatism, despite its numerous electoral victories, has failed.
Intellectually inspired by the work of Russell Kirk and William Buckley’s National Review, post-war conservatives, Lind and Weyrich argue, succeeded in capturing the Republican Party and, under Reagan, gaining national power. This did much to discredit liberalism and contribute to subsequent conservative victories.
But once having won the Cold War, which beat back the threat of Communism and ensured the triumph of the liberal market, conservatives became complacent, failing to respond, in effect, to their own success.
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