Too Long; Read* Anyway

World War IV continues apace. Helps to explain Andrew Breitbart.

Central to the rhetoric of American rightists, be they literate neocons or populist wingnuts like Glenn Beck, is the accusation that America is on the verge of destruction by powerful enemies without and traitorous or defeatist progressives within. In this political psychodrama, the identity of the foreign threat is secondary. If terrorists identifying themselves with Peru’s Sendero Luminoso had massacred Americans on 9/11, conservatives might well have declared war on "Latinofascism," called for the invasion of Cuba, Venezuela and other leftist Latin American regimes, and denounced cultural relativism and multiculturalism and the welfare state for weakening the will of Americans to resist the imminent overthrow of Western civilization by Latin American Maoism.

[...]

In the essay, Irving [Bill Kristol's proud papa! — M.B.] confessed that he had never really been interested in defeating the Soviet Union. The real enemy had been American liberalism, all along:

There is no "after the Cold War" for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers. We have, I do believe, reached a critical turning point in the history of the American democracy. Now that the other "Cold War" is over, the real cold war has begun. We are far less prepared for this cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our victorious war against a global communist threat. We are, I sometimes feel, starting from ground zero, and it is a conflict I shall be passing on to my children and grandchildren. But it is a far more interesting cold war -- intellectually interesting, spiritually interesting -- than the war we have so recently won, and I rather envy those young enough for the opportunities they will have to participate in it.

There are a few people on the American right who are interested in foreign policy for its own sake. But the majority of conservative pundits who write or talk about foreign policy, like Irving Kristol, are mainly interested in smearing Americans who disagree them with them as Fifth Columnists, traitors who are undermining America or Western Civilization or Democracy or whatever from within. Liberals are Enemies Within, in conscious or unconscious alliance with the Enemies Without.

War is not over.

*Past participle: We read it. Not trying to impose anything on any one in any way.