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By Paul M. Weyrich This is the first of a series of columns I intend to write on “the next conservatism.” In them, I will lay out where I think conservatism needs to go after the end of President George W. Bush’s second term. Some people may wonder about the theme, “the next conservatism.” Isn’t conservatism always the same? Don’t we call ourselves conservatives because we believe in what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” truths that hold for all time? Of course we do. We believe that truth comes from God, who does not change. We hold certain beliefs, such as the impossibility of perfecting man or human society, that define conservatism in any period. In fundamentals, what was true for Russell Kirk was also true for Edmund Burke. We are not relativists. We do not hold that there is or can be a different “truth” for each time, place or person, depending on what is “true for them.” Yet it is also true that conservatism changes over time. Sometimes, that is because ideologies that are not really conservative try to disguise themselves with the conservative label (real conservatism is not an ideology at all). But more often, it is because new events face conservatives with new challenges. While our basic beliefs do not change, the circumstances to which we must apply those beliefs do. Burke and Churchill were both conservatives, but in the face of the French Revolution Burke stressed the importance of hierarchy and order, while under the threat of Nazism Churchill spoke of defending liberty. Their views were not contradictory, but the situations they faced were different. If we look at the American conservative movement since World War II, we see that it has undergone a number of changes. In the early 1950s, conservatism was defined by Senator Robert A. Taft. It meant a non-interventionist foreign policy ((which has been mislabeled “isolationism”), a small federal government of limited powers, states’ rights and scrupulous observance of the law (Taft opposed the Nuremburg Trials on the grounds that American law did not accept ex post facto justice). I continue to believe that much of what Senator Taft stood for was correct. However, with the coming of the Cold War American conservatism headed in a somewhat different direction. Led by William F. Buckley and other thinkers associated with National Review, conservatives accepted the need for a large proactive military and extensive foreign alliances in order to counter the threat of Soviet Communism. At the same time, conservatism adopted the economics previously known as liberalism: the belief that free markets and free trade are the best paths to national prosperity. Traditionally, conservatives had been for high tariffs. To some extent, in the late 1950s and the 1960s American conservatives also moved away from states’ rights and strict construction and toward accepting a more active role for the federal government, especially in enforcing civil rights. With the end of the Cold War around 1990, American conservatism changed again. Traditional conservatism was eclipsed by so-called neo-conservatism, which envisioned some form of American world empire in which America would bring “democratic capitalism” to every country on earth, whether they wanted it or not. This was really Wilsonianism, which traditionally was considered the opposite of conservatism. That is where conservatism has been. Where does it need to go? I think new developments and new challenges will bring forth a “next conservatism” after President Bush leaves the White House. What that next conservatism might look like will be the subject of my upcoming columns. Paul M. Weyrich is the Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. By Paul M. Weyrich At the heart of the challenge facing the conservative agenda lies one simple fact: while we focused our efforts on politics, our opponents on the left focused instead on culture. Unfortunately, our opponents have won an equally large victory over our culture. Today, what was called the “counter-culture” in the 1960s now controls almost every cultural venue: the entertainment industry (which is now the most powerful force in our culture), the government schools, the media, even many churches. The ideology usually know as “Political Correctness,” which is really the cultural Marxism of the infamous Frankfurt School, is using every type of cultural institution in our country to achieve its purpose, which is the destruction of traditional Western culture and the Christian religion. All we have to do is look around us and compare what we see with the America of the 1950s to understand how vast their victory is. The old sins have become virtues and the old virtues have become sins. The nub of the problem is this: culture is stronger than politics. Despite everything conservatives have achieved in politics, the left’s cultural victory trumps ours. That is why even when we win election after election, our country continues to deteriorate. The next conservatism will have to have solving this problem as its central theme. Conservatives have already taken some important steps in doing so. Starting in the mid-1980s when the Free Congress Foundation introduced “cultural conservatism,” parts of the conservative movement have come to realize that if we lose the culture war, we also lose everything else. Culture is no longer at the periphery of conservatives’ concerns, although it may not yet be at the center where I think it needs to be. And, I have to add, some neo-conservatives have been quite helpful to other conservatives in the fight to save our traditional culture, while others have had foreign policy as their focus. They ignore the cultural issues. The question is, how can we win this fight? In 1999, I wrote an open letter to conservatives with a somewhat radical answer to that question. Instead of trying to retake existing institutions from the cultural Marxists, a battle I do not think we can win, I proposed we separate our lives and the lives of our families from those institutions and build our own institutions instead. In that letter, I wrote, What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead “condition” students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and created new institutions, new schools, in their homes. I suggested conservatives should consider doing the same thing in many other areas of our lives (entertainment might be the most important with health care a close second). At the time, some people misinterpreted what I wrote as saying that conservatives should abandon politics. I said no such thing. Conservatives must remain strongly involved in politics, to prevent the cultural Marxists from mobilizing all the power of the state to crush us. What I am saying is that we cannot reasonably expect to reverse America’s cultural decay through politics alone, because culture is stronger than politics. We must continue our political work, but we must also do something more, something that works directly on the culture. I thought then and I think now that building our own institutions, institutions that reflect and reinforce traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture, may be the most effective strategy in that regard. The next conservatism may end up taking this approach or another approach. But unless it offers some strategy with a realistic hope of reversing conservatism’s cultural defeat and restoring our country to its rightful mind where morals and culture are concerned, it will not be worth calling “the next conservatism.” The decline, decay and seemingly endless degradation of America’s culture must be recognized as conservatism’s most important and most difficult challenge in any new conservative agenda. Paul M. Weyrich is the Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. By Paul M. Weyrich If there is one clear lesson from the 20th century, it is that all ideologies are dangerous. As Russell Kirk wrote, conservatism is not an ideology, it is the negation of ideology. Conservatism values what has grown up over time, over many generations, in the form of traditions, customs and habits. Ideology, in contrast, says that on the basis of such-and-such a philosophy, certain things must be true. When reality contradicts that deduction, reality must be suppressed. And when an ideology takes over a state, the power of the state is used to accomplish that suppression. The state’s citizens are forced to mouth lies. One of the new facts the next conservatism must address is the fact that America, for the first time in its history, has become an ideological state. The ideology commonly known as “political correctness” or “multiculturalism” now shapes the actions of government in thousands of ways. Under the rubric of “hate crimes,” it sentences American citizens to additional time in jail for political thoughts. As “affirmative action,” it “privileges” women, blacks and homosexuals over heterosexual white males. In some cases, it requires private businesses to give their employees “sensitivity training,” psychological conditioning in obedience to the state ideology, including its demand that everyone express approval of homosexuality. Employees who demur lose their jobs. It is ironic that after the catastrophic failure of ideologies in the 20th century in Russia, Germany, Italy and many other countries, America should now head down the same road. How did it happen? While conservatives slept, ideology crept in on little cat feet, taking over all our cultural institutions, just as Gramsci demanded in his “long march.” As I have said before, culture is more powerful than politics. What should the next conservatism do about it? First, it needs to reveal this ideology for what it is. In terms of its historical origins and basic nature, it is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The translation was undertaken largely by the unorthodox Marxists of the Frankfurt School – Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Reich and Marcuse, to
The next conservatism needs to shout from the housetops, “People, here’s what this stuff really is. It's not about ‘being nice’ or ‘toleration.’ It’s about destroying our culture and our religion, and it is succeeding.” Then, when we have the American people behind us, which we will once they learn the real nature of “PC,” we need to comb through every law, every government regulation, every federal office and department and weed the cultural Marxism out. The goal should not be to replace it with any ideology of our own – again, if we are real conservatives, we don’t have one – but to restore a non-ideological American state, which is what we had up until the wretched 1960s.
By Paul M. Weyrich In 1951, one of America’s true conservatives, Senator Robert A. Taft, published a book titled A Foreign Policy for Americans. I think what Senator Taft wrote then applies to our own time as well. In discussing the purposes of American foreign policy, he said: There are a good many Americans who talk about an American century in which America will dominate the world. They rightly point out that the United States is so powerful today that we should assume a moral leadership in the world . . . The trouble with those who advocate this policy is that they really do not confine themselves to moral leadership. . . In their hearts they want to force on these foreign peoples through the use of American money and even, perhaps, American arms, the policies which moral leadership is able to advance only through the sound strength of its principles and the force of its persuasion. I do not think this moral leadership ideal justifies our engaging in any preventive war . . . I do not believe any policy which has behind it the threat of military force is justified as part of the basic foreign policy of the United States except to defend the liberty of our own people. Like the Founding Fathers, Senator Taft valued liberty here at home above “superpower” status abroad. The Founding Fathers understood that these two are in tension. To preserve liberty here at home, we need a weak federal government, because a strong federal government is the greatest potential threat to our liberties. The division of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government is intended to make decisions and actions by the federal government difficult. But playing the great power game abroad demands the opposite. It demands a strong federal government that can make decisions, including of peace or war, quickly and easily. To a large degree, that is the kind of federal government we now have. But should we? In my view, the next conservatism needs to take a hard look at our foreign policy from exactly this perspective. Do we now have a foreign policy that requires a federal government, and particularly an executive branch, so strong that it is a danger to our liberties? If we do, then we have a fundamental contradiction at the heart of our foreign policy. Why? Because the most basic purpose of our foreign policy should be to preserve our liberties. As Senator Taft understood, this touches on the most sensitive foreign policy question: to what degree should America be active in the world? Since his time, the whole Washington Establishment, the New Class, has come to condemn his position, which I think is the real conservative position, as “isolationism.” But the word is a lie. America was never isolated from the rest of the world. Rather, through most of our history, America related to the rest of the world primarily through private means, through trade and by serving as a moral example to the world, the “shining city on a hill.” That policy served us well, both in maintaining liberty here at home and in developing our economy. As Senator Taft wrote, “we were respected as the most disinterested and charitable nation in the world.” Then, after World War II, we instead began to play the great power game, which the Founding Fathers had opposed. Because of the threat of Communism, that was necessary for a time. But when Communism fell in the early 1990s, we did not return to our historic policy. Rather, we declared ourselves the dominant power in the world, “the only superpower,” the New Rome as some would have it. We set off on the course of American Empire, despite the fact that empire abroad almost certainly means eventual extinction of liberty here at home. The next conservatism needs a different foreign policy, a foreign policy designed for a republic, not an empire. It needs to recognize that the Establishment wants to play the great power game because it lives richly off that game. But the next conservatism is about throwing the Establishment out, not enriching it further. The next conservatism’s foreign policy should proceed from these wise words of Senator Robert A. Taft: I do not believe it is a selfish goal for us to insist that the overriding purpose of all American foreign policy should be the maintenance of the liberty and peace of our people of the United States, so that they may achieve that intellectual and material improvement which is their genius and in which they can set an example for all peoples. By that example we can do an even greater service to mankind than we can do by billions of material assistance – and more than we can ever do by war. Paul M. Weyrich is the Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. By Paul M. Weyrich In my next two columns, I intend to write about two places the next conservatism needs to consider: the countryside and cities. Perhaps because most conservatives, including myself, live in suburbs, we don’t think about rural life or cities very often. But there are good reasons why the next conservatism should think about both. Earlier generations of conservatives were agrarians. They thought that life on a family farm was a good life for many people. It built strong families and communities, communities where faith and morals could flourish. I believe that is still true, and I therefore think that bringing back the family farm as a viable way of life should be an important part of the next conservatism. Some people may object that such a program is simply not possible. The family farm cannot be made economically viable in today’s world. I am not certain on that point. I do know that most of the billions we spend each year for agricultural subsidies go to support big agribusiness, not family farms. What if we changed that? What if instead of subsidizing factory farming, we provided financial support for people who were trying to start new family farms? Such support should not go on forever, but if it were in the form of a revolving fund, it could help them get started. This is also a situation where we, as conservatives, need to learn from others. One place to start is with the Amish. The Amish are cultural conservatives. They live according to the beliefs most conservatives espouse: Christian faith, strong families, close-knit communities where people depend on each other, communities based on the church. The Amish are also successful, often prosperous, family farmers. One of my colleagues has a friend who is an Amish farmer. He has a herd of 40 to 50 dairy cows. He recently The next conservatism can also learn from the organic farming movement. Many people, including some conservatives, want organic products and are willing to pay a premium for them. That helps the farmer receive a fair price for his products, one that makes his farm viable. As conservatives, we should not see cheapness as the highest virtue. Russell Kirk wrote, “So America’s contribution to the universal ‘democratic capitalism’ of the future . . . will be just this: cheapness, the cheapest music and the cheapest comic-books and the cheapest morality that can be provided.” He might have added the cheapest agricultural products, regardless of what that does to agrarian life. That is not the direction in which the next conservatism should go. Agrarian life is a whole culture, not just a way to make a living, and we should seek to protect that culture and make it available to more and more families. A recent article in Farming magazine, “Conversations with the Land” by Jim Van Der Pol, gave insight into that culture:
Beyond the family farm itself, the next conservatism should seek to make the countryside available to as many Americans as possible. The Mennonites have a wonderful program where they bring inner-city children to their farms for part of their summer school vacations. What a tremendous and health-giving change for kids who have never known anything but asphalt and crime! Many cities and towns now have farmers’ markets, where people in the city and the suburbs can buy fresh farm product directly from the farmers. Both the farmers and the city-dwellers benefit. The next conservatism should look toward a world where, as Tolkien put it, there is less noise and more green. Our goal should be to make agrarian life, in all its dimensions, By Paul M. Weyrich In my last column, I argued that the next conservatism needs to revive the family farm. Here, I want to make the case that is also needs to revive our cities. Many conservatives dislike cities, for reasons I understand and sympathize with. Sin and the city is an old, old story; you can find it in the Confessions of Blessed Augustine. But cities are also the birthplace and necessary home for high culture. Without living cities, we will not have symphony orchestras and great music, classic theater, art museums, serious public libraries or any of the other venues high culture requires. Nor will we have the good used bookstores, artistic and literary cafes, salons or other informal but important places where ideas can be exchanged and culture can grow. No, the Internet is not a substitute; there can be no full replacement for people talking face-to-face. Just as the next conservatism needs to make the culture its centerpiece, it needs to include high culture. Conservatism ought not be indifferent to whether future generations get to see Shakespeare’s plays, hear Mozart’s music or see Dürer’s engravings. And if conservatives want that to happen, we need cities. God knows we dare not entrust culture to the universities. That brings us to the problem we face: America’s cities are in bad shape, most of them anyway. First the upper class, then the middle class, then anyone who could afford to moved out (busing, which wrecked the public schools, played a central role in the exodus). Cities cannot live if no one but the underclass lives in them. Nor can they survive if we continue to export our industries, to the point where cities offer no manufacturing or business jobs. Over the past several decades, a movement has arisen to restore our cities and even to build new urban communities, towns, as an alternative to suburbs. It is called “new urbanism.” As a conservative, I think new urbanism needs to be part of the next conservatism. But I also think we need a conservative new urbanism, which differs from much of what now goes under the new urbanist label. The difference is this. Much of present-day new urbanism is statist. It envisions using the power of government to force people to adopt new urbanist ideas. An example is Portland, Oregon’s “urban growth boundary,” a line drawn on a map by government bureaucrats that tries to stop sprawl by decree. Guest what? It doesn’t work. Not only does it violate property rights, if you actually go to Portland and look what has been built inside the boundary, most of it is still sprawl. Let me say that I am not necessarily against sprawl. Suburbs are great places for families to raise kids. What we need is suburbs and living, thriving cities, not one or the other. Here is where conservative new urbanism comes in. Conservative new urbanism should be built on property rights. Its basis would be dual codes. At present, virtually every building code in the country mandates sprawl. One developer told me that in order to build a traditional town (something most conservatives like), he had to get 150 variances at immense expense and delay. The next conservatism should call for dual codes, nationwide. Under one code, a developer would be perfectly free to build a sprawling suburb. But he could also choose to build under a new urbanist code, which would be consistent with the way towns and cities were traditionally designed and built. Obviously, developers would make their choice based on demand in a free market. They would build suburbs where the market wanted suburbs, and towns or even small cities (or redevelopment in existing cities) where the market wanted that. Good new urbanism should welcome a dual-code approach. Why? Because good new urbanism sells. Sometime when you are in Washington, go look at the architect Andres Duany’s Kentlands development in Montgomery County, Maryland. It is a beautiful traditional town. And houses there are selling for tens of thousands of dollars more than houses with the same floor space in surrounding suburbs. Here as so often elsewhere, the problem is government interference in the marketplace. The next conservatism should end the monopoly government building codes give to suburban sprawl and allow the free market to restore our cities. That is conservative new urbanism, and I think it needs to be part of the next conservative agenda. Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. By Paul M. Weyrich For many years, one of the left’s slogans has been, “Think Globally, Act Locally.” I think the next conservatism needs to answer this with a new slogan of our own: Think Locally, Act Locally. Think Globally, Act Locally reflects the left’s centuries-old belief in “one world.” Just as the Jacobins of the French Revolution wanted, everyone in the world should be forced to abandon their old traditions and fit one “globalist” model, based on some ideology. Today, we even see some people who call themselves conservatives (neo or otherwise) promoting globalism. Sorry, but that is not what the word “conservative” has meant. On the contrary, conservatives have always supported local variation. We value local cultures, traditions and ways of life, based on what has grown up in a specific place over time. We want Maine to be Maine and the Deep South to remain the Deep South, rather than every place becoming California. To conservatives, a homogenized world is a danger, not a promise. Here again we see the power of culture. Many of the forces promoting globalism are not political but cultural. Television is one of the most powerful. How can old, local ways survive when children grow up in front of the television, which reduces everything to a single, uniform (and low) common denominator? The “world economy” works to the same end. Local producers reflect local traditions, but when they are driven out of business by cheap imports, everything local is lost. The next conservatism needs to help Americans see the value of what is local and traditional. Much of that is not political, but real conservatism has never just been about politics. Conservatism is not an ideology, it is a way of life. That way of life needs to be grounded in local traditions and in preserving and, where necessary, restoring those traditions. At the same time, politics plays an important role here. The next conservatism needs to revive an important conservative truth that has to some extent been lost, even among conservatives: subsidiarity. Subsidiarity says that decisions should be made at the lowest possible level. As much as possible should be decided at the local level. Only when the local level clearly cannot cope should state governments get involved. And federal involvement should be rare, because it is dangerous. Decisions made in Washington often run roughshod over local needs, traditions and realities. The public schools offer a sad example. Have America’s schools gotten better since state governments and the federal government have given them more and more directives? No, they have gotten worse. By Paul M. Weyrich In this column and the next, I would like to discuss some of the responses I have received from readers of this series on the next conservatism. Let me start by saying how grateful I am to the many readers who have told me they have found my columns stimulating. My main purpose in writing is to get conservatives thinking, whether they agree with me on everything or not. I don’t have all the answers, or even all the questions. We all need to think creatively about what the next conservative agenda should be.
Paul has this to say: While nodding in agreement with your article, I got to thinking whether or not culture and politics were that dissimilar. I don’t think they are. Both involve the ways men relate to men and how to govern their behavior. Culture is governed by the law of unwritten customs; politics prefers judicial fiat, statute and regulation. . . We retook the government believing that doing so would better preserve our liberties and the defense of our nation. Were we naïve to believe that government was the problem as far as the culture was concerned? Did we conservatives miss the boat by thinking that a strong culture could be ensured by government in our image? Well, Paul, you’ve hit on another difference between conservatives and the left. They want a culture that is controlled by government. We don’t. We believe that culture should be shaped by customs, habits and traditions, not state power. Legitimate laws reflect customs rather than replace them. Customs are not threats to liberty, because people don’t get sent to jail for departing from them. A culture controlled by the state becomes totalitarian.
What you are seeing here, Marc, is something that too few conservatives outside Washington perceive. With relatively few exceptions, Senators and Congressmen from both parties are afraid to confront political correctness. In this case, they fear that if they even allow opponents to be heard, the radical Feminists and the culturally Marxist press will say they “favor violence against women,” which is of course nonsense. To be blunt about it, too many Washington Republicans lack moral courage. They would rather hide under a rock than be called a “racist” or a sexist” by the cultural Marxists. One thing the next conservatism needs to do, in my opinion, is make people like that pay a political price for their moral cowardice. Until we do, they will continue to sell us out. Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. By Paul M. Weyrich Conservatives have always been for a strong national defense. America’s victory in the Cold War showed we were right on that point. Unfortunately, the world has not become a safer place since the Cold War ended. That means the next conservatism will also need to make a strong national defense part of its program. However, conservatives need to recognize that the nature of the threats we face is changing. In the past, threats came from other states that were hostile to us - - Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union. But the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, the events of 9/11, was not launched by any other state. It came from a non-state organization, al Qaeda. The next conservatism’s defense policy must take account of this fact. America must be prepared to defend itself against very serious threats that come from non-state organizations. Let me add that what happened on 9/11 was only a beginning. Some people in Washington seem to think that we are now safe, because we have created a Department of Homeland Security and passed the so-called “Patriot Act.” Nothing could be further from the truth. We are going to get hit again, only harder. It may be with a nuclear weapon, smuggled inside a shipping container. It may be with something that could be even worse, a genetically-engineered plague. Creating new bureaucracies in Washington won’t stop terrorism, at least so long as we insist on poking our nose into every quarrel in the world. The fact that our country faces a new kind of threat has two important implications. First, it may be possible to re-create a national consensus on defense, like that we had early in the Cold War. I am not certain that will be possible, but the next conservatism should at least try. It would be better for our country if conservatives and liberals could agree on maintaining a strong national defense. Personally, I don’t know any liberals who want suitcase nukes going off in American cities. The next conservatism should make clear that our door is open to liberals who want to put national defense above politics. We should prefer consensus, so long as it is the right consensus, over seeking partisan advantage on this issue. It is just too important to play politics with. Second, I think conservatives need to reconsider how we approach building a strong national defense. In the past, during the Cold War, we accepted the idea that so long as we spent enough money for defense, our defenses would be strong. From what I see in Washington, I don’t think that is true anymore - - if it ever was. History warns us that you can spend heaps of money on defense and still be weak, if you buy the wrong kinds of things. France spent billions on the Maginot Line between the World Wars, but the Germans just went around it. Today, America spends more for defense than all the rest of the countries in the world put together. But that does not seem to make us more secure. Most of the $500 billion we spend for defense every year seems to go for weapons and strategies that may be outdated. We still keep hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in places like Europe and South Korea, long after the Cold War ended. We keep buying the kinds of tanks, planes and ships that may have made sense for fighting the Soviet armed forces but have little if any use in places like Iraq or Afghanistan. At the same time, our troops in those places go without basic gear they need to stay alive. The next conservatism needs to recognize that the Pentagon is a government bureaucracy like any other government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats who wear uniforms behave the same way as other bureaucrats. They do what benefits their bureaucracy, not necessarily what works in the outside world. Conservatives need to be both supporters of a strong national defense and skeptics about the Pentagon, if the money America spends for defense is really to buy security against the new threats we face. In the 1970s and 1980s, a bi-partisan group of Senators and Congressmen put together something called the Military Reform Movement. I supported that effort, and I think it may be time to start it up again. The next conservatism should recognize that military reform is necessary for a strong defense, not opposed to it. My colleague Bill Lind is an internationally-recognized expert on military theory and doctrine. I have asked him to write the next column in this series, to explain in more detail the changes in war the next conservatism must address. Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. By William S. Lind Paul Weyrich asked me to write this column to lay out a framework conservatives can use to understand the threats America faces. It is a framework I developed in the 1980s, when I was working closely with the United States Marine Corps on questions of military theory and doctrine. I call it "the Four Generations of Modern War." Modern War began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War. Why? Because in that treaty, the state established a monopoly on war. We now automatically think of war as something fought between states, using armies, navies and air forces with uniforms, ranks, and specialized equipment, designed to fight other state armed forces like themselves. But before 1648, many different kinds of entities fought wars, using many different means, not just formal militaries. Family, clans and tribes fought wars. Cities and business enterprises fought wars. Religions, ethnic groups and races fought wars. They did so using many different means, including hiring mercenaries, employing assassins, offering bribes and making dynastic marriages. For the most part, there were no standing armies; when war came, you just hired people who would fight. In times of (relative) peace, those fighters roamed through the countryside, taking whatever they wanted from anyone too weak to resist them. In most places, ordinary people's lives and property were at their mercy. But around the middle of the 19th century, the battlefield of order began to break down. That created the central problem facing state militaries ever since: the military culture of order came increasingly to contradict the growing disorder of the battlefield.
Third Generation war, also called maneuver warfare, was developed by the German Army during World War I, not World War II, although most people know it as Blitzkrieg. The Germans broke with the First Generation culture or order and created a highly decentralized military that focused outward on results, not inward on rules and processes; prized initiative over obedience; and relied on self-discipline, not imposed discipline. One of the purposes of the Military Reform Movement was to move the American armed forces from the Second to the Third Generation, an effort which, sadly, for the most part failed. Fourth Generation war is often called "terrorism," but that is more misleading than helpful. Terrorism is merely a technique, and Fourth Generation war is very much more. It marks an end of the state's monopoly on war and a return to war as it was before the Peace of Westphalia. Once again, many different kinds of entities, not just states, are waging war (gangs and invasion by immigration are two obvious examples). They use many different means, not just formal armies or navies. Fourth Generation fighters wear no uniforms, have no ranks, and are indistinguishable from civilians. Rather than engaging an enemy state's armed forces, they try to bypass them and strike directly against his civilian society, even his culture. The framework of the Four Generations of Modern War offers the next conservatism a way to evaluate whether America's defense policies make sense. To the degree they move our armed forces from the Second to the Third Generation, and help them face the Fourth, they are helpful. But if they just provide fancier weapons for Second Generation war, they probably are not. If the next conservatism is to help the American state survive in the Fourth Generation 21st century, it needs to make adapting to Fourth Generation war our top defense priority. William S. Lind is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation. By Paul M. Weyrich If the next conservatism is to be the guide the conservative movement needs, it ought to talk about some new issues as well as the old standards. Sometimes, some of these new issues may strike people as unimportant. But it is hard to know what will prove important in the future we are trying to address. In this column, I want to talk about an issue that is not yet on many voters' radar screens but I think may come to be: the public space. What is the public space? It is the space outside our homes, schools or offices where people intermingle. It is streets with sidewalks, where people not only walk but stop, talk and listen. It is malls and town commons. It is restaurants and stores, churches and movie theaters, trains and buses and even airports. Essentially, it is anyplace where we do not control who we might meet. Why is it important? Because if we are to be citizens of a republic and not mere consumers in an administered state, we need to both have and want contact with our fellow-citizens. When life is privatized, lived largely or almost wholly behind walls, doors and security control points, society withers. We come only to care about ourselves and those who share our private space. What happens to the rest of the society is not our concern, so long as we are OK. There is no question that American life is being privatized this way. If you go to Europe, you will see that people there spend much more of their time in the public space. The same used to be true in this country. Even the front porches of old houses, where families often spent their evenings before air conditioning and television, were part of the public space. I do not think that the loss of the public space in America is part of any kind of deliberate effort. There are many reasons for it. I already mentioned air conditioning and television. Other causes include the increasing coarseness of dress, manners and behavior; when the public space is filled with people who look bad and often behave badly, people avoid it. Noise is another factor. Blaring boom-boxes were bad enough, but just as that curse seems to have faded somewhat, cell phones have come along. Too often, if you are in the public space, you find yourself having to listen to one-half of a private phone conversation. Many people now dread the prospect of cell phones on airplanes. Whatever the reasons for it, the destruction of the public space should be recognized by the next conservatism as not a good thing. It happened in Rome, too, towards the end of the Empire. People stopped going to the forum and other public spaces, while private life became much more opulent. When that happens in any society, it makes it easier for those who want power to grab it, because people only care about their private lives. I have talked in several previous columns about some things that could help revitalize the public space and draw Americans back into it. The New Urbanism can help, because it makes cities into places where people want to go. High quality public transportation can help (in most cases that means rail transit, not buses), because it both takes people to public spaces and is itself a public space. Probably nothing would help as much as the return of good manners and decent dress. Should both perhaps be part of the next conservatism's agenda? They have nothing to do with politics. But as I have pointed out over and over, culture is more powerful than politics, and the next conservatism must be at least as much a cultural as a political movement. Developing the next conservatism is not just a matter of offering new answers to old questions (re reminding people of the old, right answers which have been forgotten). It also requires asking some new questions. One of those questions needs to be, is restoring the public space important to the future of our republic? If we are in fact to be a republic, I think the answer is yes. Paul M. Weyrich is the Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. By Paul M. Weyrich A thoughtful reader of these columns suggested to me that we need to address one simple question: where are we as a nation? Are we, as some people suggest, at the beginning of a "New American Century" that will be marked by endless triumphs at home and abroad? Or is the picture perhaps not quite so bright? I recently ran across a prophecy that struck me for its timeliness. It reads, "They will sink into a swamp of decadence: men will sleep with men, and boys will be pimped in brothels; civil tumults will engulf them, and everything will fall into confusion and disorder." Scholars have dated this prophecy to around 140BC, and it referred to Rome, not America. Importantly, it was talking not about the later Roman Empire, but about the Roman Republic - - just on the verge of its fall and Romans' loss of their liberties. I think it is timely because it reminds us of one of history's basic facts: those who abuse their liberties lose them. Decadence is an abuse of liberty. Our country's Founding Fathers understood this. They said over and over again that our republic can endure only so long as its citizens are virtuous. Virtue means that people use their liberty to do good, not evil. Sadly, that is not what we see when we look around America today. Of course, there are many good people, people of faith, who still use their liberty to do good. But they are not setting our country's direction. Our direction is being set by elites that despise everything we have always defined as good. They have in effect said, "Evil, be thou my good."
It is not surprising that the prophecy I quoted earlier (I don't take it seriously as a prophecy, because the source was not Christian or Jewish, but it was a signpost) pointed to homosexuality as the number one sign of decadence. I think that has always been true. Now, we find pro-homosexual psychological conditioning in the public schools, "gay marriage" being ruled legal by courts and a supposedly Christian church with an openly homosexual bishop. Other denominations are considering or adopting rites for "same-sex marriage," as if there could be any such thing. What does all this mean for the next conservatism? It means that we have to start with a realistic understanding of where our country is. Yes, it sells better politically to say, "It's morning in America." Unfortunately, that just isn't true. It is not a new American century that lies before us, but a long descent into what Russell Kirk called "old Night." The immense task facing the next conservatism is turning that around. In my next column, I will take a look at where I think we as conservatives are today in Washington, in politics. That picture, too, is perhaps not quite as rosy as some people tell us it is. By Paul M. Weyrich In one of the early columns in this series, I pointed out that, if we look back over the last thirty or forty years, we see that the Left won the culture war while we conservatives won politically. It is true that we won politically, in the sense of winning elections. Republicans now control the White House and both Houses of Congress, something we could not have even dreamed about forty years ago. But to assess where conservatives are in politics today, we have to look beyond just winning elections. The question is do we have power? Not power for ourselves but power for the common good. I would venture that while we have influence, we often lack power. And as my old colleague Howard Phillips used to teach there is a profound difference. I have been here while the Democrats controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress (Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton). I have also seen Republicans in the White House but Democrats controlling the Congress. (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43. In his case the Democrats controlled the Senate for a year and a half.) and I have seen a Democrat in the White House with Republicans controlling the Congress (Clinton) and now for the past several years Republicans controlled not only the White House but the Congress. We should be in political heaven with this development. The first time this has happened in more than 50 years. If we really had power, then, our ideas and programs would be front and center. We should be well into a period of having adopted them and now we should be concerned with their implementation. The fact is most of our programs and ideas are dead on arrival. In some cases the President has proposed good ideas only to see them sink in the Congressional cesspool. In other cases, the President won't buy into our ideas. We plead them in the Congress but we often don't get very far. Yes, we have influence. In some cases the White House worries about offending their base. The same with Congress. So often we are able to stop bad ideas. Why is this the case? The fact is we have no horse. To the extent our ideas advanced in the past it was because we first had Senator Barry Goldwater. Granted, Goldwater later turned out to be something other than a conservative on a lot of issues. But his initial "Conscience of a Conservative" advanced our ideas and made our views legitimate. The Goldwater campaign involved then actor Ronald Reagan. His speech on national television again advanced our views. Then he ran and was elected Governor of California. After he served two terms, during which he continued to advance our views, he ran for President. Although he failed to defeat President Gerald Ford in 1976, that run set him up to be the heir apparent in 1980. Reagan's election, and with him a Republican Senate and enough Republicans to form a conservative coalition in the House, advanced our ideas. Tax cuts worked. So did the President's objective of bringing down the Soviet Union. Most conservatives never believed that was possible. While the Reagan Administration did not see all of our ideas enacted into law, still he made issues such as vouchers popular and these issues have lived far beyond his Administration. He also made legitimate our view that federal courts have to be reigned in. While George Herbert Walker Bush continued some ideas advanced by President Reagan, his advocacy of the largest tax increase in US history, after he had pledged "Read my lips. No new taxes." ruined his Presidency. Now Bush '41 has been more open to some of our ideas, but his unwillingness to veto spending bills, the immigration issue which he has not tackled and for some the war in Iraq has meant that he is not the standard bearer of the conservative movement. We have a number of able Senators, at least a couple of whom could become the standard bearer of the conservative movement. Right now, however they have not stood out among their colleagues. For the most part they have not exercised leadership. We do have a couple of promising Governors. Again, while they have done well in their states, they have not exercised national leadership. I used to believe that the movement could advance on the basis of ideas alone. We were the first to come up with cultural conservatism. We pushed the idea that political correctness was ruining the nation. Yes, these ideas did catch on in the conservative movement. But we failed to go beyond the movement because we have no standard bearer who openly advances our ideas. Our movement in some ways is much stronger now than it was even in 1980. At least the social issues part of our movement is much larger than it was when Ronald Reagan became President. The economic part of our movement, however, is not as strong. And the defense/foreign policy part of our movement all but disappeared after the end of the Cold War. It is being reinvigorated now as conservatives realize the threat from the radical Muslims. While ideas are powerful and sometimes they generate action, there is
For the first time in 2008 we do not have a logical heir to our movement. There are plenty of candidates who plan to run but so far none has caught fire. We run the danger of splitting our support between candidates and thus permitting a liberal to win. If we expect to have power to advance our ideas then we need to get behind a single candidate provided that candidate promises in blood that our people will be appointed by him. Otherwise we will just continue to have influence, but most likely not enough influence to actually see our ideas become law. Can we find a suitable standard bearer for 2008? It will prove difficult but if we don't this movement may find itself completely on the outside looking in. Paul M. Weyrich is the Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. By William S. Lind Paul Weyrich asked me to turn my historian's eye on the question of "Where are we?", which he has considered from several aspects in his last two columns. I am afraid my answer to that question cannot be an encouraging one. From an historical perspective we are living in a house of cards. Internationally, we have committed the classic error of dominant powers: overextension. By adopting an offensive grand strategy that demands everyone else in the world accept the values of "democratic capitalism" - - the neo cons' little present to the rest of us - - we have overreached. We are now bogged down in two wars, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Every indication I see, as a military historian, tells me we are not winning and will not win either one. While most Americans, not just conservatives, would be happy to take care of ourselves and let the rest of the world take care of itself, the Washington Establishment lives off the "Great Power" game. Will the loss of two wars force that Establishment to face reality? Probably not, at least until, in classic Great Power fashion, it bankrupts the country. The U.S. defense budget already equals what all the rest of the countries in the world spend for defense. No nation can sustain that burden without financial collapse. Already, America's middle class is being eroded by the export of manufacturing jobs under the rubric of "free trade," to which both political parties seem to have sworn blood oaths. People cannot sustain middle class standards of living with "service industry" jobs, as is evident in any Third World country. In fact, America's economy already shows a classic Third World pattern, exporting commodities and importing manufactured goods. Added to imperial overreach, financial imprudence and voluntary de-industrialization is the fact that we are being invaded. Both parties see no evil as millions of immigrants from very different cultures pour into our country through what are effectively open borders. Not only does this further undermine the American middle class by lowering wages, it sets us up for Fourth Generation war on our own soil. Internal wars are yet another classic element in the fall of a Great Power. Of course, to all of this we have to add the collapse of our culture, a phenomenon which was no accident. It is the product of a small group of cultural Marxists, the Frankfurt School, whose purpose was to destroy Western culture and who have made remarkable strides to that end. Once a country's culture goes, everything else goes too, sooner or later. People often ask me if we are seeing a reenactment of the fall of Rome, and there are certainly some parallels. One could argue that Rome's situation was actually better, in that Christianity was a rising force instead of a declining one (Western culture survived the Dark Ages by hiding out in the monasteries). But there is a parallel I like better, and that is Spain in the 17th century. Spain was the first true world power, with a globe-circling empire. She was enormously rich (when the Spanish Armada was destroyed, King Philip II just built another one). By the first half of the 17th century, when Spain's power was beginning to totter (thanks once again to imperial overextension and financial imprudence), many leading Spaniards saw that reform and retrenchment were needed. They put forward well-considered plans for such reform, some of which would probably have worked. But none of the reform programs could cut through the power of the interests at court that lived off Spain's decay - - just as powerful interests in Washington live off our decay. I think that if Spain's equivalent of a prime minister at that time, the Count-Duke of Olivares, were to find himself in today's Washington, it would all feel very familiar (if you want to read a good book on Spain's decline and fall, I recommend J.H. Elliott's biography of Olivares). America may be luckier than Spain, and perhaps we will be able to deal with our foreign policy, military, financial, trade and cultural crises separately, over time. But I think the greater probability is that they will come in close enough succession that they will feed on and magnify each other, until they become a single vast, systemic crisis - - the fall of the house of cards. That creates a vacuum which, in the old days, usually resulted in a change of dynasties (from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons, in Spain's case). What does that mean for the next conservatism? It means conservatives should get ready now in order to fill that vacuum when it comes. William S. Lind is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation. By Paul M. Weyrich In the last three columns, we have tried to look at where we are as a country. The picture is not very bright. The question facing the next conservatism is, how can we turn the situation around? I want to try to address that question in this column and the next. The answer has to start not with politics but with culture. As I have said over and over, culture is more powerful than politics. We cannot keep winning politically while the Left wins culturally. Somehow, we have to win the culture war ourselves. That in turn requires a new movement. I hate to have to say so, but I think the old conservative movement has somewhat played itself out. There are still some courageous and effective fighters in it, people like Phyllis Schlafly and Senator James M. Inhofe, but much of it has been co-opted by the Republican Party, and much that has not been co-opted seems to be out of new ideas. To create a new movement, we have to have a new idea to build it around. That idea has to speak directly to our national decadence and offer a chance of changing the culture. It has to offer a real potential of reviving the America many of us remember, up through the 1950s. If it cannot do that, it cannot serve as the basis of a new movement, because anything less will not reverse the country's decadence. We will just be papering over the cracks. Is there such a new idea somewhere out there? I think there may be. Bill Lind calls it Retroculture. What it means is that, in our own lives and the lives of our families, and eventually our communities, we would deliberately revive old ways of doing things. Of course, we could not exactly re-create the past, but we would use the past as a guide and a benchmark. I know America has always been a future-focused country. But that may be changing. As early as 1990, the Free Congress Foundation did a national survey about Americans' attitude toward the past, present and future. The results were a big surprise.
A good example is public education. Everyone knows today's public schools are much worse than those we had in the late 1950s. That is true in rich areas and in poor. The education lobby says the answer is even more "new math" and other modernist rubbish, plus of course oceans of Political Correctness and money. What if instead our new movement called for "Schools 1950?" We still know how those schools worked. We would go back to teaching the facts, reasoning, and skills like adding and multiplying without a calculator, instead of worrying about pupils' "self-esteem." Of course we would teach some newer things as well, such as computer skills. But the basic rule would be, "What worked then can work again." In fact, that might not be a bad slogan for our new movement. It is true in so many areas of our lives. It is true about families, marriage and sexual morals; finance, both family and national (everybody used to know that debt was dangerous); entertainment (it used to be both good and decent); even in areas like public transportation, where streetcars were better than buses. The old America, America before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, was a pretty good place. Even a lot of young people know that is true. This movement would seek to re-build our old culture from the bottom up, one individual or family at a time. That is slow, I know. But I don't think there is any other way to win the culture war. We have lost so much that we almost have to start over again. It is too late, when it comes to our culture, to conserve. We have to restore. The restoration movement in architecture points to where Retroculture might go. In the 1960s, it was fashionable among architects and urban planners to rip down Victorian and even federal and colonial buildings and put up new ones. The new ones were usually awful. Now, most people agree that older buildings can and should be restored rather than replaced. I really think that a next conservatism that included a movement to recover our old ways of thinking and living could win the culture war, which so far we have lost. Still, politics remains important. In my next column, I intend to talk about what we need to do in politics. Paul M. Weyrich is the Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.
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