With permission from, and much thanks to, Kos member Troutfishing, aka Bruce Wilson, who is interviewed about 4GW in this Salon article, and co-founder of the amazing political action blog, Talk to Action. Every Kos member would benefit from bookmarking Talk to Action.
What is 4GW? I’ll let Mr. Wilson explain, as he cites the progenitor of the theory of 4GW, William Lind:
Lind anticipated the coming of an age of “non-trinitarian” warfare. In Clausewitz’ famous construction on war, there’s the government, the army and the population. Each have distinctly different functions, and there’s little to no overlap. The army does the fighting, the government and population do not. In 4G warfare those categories you mention — war/peace, combatant/non-combatant — disappear….
In a paper on Fourth Generation Warfare,published in the December 1994 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, William Lind explicitly laid out the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, as an ongoing 4GW attack on the nation:
Starting in the mid-1960s, we have thrown away the values, morals, and standards that define traditional Western culture. In part, this has been driven by cultural radicals, people who hate our Judeo-Christian culture. Dominant in the elite, especially in the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry (now the most powerful force in our culture and a source of endless degradation), the cultural radicals have successfully pushed an agenda of moral relativism, militant secularism, and sexual and social “liberation.” This agenda has slowly codified into a new ideology. usually known as “multiculturalism” or “political correctness,” that is in essence Marxism translated from economic into social and cultural terms.
This new, cultural Marxism has had remarkable success in discrediting America’s common culture and substituting for it cultural fragmentation based on ethnic groups, gender, sexual identity, and class. If this trend continues, Americans will increasingly find they have less in common with each other as Americans. National identity will weaken. Other, mutually hostile identities will strengthen, until the nation comes apart: region vs. region, minority vs. minority, and gang vs. gang. When one nation comes apart at its cultural seams, eventually it turns on itself and fights.
There’s a lot about this that is (and should be) disturbing to anyone who believes that the highest purpose of a democratic government is to maintain secular civil society. In 4GW, we have all been enlisted as combatants in politico-cultural warfare, either knowingly and willingly, or more commonly among progressives, without our full knowledge and consent.
In Lind’s comments, we can see the distillation of conservatism’s worldview (the talking points, if you will): “cultural radicals, people who hate our Judeo-Christian culture. Dominant in the elite, especially in the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry (now the most powerful force in our culture and a source of endless degradation), the cultural radicals have successfully pushed an agenda of moral relativism, militant secularism, and sexual and social “liberation.” This agenda has slowly codified into a new ideology. usually known as “multiculturalism” or “political correctness,” that is in essence Marxism translated from economic into social and cultural terms” (my emphasis).
Note the conceptual shorthand, easily digestible by the average GOP delegate or Fox news analyst: multiculturalism=political correctness=anti-Christian=amorality=feminism=Marxism.
The culprits in this conspiracy to undermine ‘traditional American Judeo-Christian values and culture”? the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry.
And for more than thirty years, the right wing has been attacking journalists and journalism (the liberal media), public universities, tenure and science (especially ‘political correctness on campus’, a favorite boogeyman of Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic), ‘feminazis’ and the LGBT community (since sexual and social liberation are, apparently, terrible things), and something called ‘militant secularism’ (in a staggering logical inversion, forcing Kim Davis to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples is the imposition of secular beliefs on a Christian public servant, not one fundamentalist zealot using her taxpayer funded job to impose her religion on everyone else).
*****
Among the many disservices large media outlets have performed during Donald Trump’s campaign, allowing the GOP establishment to disavow Trump and his supporters is particularly egregious. This article from WaPo is illustrative:
Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party
The naked racism, misogyny, homophobia, and religious intolerance on display at Trump rallies weren’t conjured out of thin air; this contingent has been nourished and sheltered by the GOP since at least the 1950’s, with the more avidly racist and sexist ‘social conservatives’ becoming the vanguard of the right following President’s Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1960’s, early 1970’s.
The chants of ‘political correctness’ and ‘take back our country’? These are notions that have been patiently instilled in the minds of conservatives over decades, as semi-conscious cues to react with blind terror and sputtering rage when they are invoked, summoning the silent majority to repel the impending invasion of dark-skinned socialists and rampaging angry lesbians, who will enslave the children, and burn whole communities to the ground.
The GOP has been following William Lind’s 4GW blueprint for decades, all Donald Trump has done is dropped any pretense that conservatism has ever been about anything other than bigotry, theocracy and rule by oligarchy. David Brooks, George Will and Ross Douthat may be doing their best to deflect the spotlight Trump has shone on the grotesque face of the real GOP, a face they have dutifully provided the opulent Carnevale di Venezia masks to hide; hundreds of columns promoting the mythical intellectual base of ‘principled conservatism’, alabaster white paper mache hiding the true visage of the monster.
Tear away the mask, and the face looks like Trump. He and his supporters always were on the floor of the GOP convention— closeted Nazis and KKK, secessionists and pro-slavery Confederacy apologists, Holocaust deniers, rape and spousal abuse excusers, none of these are strangers to the private conversations of the GOP establishment. The GOP leadership simply never had to acknowledge their presence so openly before Trump.
William Lind drew the road map, the GOP dutifully followed it, and it led them straight to Trump.