Politics & Power Quote by Paul Weyrich

Weyrich’s line does two jobs at once: it upgrades a security problem into a civilizational drama, and it quietly rewrites the rules of what counts as legitimate power. Calling “radical Islamists” an “unusual conflict” signals novelty, but novelty here is a political tool. If the enemy is unprecedented, then precedent - legal limits, diplomatic habits, even the public’s comfort with restrained government - can be treated as optional.

The key move is the last clause: “not a state.” It’s a phrase designed to unmoor the listener. States are enemies you can map, deter, negotiate with, or defeat in a surrender ceremony. A non-state enemy is mist: everywhere and nowhere, a perpetual rationale rather than a finite campaign. That framing doesn’t just describe terrorism; it invites a politics of indefinite mobilization, where emergency becomes a standing condition.

Context matters. Weyrich helped architect modern American conservatism, fluent in the language of existential threat and moral clarity. In the post-Cold War, pre- and post-9/11 milieu, the right needed a successor to communism as the organizing antagonist. “Radical Islamists” becomes that successor, a category broad enough to feel coherent, flexible enough to absorb new fears.

The subtext is also domestic. By defining the conflict as unlike anything before, Weyrich primes audiences to accept expanded surveillance, preemptive action, and cultural boundary-policing at home. The sentence’s calm, bureaucratic tone masks its real ambition: to normalize a war without borders, against an enemy without a flag, with politics reorganized around permanent alarm.