Reihan Salam's book in the Sunday Times | Andrew Sullivan: 'A New Atlantic Right Rediscovers Society'

Communications — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 09:04:00 -0400

New America in the News:

...The Bush-Rove Republicans have already shifted from the broader Reagan coalition of libertarians, anticommunists, moral traditionalists and tax cutters to one that is rooted in the South and skewed towards the rural heartland. They are losing the educated elites at a fast clip, accelerated by Barack Obama’s class appeal. What some younger conservatives now want is to capitalise on this and take it one step further.

That’s the central thrust of a book just out, Grand New Party, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The title is a play on America’s nickname for the Republicans, the Grand Old Party, or GOP. The authors are in their twenties, undeniably brilliant and (full disclosure) friends and colleagues at The Atlantic Monthly, the American magazine whose website hosts my blog. They are the first generation of American intellectuals to have emerged from the blogo-sphere. And so they think widely and outside some of the guard rails of the professional think tank class.... LINK

Peter Bergen in The Sunday Times | 'Al-Qaeda: the Cracks Begin to Show'

Communications — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:16:00 -0400

New America in the News:

An article published recently in The New Republic, the American journal, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank – both respected experts on terrorism – outlined a radical change in thinking on Al-Qaeda’s strategy among some of the most respected thinkers in the Islamist world.

For the first time, they reported, men whose previous pronouncements had been used as a justification for jihad were speaking out against it. They were not embracing the West, by any means, but they were questioning the ideological basis upon which Al-Qaeda, as a scattered movement, relies. In the battle for “hearts and minds” the group appeared to have scored an own goal. LINK