In 1993, Irving Kristol wrote "My Cold War":
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.
Michael Lind extends the metaphor:
9/11 fortuitously provided the American right with the external enemy that allowed it to go back into business demonizing the internal enemy, liberalism. And the idea of World War IV enabled the right once again to smear American liberals as defeatists or appeasers, if not traitors, in a struggle on the scale of the world wars and the Cold War. … World War IV was never really about bin Laden or al-Qaida. It was always about American domestic politics.
I think it's fairer to say it was about both. I do believe that the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others – mainly neocons – were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence. There is the covert ideology of Strauss or the overt anti-ideology of Oakeshott.
The Dish 