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Jewish World Review
January 5, 2009
/ 9 Teves 5769
Sam Huntington was plainly correct
By
Rod Dreher
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If 2008 taught us anything, it was the danger of listening to people who tell us what we want to hear. Anybody with a lick of sense should have seen that we were living inside a bubble of Panglossian optimism that had little basis in observable fact. But as George Orwell quipped, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
Samuel P. Huntington, the eminent Harvard political scientist who died on Christmas Eve, was used to being derided for his ability to see what was in front of our collective nose and to describe it to people who didn't want to hear. In 1957, he rankled the academic establishment with his first book, The Soldier and the State, which argued that protecting our liberal political and social order required a professional military that held a far less idealistic view of human nature than many of us tender.
His thesis appalled academic elites of the day, who misread it as a defense of militarism. In fact, Huntington all his life a New Deal Democrat argued that liberals favor individualism because they take security for granted. Conservatives, including soldiers, understand that security is not in the natural order of things and that protecting our liberal order in a hostile world requires rejecting the standard liberal view of good, evil and human nature.
The Soldier and the State, despite its seeming paradoxical, ideologically inconvenient message, went on to become a realist classic and Huntington's brilliant career was launched.
If you've heard of Sam Huntington at all, it's probably because of his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . He was the Cassandra who showed up at the post-Cold War victory party to point out that history hadn't ended at all and that Western liberal democracy hadn't been vindicated as a universal ideal. In fact, he said, the world was headed into a time of multipolar conflict in which culture was the dominant factor in international relations.
This was heresy to the globalized cosmopolitan elites, who had convinced themselves that capitalism and democracy had trumped older loyalties of race, religion and soil. Huntington struck a particular nerve by drawing attention to what he called "Islam's bloody borders" the plain fact that Muslims were involved in far more intergroup armed conflicts than members of any other of the contemporary world's nine great civilizations.
Far from the smug racist many critics accused him of being, Huntington was attempting to shake arrogant Americans out of their delusion that the rest of the world's people are like them or want to be. Believe that nonsense, he said, and you'll blunder into all kinds of trouble. Within a decade, the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration's catastrophic moral crusade to turn Muslims into good Western liberals would do much to prove Huntington's point.
His final book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's Identity (2004), drew the usual caterwauling from multiculturalist bien-pensants. He argued that the essential American identity is rooted in the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding generations. Immigrants from the world over have been grafted successfully onto this essential culture and its ideals, hence the historical success and dynamism of our nation.
We are at a crossroads now, he contended, because the nation is being overwhelmed by an unprecedented level of Latin American immigration at precisely the moment when its ability to assimilate them to traditional Anglo-Protestant norms (as inculcated in U.S. Catholics, Jews and other non-Anglo, non-Protestants) is flagging because our elites no longer believe in them. Either we figure out how to revitalize our Anglo-Protestant culture which is not the same thing as ethnicity or we could see the fracturing of America along linguistic and cultural lines.
For describing the world as it is, not as elites would like it to be, and for defending liberalism against the mindless orthodoxies of liberals, Huntington was savaged as a bigot. But he had been there before. History suggests that sooner or later, even his critics will catch up to Sam Huntington.
The professor's cant-piercing insights derived from his tragic vision. He deeply believed in liberal values and liberal institutions, but he understood as few Americans of his class do how little we can take for granted in this fallen world. To protect and preserve what is best in our political and social order, we have to see clearly how contingent it all is. Defenders of liberalism had better be conservative about human nature or else.
No wonder his was a solitary path. But then, great men rarely run with the herd.
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Rod Dreher is assistant editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning News and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum).
PREVIOUSLY
11/10/08: Here comes the conservative civil war
10/21/08: Mad men in crazy economic times
10/14/08: The positive act of not voting
10/09/08: The speech John McCain should give
09/30/08: And it was written, our blame
09/22/08: The Beehive buzzes for Sarah Palin
09/08/08: Palin's a fighter and worth fighting for
09/02/08: GOP slouches toward St. Paul
07/18/08: Wall-E Pixar's surprisingly political postmodern masterpiece
06/08/08: Era of cheap airfare is over
05/29/08: What if they're not smart enough?
05/11/08: From horror, a child's loving gift
05/07/08:Will a canary be our last meal?
04/03/08: Economic crisis is of our own making
02/14/08: What child-men need is some tradition
02/05/08: A Republican victory this year could do more long-term damage to the party than a loss
01/22/08: Putting faith in Obama: Do GOPers tempted by him know what they're supporting?
11/20/07: We can't fix the world with The Care Bear Stare
10/17/07: Every father should read this book to his son
10/03/07: Not even our parks are safe … And I lay at least part of the blame on the cultural revolution and our obsession with the individual
08/22/07: The Decalogue, dangerous? Advice for a society that cringes at commandments
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08/01/07: How the U.S. can avoid its own version of the fall of the Roman empire
07/24/07: Conservative author: Big business can be as dangerous a threat as big government
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05/08/07: PBS darling gets abused by PC police
05/02/07: Impervious to beauty and deadened to depravity
04/20/07: What I know about being a loner
10/28/05: How the conservatives crumble
© 2007, The Dallas Morning News,
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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