Samuel Huntington, who died in 2008, was a liberal Harvard
professor of political science. In 1996 he published a controversial book The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (see my book list in
the sidebar) in which he argued that the coming century would see conflicts
along the borders between major cultures and civilizations. The liberal
academic world didn’t like this view, which clashed with the current groupthink
best expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that history had
come to an end and the world would now settle down into a more or less permanent
state of peace and liberal democracy. With the resurgence of Russian and
Chinese expansionism, and the Middle East religious wars, we now know that
Huntington was right and the liberal academic fantasy was wrong.
Fast forward to 2004 and Huntington published his last book,
Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, referred to in Hanson’s piece The End of
Identity Politics recommended in my previous post. Again his argument went against the current
academic politically correct thinking, and again he was roundly criticized for
not supporting the current multiculturalism fad.
His argument is
complex and nuanced and one should read the whole book to get the full force of
his position, but in short he worried that the current trend of identity
politics, of multiculturalism, of encouraging groups to separate out into
tribes (LGBTQ, Hispanic, Afro, women, Asian, etc, etc) was a dangerous path.
That what had held America, a land of immigrants, together was the adoption of
a more or less common identity as Americans, wherever we all came from
originally, and to destroy that was to invite the sort of Balkanization and
civil tensions (even civil wars) that have plagued other nations with unassimilated
and resentful immigrants in their midst (think of the EUs problems right now).
The book is highly relevant
right now, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat and Donald Trump’s election
to the presidency, an event which has exposed the sharp cultural divisions in
the country between the largely costal liberals and the more conservative rest
of the country.
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