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January 04, 2009

Sam Huntington Was Plainly Correct

By Rod Dreher

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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