Every age needs its contrary thinkers, those prepared to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day. As Lexington argues in The Economist, Samuel Huntington—who died on Christmas Eve—was that for the 1990s. While others were triumphalist after the West’s victory in the Cold War, Huntington was pessimistically warning of a coming Clash of Civilizations. Huntington was many things but he was not creature of fashion.
Clash, to my mind, is at least as flawed a theory as The End of History but it has undoubtedly added something to the intellectual debate. We would be in a better state today if more people in the 1990s had not succumbed to the illusion that the challenges to democratic market liberalism were over. Ironically, the phrase ‘clash of civilizations’ isn’t actually Huntington’s. Bernard Lewis coined it.
My first job was working at Foreign Policy magazine, which Huntington had co-founded back in 1970. In 2004, he wrote a piece for us previewing the argument he was to make in Who Are We. In it, Huntington contended that Hispanic immigration was undermining the Anglo-Protestant political culture of the United States. This led many to call Huntington a bigot or a nativist.
I think Huntington was wrong, by most measures Hispanic immigrants are actually integrating faster than previous waves of immigrants to the US. But the shrill accusations of bigotry always amused me. The piece had actually been commissioned by one Latino immigrant and edited by another. Funnily enough, Clash—in article form—had actually been commissioned and edited by a Muslim.
As Lexington notes, the optimism of the 1990s has been replaced by a deep pessimism about the possibility of spreading democracy and we need new Huntingtons not afraid to challenge the new consensus. I suspect that the levels of pessimism today are at least as excessive as the levels of optimism were in the 1990s.
PS Reihan Salam has some touching personal reminiscences of Huntington over at The American Scene.
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