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Samuel P. Huntington’s greatest contribution to the world of ideas was the phrase “Davos man.” This was his term for the capitalists to which our globalized socioeconomic order had given rise: highly educated, generally English-speaking people who profited from the world of borderless trade and travel, represented by the attendees of the yearly economic conference held in the small Swiss town of the same name.
Huntington … was less sanguine than Fukuyama about how total liberalism’s victory had been. For him, the ideological struggle between communism and liberalism had not proved the strength and appeal of the latter but confirmed that no single universalist worldview could claim purchase on the lives of people across the globe.
“In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups,” he writes in The Clash of Civilizations, “but between peoples belonging to different cultural entities.”
Interestingly, Huntington did not think that this turn toward ethnonationalist and racialist politics was a sign of a regression from modernity. It was a sign that modernity had spread across the world, the majority of which did not speak English and did not have much interest in anything called “the West,” let alone liberalism. It was merely hubris, epitomized in neoconservative support for foreign interventions opposed by Huntington, that had made talk of a singular vision of modernity plausible.
“In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was ‘Which side are you on?’ and people could and did choose sides and change sides,” he writes. But he goes on to add that contemporary societies gave rise to “conflicts between civilizations,” and in these contests “the question is ‘What are you?’” The difference was that one’s answer to the latter question “cannot be changed.” The Clash of Civilizations claims that “in coping with identity crisis, what counts for people are blood and belief, faith and family.”
However, seen in the context of the broader intellectual and political climate of the end of the last century, Huntington’s ideas were hardly out of place. They had their analogue in the cultural turn embraced by sections of the Left in the 1980s as hope for socialism waned and notions of class and exploitation fell out of favor.
The Clash of Civilizations similarly responded to a crisis of purpose among members of the American right who, with the Soviet Union gone, needed a new way of justifying their country’s heavy military presence on every continent and their own status in a world in which the non-US share of the global economy was rising. Adding to this anxiety was a sense that the West, especially in its American core, was losing vitality because it had turned away from the ethnic roots of its own culture.
But while he focused on the world, his real concern was the United States, which he believed had tied its own hands by acquiescing to multicultural liberalism, effectively adopting the cultureless efficiency-minded worldview of the Davos man as national policy.
At the time, readers of Huntington objected to what they saw as the racism underlying his arguments; today the belief that there are profound and irreconcilable differences between peoples of different cultures has become mainstream.
In the nineteenth century, racial distinctions were often made by appealing to the sciences of the day. In an era in which these ideas have lost all credibility, new methods are required to shore up identities and offer an answer to the question “Who are we?” Like many contemporary defenders of the unity of the West, Huntington relies on a selective interpretation of the past.
Cultural differences, which Huntington assumed ran deep and were ineradicable: their existence was assumed, and these assumptions obscured the political and economic relations between nations and populations.
In Project 2025, the manifesto for the New Right written for Trump’s presidency, there was a single mention of what its authors called “re-hemisphering,” the Right’s attempt to hold a globe in its hands and tilt it toward the United States. This was a call to turn away from the Middle East and “work with Mexico, Canada, and other countries to develop a hemisphere-focused energy policy that will reduce reliance on distant . . . sources of fossil fuels.”
Predictably, little has come of this under Trump’s second term. Rather than turning away from empire, the United States continues to aid a genocide in Gaza, prop up the dictatorship in Egypt, and threaten Iran with destruction, all in the name of the Western alliance. Despite all the talk of “America first,” the allure of “civilization” is too hard to resist.
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