Samuel Huntington

Samuel Huntington died the day before Christmas at 81. He was a Harvard intellectual who openly defended Western civilization, and America’s leading place in the West, against what by 1993 he saw as the greatest threat to civilization: the culture of Islam. Huntington felt that “globalists,” including transnational businesspeople, were undermining America’s and the West’s ability to defend its civilization because they had lost their national identities, believing only in the world market’s virtues.

Middle Eastern expert Fouad Ajami wrote a Wall Street Journal obituary bemoaning Huntington’s passing. Ajami noted that by 2004, Huntington saw three possible American futures: cosmopolitan, imperial and national. Huntington favored the national approach, in Huntington’s words, "devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding." He had no patience for the globalism of "Davos Man"(the global elite’s watering hole). But Huntington’s 2004 warning against imperialists was aimed at the American expedition to Iraq, and the American conservatives who had come to believe in an "imperial" American mission. He correctly predicted The American people would not sustain an effort to democratize others through military action.

Ajami marveled that Huntington, “with his typical precision,” had in 1993 written of a "youth bulge" unsettling Muslim societies, of young, radicalized Arabs, unhinged by modernity and unable to master it, emerging as the children of the upcoming radical age. Huntington had it right, but as Ajami wrote, “nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism that marked Samuel Huntington's life and work is derided, and the American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and simpletons.”