remembering Samuel Huntington

Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins and the Hoover Institution has a lovely essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning, in tribute to the late Samuel Huntington. Ajami was one of those who initially scoffed at Huntington's 1993 essay, "The Clash of Civilizations", published in Foreign Affairs and later expanded into a book of similar title. In it, the Harvard political scientist predicted what would come to pass, eight years later: "The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply confictual relation between Islam and Christianity." Add to that a "youth bulge" in the Muslim world and the inability of those youths to adjust to the modern age, and you have the recipe that brought down the towers of the World Trade Center.

But it is Huntington's more recent book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity that especially moved Ajami. Huntington mourned the loss of the essential American identity, which he cited as unbashedly Anglo and Protestant, in inspiration if not in fact: "The Stars and Stripes [are] at half-mast, and other flags [fly] higher on the flagpole of American identities." As the secular, all-American son of Irish Catholics, I can sign on to that. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford