James Kurth: What are We Fighting For? Western Civilization, American Identity, and U.S. Foreign Policy
Fifteen years ago, Samuel P. Huntington published, first as an article (“The Real Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993) and then as a book (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, 1996), his famous argument about the clash of civilizations. The clash that he was referring to was the clash between the West—Western civilization—and the rest. Of the rest, he considered the greatest challenges to the West would come from the Islamic civilization and the Sinic, or Confucian, civilization. These challenges would be very different because these civilizations were very different. But together they could become a dynamic duo that might raise very serious challenges to the West.
Since Huntington published his thesis, these challenges have indeed occurred. We all know about the conflict that we have with at least the Islamic extremists, the Islamists within the Islamic civilization—not only with Al Qaeda since 9/11, but then in Iraq and now once again in Afghanistan. There is also the clash with the Chinese civilization. This takes a very different form, being much more a competition over “smart power” and “soft power” (more on which below) than over hard power. But this is also a conflict that may become more intense in the next generation. More recently, Huntington wrote a book about the clash within the West itself, and especially within the United States: Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon and Schuster, 2004). That is the struggle that I will address here—the internal conflicts over America’s identity.
These internal conflicts have been maturing over the course of some forty years. One might date them to 1968, the most pronounced year of the famous decade of the 1960s. One could thus call them a forty-year war; a decade or so ago, some people called them the “culture wars”. However, although this war has been going on for a long time, with truces or modus operandis and modus vivendis between the contending parties from time to time, we are now in a new stage because of the current world economic crisis. This is becoming very important in terms of the clash of civilizations within America itself.
For many years we have been governed by a free-market ideology. This is a distinctive product of the West in general, and more specifically of the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American tradition in economics and government and in the relationship between them; it has been especially pronounced in the United States and its Republican Party in the past few decades. This particular product of the West—the free-market ideology—is now under serious assault, not only from a counter ideology—i.e., the belief in extensive government regulation—but indeed from economic reality. A good argument can be made that what has recently happened to the world economy was a result of the free market being carried to an extreme.
This ongoing economic debate was refracted through the political elections of 2008. As a result, we now have the most dominant one-party government in America since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won a handsome landslide and was supported by a heavily Democratic Congress. That Democratic dominance in government shortly issued in substantial social and political changes, most obviously the Great Society programs and a variety of other initiatives that greatly altered America and produced what is seen as the radical 1960s. There is a very good chance that the new Democratic administration and Congress will also make very significant changes. One expression of the West, i.e., the free market, will likely be confronted and put down by another expression of the West, i.e. extensive government regulation, something that has developed in Western societies over the last several generations. But there may be a better way to go than either of those two extremes, something that combines the best of the West and the best of these two extremes, while eliminating their dangerous consequences. I will call this Liberty under Law—the free market as refracted into something deeper—liberty—and government regulation as redefined into something much better—law....