From TPMCafe: Huntington revisited

After Professor Samuel Huntington passed away on December 24, I held off commenting on his work during the first 30 days of mourning out of respect for the norms that govern such a period. I believe we are now ready for a balanced review of his work.

The theme that runs throughout Huntington’s various works is best characterized as a theory of fear. His books typically identify a mounting threat, such as Mexican immigrants, Islamic civilization, or democratic proclivities, and then point to the need for strong national-unity building measures and mobilization of the people (including militarization) in response to the barbarians at the gates. Sometimes, the argument is formulated in basically analytical terms: If the required vigorous responses to the particular challenge at hand are not forthcoming, various calamities will ensue (e.g., the U.S. will lose a large part of its territory to Mexico and its Anglo-Protestant identity will be undermined) that will implicitly call for stronger countermeasures. In other cases, advocacy for powerful antidotes is quite explicit. As Huntington puts it in the Foreword to Who Are We?, he is writing as a patriot and a scholar, in that order.

Taken on its own, the threat-response thesis is unproblematic, a correlation the validity of which even people without social training can readily discern, and one that has often been repeated in the annals of social analysis. When the Nazis were about to overrun Britain, the country suspended habeas corpus. And few, even among the strongest supporters of Israel, would deny that while continuous threats from armed neighbors and terrorists and the responses to these threats have helped keep the segments of Israeli society together, they have also involved a measure of militarization and have imposed limits on civil rights.

The key issue then is to determine whether a nation truly faces particular threats or whether such concerns are largely drummed up, if not totally manufactured–say, in order to keep a nation under the control of one powerful elite or another and to make its citizens accept various governmental measures that they otherwise would not tolerate. These measures might include the curtailment of rights, economic belt-tightening, and discrimination against foreigners, among others. It is a familiar issue, seen for example in the debates over whether or not Saddam actually possessed nuclear weapons that could pose an imminent threat to the United States. Even more recently, it has been witnessed in the argument over whether or not Social Security is indeed in “crisis.” We must ask: If the various threats are real, what is their magnitude? And if the dangers are vastly exaggerated, what purposes are served by such a politics of fear…

A good read, putting our country’s trends in perspective. The only point I would make is that Huntington just represented one side of the fear mongering elitist class. It really isn’t left/right, liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican. The sins are the same, the power grab in a different dress; with all the dresses from the same nation over individual dressmaker. Sadly, our rights diminish, our freedoms like sands through the fingers of a fear filled child.