Leaders of March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom marching with signs. Left to right: Matthew Ahmann, Floyd McKissick Jr., Martin Luther King Jr., Eugene Carson Blake and Cleveland Robinson. (Photo by Robert W. Kelley/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Donald Trump and his supporters may be waging battles against the press, immigrants, voting rights, the environment, science, social welfare programs, Planned Parenthood and what they label political correctness and the deep state.
But to them these are mere skirmishes in a much larger conflict. The president has essentially declared an all-out war on the American 1960s.
What he and his followers hope to do is not necessarily turn back the clock to the 1950s, but rather restore a social order, value system and “real America” that they believe was hijacked by the liberal culture, politics, thought leaders and policy priorities that emerged from the ’60s.
America was much more of a community before the agitators caused all the problems, wasn’t it?
An October 2016 PRRI survey found close to three-fourths of Trump voters and white evangelical Christians bemoaning an American society and way of life that to them has changed for the worse since the 1950s. Donald Trump has become their cultural and political reset button.
But while the president and his supporters can’t reverse demography, they are trying through rhetoric, symbolism, policy and politics to resurrect an iconic post-World War II Norman Rockwell version of what it means to be authentically American.
To them, the ’60s undermined what was good and virtuous in America. In their sepia-toned view of our history, it was a triumphant military, a white working class and a Father Knows Best conception of nuclear families, moral values and suburban bliss that made America great.
In this America we saluted the flag, revered the police, attended church, trusted authority, respected tradition and venerated sturdy, stoic, upstanding lunch pail heroes who earned their American dream without griping or government assistance.
It’s not that religious and ethnic minorities are absent from this history — they gave America character, after all and we all need to show our melting pot tolerance. But how nice it was that they knew their place, didn’t get too uppity and honored the primacy of Christians and whites who, the story goes, steadied and built the United States.
America was much more of a community before the agitators caused all the problems, wasn’t it?
Then came the 1960s. And it was then that the so-called agitators pointed out that those charming Levittown havens — just like the Trump apartment complexes — had no welcome mat for blacks and those good middle-class occupations excluded women.
It was a generation that questioned God, fled the church, disparaged conformity, upended gender roles, asserted black power and criticized the military for Vietnam and the police for brutalizing civil rights workers, killing African-Americans and bullying antiwar protesters.
It also was a singular moment in our history that codified into law personal privacy rights and a woman’s right to control her own fate. It would begin our long cultural march to rethink masculinity and lift the taboo from same sex relations. It also launched an environmental movement that said yes to the Earth and no to the smokestack.
We passed civil rights and immigration laws that changed the complexion of mainstream America and who showed up to vote. White men would no longer control America’s storyline.
In the ’60s our moral compass pivoted from judgmental scrutiny of our private lives to an examination of our collective and individual capacity for prejudice, bigotry and discrimination. Minorities, previously considered America’s outliers, became central to our historical narrative. We passed civil rights and immigration laws that changed the complexion of mainstream America and who showed up to vote. White men would no longer control America’s storyline.
For many, the ’60s redefined patriotism away from flag waving and military might to the pursuit of equality and justice for all. It was an era that celebrated an unbowed press for rooting out corruption, uncovering secrets and pointing out where our democracy had fallen short.
Whereas the 1950s sanctified unfettered capitalism as a rebuke to communism and symbol of freedom, in the 1960s many began to eye it with a new skepticism as corporations pumped pollution into rivers and produced cars unsafe at any speed. The economic and cultural fulcrum also began its shift from the factory floor to the college campus and with it came the realization that brains and not brawn would define our future and build a stronger America.
The ’60s also challenged a shibboleth of the ’50s: that if you worked hard you could succeed, but if you didn’t succeed it was because you didn’t work hard. Liberals led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson argued that even the hardest of work didn’t free millions from the chains of history, and so they turned to government to level the playing field and cushion the hard blows of misfortune.
To many white men who saw their own sweat and labor yield suburban happiness and middle-class fruits — and seemingly unconcerned that the same opportunities weren’t available to all — government elites were creating a protected class at their expense.
The ’60s bent the river of American history and now Donald Trump and his own “silent majority” are doing everything in their power to bend it back.
On immigration, race, voting rights, women’s rights, religion, cultural issues, public schools, higher education, social programs, business, labor, coal, the environment, the news media, the white working class, the military and the police, virtually all of his policies, pronouncements and tweets are aimed at restoring what Steve Bannon has called the “very kind of 1950s values” that made America great.
Perhaps that is what President Trump meant in his July 2017 speech in Warsaw, Poland, when he dedicated his presidency “to counter forces … that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”
It’s often said that Trump is fixated on undoing everything President Obama accomplished. But in truth it’s not the Obama legacy he’s undoing. It’s the 1960s.
In the summer of 1964 my mother visited my aunt in Mobile. I asked her to bring me back a book. What kind of kid was I at 14? She brought back The Diary of Anne Frank and J. Edgar Hoover's Master of Deceit. They are still on my shelf. I have yet to read either. Sorry, Mother.
Scaramucci, who was endorsed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, seems to have been installed to carry out Trump’s form of personnel management—to help demean and get rid of retainers who have proved disappointing or threatening to his interests. Sean Spicer. Reince Priebus. Steve Bannon. Jeff Sessions. And, ultimately, Robert Mueller.
In other words, the Mooch matters because the Mooch helps to clarify what matters most to the President and his family. What matters most is Trump’s grip on his base voters and his survival in office. Everything else—a sane health-care policy, the dignity of the transgender people who have volunteered to serve their country, a rational environmental policy, a foreign policy that serves basic democratic values, rule of law—is of tertiary interest.
Trump’s focus is not impossible to divine. He is increasingly anxious that Mueller and congressional investigators are exploring the details of his business transactions and financial holdings, and how they might have exposed him to being targeted by the Russian government.
The writings of the late Harvard political scientist anticipate America's political and intellectual battles -- and point to the country we may become.
Robert Carter for The Washington Post; based on photos by Steve Liss/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images (Huntington) and Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters (Trump)
Sometimes a prophet can be right about what will come, yet torn about whether it should.
President Trump’s recent speech in Warsaw, in which he urged Europeans and Americans to defend Western civilization against violent extremists and barbarian hordes, inevitably evoked Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” — the notion that superpower rivalry would give way to battles among Western universalism, Islamic militance and Chinese assertiveness. In a book expanded from his famous 1993 essay, Huntington described civilizations as the broadest and most crucial level of identity, encompassing religion, values, culture and history. Rather than “which side are you on?” he wrote, the overriding question in the post-Cold War world would be “who are you?”
So when the president calls on the nations of the West to “summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization,” when he insists that we accept only migrants who “share our values and love our people,” and when he urges the transatlantic alliance to “never forget who we are” and cling to the “bonds of history, culture and memory,” I imagine Huntington, who passed away in late 2008 after a long career teaching at Harvard University, nodding from beyond.
Read These Comments
The best conversations on The Washington Post
It would be a nod of vindication, perhaps, but mainly one of grim recognition. Trump’s civilizational rhetoric is just one reason Huntington resonates today, and it’s not even the most interesting one. Huntington’s work, spanning the mid-20th century through the early 21st, reads as a long argument over America’s meaning and purpose, one that explains the tensions of the Trump era as well as anything can. Huntington both chronicles and anticipates America’s fights over its founding premises, fights that Trump’s ascent has aggravated. Huntington foresees — and, frankly, stokes — the rise of white nativism in response to Hispanic immigration. He captures the dissonance between working classes and elites, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, that played out in the 2016 campaign. And he warns how populist demagogues appeal to alienated masses and then break faith with them.
This is Trump’s presidency, but even more so, it is Huntington’s America. Trump may believe himself a practical man, exempt from any intellectual influence, but he is the slave of a defunct political scientist.
Huntington’s books speak to one another across the decades; you find the origins of one in the unanswered questions of another. But they also reveal deep contradictions. More than a clash of civilizations, a clash of Huntingtons is evident. One Huntington regards Americans as an exceptional people united not by blood but by creed. Another disowns that idea in favor of an America that finds its essence in faith, language, culture and borders. One Huntington views new groups and identities entering the political arena as a revitalization of American democracy. Another considers such identities pernicious, anti-American.
These works embody the intellectual and political challenges for the United States in, and beyond, the Trump years. In Huntington’s writings, idealistic visions of America mingle with its basest impulses, and eloquent defenses of U.S. values betray a fear of the pluralism at the nation’s core. Which vision wins out will determine what country we become.
In that work, Huntington points to the gap between the values of the American creed — liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, constitutionalism — and the government’s efforts to live up to those values as the central tension of American life. “At times, this dissonance is latent; at other times, when creedal passion runs high, it is brutally manifest, and at such times, the promise of American politics becomes its central agony.”
Whether debating health care, taxes, immigration or war, Americans invariably invoke the founding values to challenge perceived injustices. Reforms cannot merely be necessary or sensible; they must be articulated and defended in terms of the creed. This is why Trump’s opponents attack his policies by declaring not only that they are wrong but that “that’s not who we are.” As Huntington puts it, “Americans divide most sharply over what brings them together.”
The book looks back to the Revolutionary War, the Jacksonian age, the Progressive era and the 1960s as moments of high creedal passions, and Huntington’s descriptions capture America today. In such moments, he writes, discontent is widespread, and authority and expertise are questioned; traditional values of liberty, individualism, equality and popular control of government dominate public debates; politics is characterized by high polarization and constant protest; hostility toward power, wealth and inequality grows intense; social movements focused on causes such as women’s rights and criminal justice flourish; and new forms of media emerge devoted to advocacy and adversarial journalism.
Huntington even predicts the timing of America’s next fight: “If the periodicity of the past prevails,” he writes, “a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century.”
We’re right on schedule.
There is a cyclical nature to our passions, Huntington argues. Indignation cannot endure long, so cynicism supplants it, a belief that all are corrupt, and we learn to tolerate the gap between ideals and reality. (Today we might call this the “lol nothing matters” stage.) Eventually hypocrisy takes over and we deny the gap altogether — until the next wave of moralizing. In the Trump era, moralism, cynicism and hypocrisy coexist. Not peacefully.
The creed is relevant not just because it produces America’s divisions and aspirations, but because it provides a spare, elegant definition of what it means to be American. It is not about ethnic identity or religious faith, Huntington writes, but about political belief. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” begins the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, and Huntington uses the line to define us. “Who holds these truths? Americans hold these truths. Who are Americans? People who adhere to these truths. National identity and political principle were inseparable.”
In this telling, the American Dream matters most because it is never fulfilled, the reconciliation of liberty and inequality never complete. Even so, “American Politics” is not an entirely pessimistic book. “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals,” Huntington writes in its final lines. “They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”
***
Over the subsequent two decades, Huntington lost hope. In his final book, “Who Are We?,” which he emphasizes reflect his views not just as a scholar but also as a patriot, Huntington revises his definitions of America and Americans. Whereas once the creed was paramount, here it is merely a byproduct of the Anglo-Protestant culture — with its English language, Christian faith, work ethic and values of individualism and dissent — that he now says forms the true core of American identity.
Threatening that core, Huntington writes, is the ideology of multiculturalism; the new waves of immigrants from Latin America, especially Mexico, whom Huntington believes are less able to assimilate than past immigrants; and the threat of the Spanish language, which Huntington treats as a disease infecting the cultural and political integrity of the United States. “There is no Americano dream,” he asserts. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”
The Huntington of 1981, apparently, was just wrong. When listing academics who had — inaccurately, he now insists — defined Americans by their political beliefs, Huntington quotes an unnamed scholar who once eloquently described Americans as inseparable from the self-evident truths of the Declaration. Unless you recognize the passage from “American Politics” or bother to check the endnotes, you have no idea he is quoting himself. It’s as close to a wink as you’ll find in Huntington’s angriest book.
The principles of the creed are merely “markers of how to organize a society,” Huntington decides. “They do not define the extent, boundaries, or composition of that society.” For that, he contends, you need kin and culture; you must belong. He claims that Latin American immigrants and their offspring do not disperse throughout the country as thoroughly as past immigrants, worries they seek only welfare benefits, and warns they’ll leave behind fewer opportunities for native workers. Huntington also trafficks in stereotypes, even citing Mexico’s supposed “mañana syndrome.”
Maybe Mexicans are lazy except when they’re taking everyone’s jobs.
I don’t know why Huntington changed his mind. Perhaps he felt the abstractions of the creed could no longer withstand the din of America’s multiplicity, or maybe mixing scholarship and patriotism does a disservice to both. Either way, anyone arguing for border walls and deportation forces will find much to like in this new incarnation, because Huntington describes the Hispanic threat with militaristic imagery. “Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s,” he writes, stating that the United States is experiencing an “illegal demographic invasion.”
Huntington blames pliant politicians and intellectual elites who uphold diversity as the new prime American value, largely because of their misguided guilt toward victims of alleged oppression. So they encourage multiculturalism over a more traditional American identity, he says, and they embrace free trade and porous borders despite the public’s protectionist preferences. It is an uncanny preview of the battles of 2016. Denouncing multiculturalism as “anti-European civilization,” Huntington calls for a renewed nationalism devoted to preserving and enhancing “those qualities that have defined America since its founding.”
Little wonder that, long before Trump cultivated the alt-right and Hillary Clinton denounced the “deplorables” in our midst, Huntington foresaw a backlash against multiculturalism from white Americans. “One very plausible reaction would be the emergence of exclusivist sociopolitical movements,” he writes, “composed largely but not only of white males, primarily working-class and middle-class, protesting and attempting to stop or reverse these changes and what they believe, accurately or not, to be the diminution of their social and economic status, their loss of jobs to immigrants and foreign countries, the perversion of their culture, the displacement of their language, and the erosion or even evaporation of the historical identity of their country. Such movements would be both racially and culturally inspired and could be anti-Hispanic, anti-black, and anti-immigration.” The more extreme elements in such movements, Huntington notes, fear “the replacement of the white culture that made America great by black or brown cultures that are . . . in their view, intellectually and morally inferior.”
Yes, in 2004, Huntington warned of a racist tide focused on protecting that which makes America great.
***
Having redefined the substance of American identity, Huntington ties its continued salience to war. “The Revolution produced the American people, the Civil War the American nation, and World War II the epiphany of Americans’ identification with their country,” he writes in “Who Are We?” Born in principle, American identity now survives by steel. When the Soviet threat receded, the United States needed a new foe, and “on September 11, 2001,” Huntington declares, “Osama bin Laden ended America’s search.”
This is a conflict he had long anticipated. In his 1996 book proclaiming a clash of civilizations, he writes that the West will continue its slow decline relative Asia and the Islamic world. While economic dynamism drives Asia’s rise, population growth in Muslim nations “provides recruits for fundamentalism, terrorism, insurgency, and migration.” Much as Trump mocks politicians who refuse to decry “radical Islamic terrorism,” Huntington criticizes American leaders such as Bill Clinton who argued that the West had no quarrel with Islam, only with violent extremists. “Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise,” he remarks.
Huntington’s clash has been caricatured as a single-minded call to arms against Muslims, and certainly the argument is neither so narrow nor so simple. He is probably more concerned with China and fears a “major war” if Washington challenges Beijing’s rise as Asia’s hegemon. Yet the threat Huntington sees from the Muslim world goes far beyond terrorism or religious extremism. He worries of a broader Islamic resurgence, with political Islam as only one part of “the much more extensive revival of Islamic ideas, practices, and rhetoric and the rededication to Islam by Muslim populations.” Huntington cites scholars warning of the spread of Islamic legal concepts in the West, decries the “inhospitable nature of Islamic culture” for democracy and suggests that Islam will prevail in the numbers game against Christianity. In the long run, “Mohammed wins out,” he states. “Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction.”
The vision evokes the zero-sum rhetoric of Trump political strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who was a force behind the administration’s travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries, and of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who authored a 2016 bookheralding a multi-generational U.S. conflict against Islam’s “failed civilization.” Huntington, at least, has the grace to consider two sides of the clash.
“The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” he writes. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world.”
He does not regard Western values as universal. They are ours alone.
***
While Huntington foresees an America roiled by self-doubt, white nationalism and enmity against Islam, he does not predict the rise of a Trump-like leader in the United States.
But he would have recognized the type.
Consider his earliest books. In “Political Order in Changing Societies”(1968), Huntington examines how Latin American, African and Asian countries in the throes of economic modernization struggled to adapt their politics and incorporate new groups with new demands. The result, Huntington explains, was not political development but “political decay.”
And what sort of authorities personify this decay? Across the developing world, Huntington saw “the dominance of unstable personalistic leaders,” their governments rife with “blatant corruption . . . arbitrary infringement of the rights and liberties of citizens, declining standards of bureaucratic efficiency and performance, the pervasive alienation of urban political groups, the loss of authority by legislatures and courts, and the fragmentation and at times complete disintegration of broadly based political parties.”
These self-styled revolutionaries thrive on divisiveness. “The aim of the revolutionary is to polarize politics,” Huntington explains, “and hence he attempts to simplify, to dramatize, and to amalgamate political issues into a single, clear-cut dichotomy.” Such leaders attract new rural voters via “ethnic and religious appeals” as well as economic arguments, only to quickly betray their aspirations.
“A popular demagogue may emerge,” Huntington writes, “develop a widespread but poorly organized following, threaten the established interests of the rich and aristocrats, be voted into political office, and then be bought off by the very interests which he has attacked.” Such interests include those of the leaders’ close relatives, he explains, because for them “no distinction existed between obligations to the state and obligation to the family.”
Huntington’s “The Soldier and the State” (1957), a study of civilian-military relations, is instructive on the self-regard of such leaders, especially when the author contrasts the professionalism of military officers with the imperiousness of fascist strongmen. “Fascism emphasizes the supreme power and ability of the leader, and the absolute duty of subordination to his will,” Huntington writes. The fascist is intuitive, with “little use or need for ordered knowledge and practical, empirical realism. He celebrates the triumph of the Will over external obstacles.”
Such obstacles take the form of popular protests against unpopular leaders. Today, some writers even find solace in our national upheaval, arguing that the activism and energy Trump’s election has wrought will strengthen U.S. democracy. But in a book titled “The Crisis of Democracy” (1975), Huntington examines a time of similar civic resurgence, and is not encouraged by the outcome.
“The 1960s witnessed a dramatic renewal of the democratic spirit in America,” Huntington writes. Not yet dismissive of identity politics, he praises the “markedly higher levels of self-consciousness” and mobilization on the part of African Americans, Latinos, students and women in that era, noting that “the spirit of equality [and] the impulse to expose and correct inequities were abroad in the land.” The problem, he explains, is that the political system also became weighed down by popular mistrust, however deserved, of American institutions. “The vitality of democracy in the 1960s,” he writes, “raised questions about the governability of democracy in the 1970s.”
The biggest questions involved the highest office. “Probably no development of the 1960s and 1970s has greater import for the future of American politics than the decline in the authority, status, influence, and effectiveness of the presidency,” Huntington writes. He fears that a delegitimized executive threatened not just national cohesion but national security. “If American citizens don’t trust their government, why should friendly foreigners? If American citizens challenge the authority of American government, why shouldn’t unfriendly governments?”
Huntington was writing in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, and now the current White House faces its own crisis of credibility. Trump, so obsessed with his electoral victory that a framed map of the 2016 results was recently spotted in the White House, would do well to heed warnings about governability.
“Once he is elected president,” Huntington writes, “the president’s electoral coalition has, in a sense, served its purpose. The day after his election the size of his majority is almost — if not entirely — irrelevant to his ability to govern the country. . . . What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of the key institutions in society and government.”
***
It feels odd to write of Trump as a Huntingtonian figure. One is instinctual and anti-intellectual; the other was deliberate and theoretical. One communicates via inarticulate bursts; the other wrote books for the ages. I imagine Huntington would be apprehensive about a commander-in-chief so indifferent to a foreign power’s assault on the U.S. electoral system, and one displaying so little of the work ethic and reverence for the rule of law that Huntington admired.
What makes the professor a prophet for our time is not just that his vision is partially reflected in Trump’s message and appeal, but that he understood well the dangers of the style of politics Trump practices.
Where they come together, I believe, is in their nostalgic and narrow view of American uniqueness. Huntington, like Trump, wanted America to be great, and came to long for a restoration of values and identity that he believed made the country not just great but a nation apart. However, if that path involves closing ourselves off, demonizing newcomers and demanding cultural fealty, then how different are we, really, from anywhere else? The central agony of the Trump era is that rather than becoming great, America is becoming unexceptional.
And that’s not a clash of civilizations. It’s a civilization crashing.
There are stories yet to be told, but who will do the telling, and who will do the listening? I am more the listener than the teller. If you have a story to tell, I will be glad to listen.
While constantly distressed by the shallowness and ignorance that I encounter around me these days, I have to admit that it has helped me make new friends in retirement and firm up old friendships.
