The Senescent Man

From NRO:

...Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, [is likely] the most important political scientist in America. His last book, The Clash of Civilizations, forecast the civilizational tensions that became obvious to everyone in the post-9/11 world. When Huntington writes, people listen — or they should.

Huntington's prodigious credibility makes his warning of the possible end of the United States as we know it in his new book, Who Are We?, all the more alarming.

He writes that "few Americans now anticipate the dissolution of...the United States." But few anticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union either. Huntington warns, "The greatest surprise might be if the United States in 2025 is still the country it was in 2000 rather than a very different country (or countries) with very different conceptions of itself and its identity."

Huntington sees an America gripped in a "crisis of national identity." What is that identity? It is partly based on what Huntington calls "The Creed," our belief in liberty, democracy, individual rights, etc. But The Creed has a particular source: America's Anglo-Protestant culture, which includes "the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create heaven on earth, a 'city on the hill.'"

The whole thing.

Labels: Age of Obama

// posted by The Senescent Man @ 6:04 PM