Another big picture piece today.
Thumbnail history. In the early 1990s Francis Fukuyama published a book called The End of History and the Last Man which argued, in part, that liberal democracy was winning the international war of governments. Samuel P. Huntington wrote a response called the Clash of Civilizations that objected to Fukuyama’s thesis. A few years later 9/11 happened, which seemed to discredit Fukuyama and confirm Huntington.
The present article, if I can guess before I read it, says the true clash isn’t between different cultures or religions, it’s internal — a clash between primitive and advanced human nature. MAGA and WOKE. MAGA is just the local version of whatever religious fundamentalism exists in all those other countries. And WOKE is just Enlightenment values and the true understanding of the real world, and recognition of human rights beyond the tribal. But let’s see what the article says and see if my guess is right.
The Atlantic, Josef Joffe, 14 Feb 2026: The Clash of Civilizations Was an Inside Job, subtitled “After 9/11, Samuel P. Huntington’s big idea was everywhere. But he missed the coming war within.”
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The gist of Huntington’s argument: The end of the Cold War did not mark the “end of history,” as the political theorist Francis Fukuyama had argued in a widely discussed article and subsequent book imagining that the collapse of the Soviet empire would virtually end the strife among states of millennia past and that liberal democracy and market economics would now rule.
Huntington predicted that a new conflict would rage after the demise of Communism. Now not states, but the great civilizations, would clash “along the cultural fault lines” separating them, including “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African.” In the 21st century, the altar would again be mightier than the throne. Inter-civilizational conflict would “displace the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed.”
Joffe goes on to describe how Huntington’ predictions initially seemed to pan out. Russia, the Chinese, Yugoslavia. But then they began to wobble. Instead, we’re witnessing “a culture of clashes at home.” Historical examples, and now the Middle East.
Huntington’s clash among cultures cannot explain any of these blood orgies. What can? The culprits are, as always, states and empires seeking power, possession, and primacy, no matter whom they revere, whether Jesus, Marx, or the Prophet Muhammad.
More historical examples. And then a conclusion, which is roughly what I anticipated, if without much detail.
Finally, a word on our present moment: When The Clash of Civilizations came out, the culture war in the West was in its infancy. It did not fit into the book’s scheme.
Eight years later, Huntington published a new book. It is titled Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, and it zeroes in on what he glossed over back in 1996. What then focused his mind was the clash within the United States—and by extension the rest of the West. Uncontrolled immigration by Latinos and Muslims, he darkly warned, would divide America into “peoples, cultures and languages.” He felt it was time to reaffirm Protestant values and English as the national language of the United States.
In Who Are We?, Huntington concedes that the deepest fault lines run not among clashing civilizations but within them. And today, the dominant conflict within the United States is between those who are “woke” and those who want to conduct a “war on woke.”
Even great minds err, but the greatest revise their predictions when they fail.
Yes, the clash is among variants of human nature, and all those religions are just expressions of a singular base human nature.
As an aside, that last line. Religious folks never revise their predictions, or conclusions, or beliefs.
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Quick links to articles I may explore later.
- JMG: Noem: DHS Will Ensure “The Right People” Are Voting (And who might those right people be? One guess.)
- CNN: Trump has chipped away at the long-standing wall between church and state. It’s just the beginning (Of course they are. They don’t know or don’t understand Constitutional principles, or are arrogant enough to think those principles don’t apply to themselves, since they *know the truth*.)
- NY Times, news analysis by Peter Baker, 15 Feb 2026: Trump’s Relentless Self-Promotion Fosters an American Cult of Personality, subtitled “President Trump has engaged in a spree of self-aggrandizement unlike any of his predecessors, fostering a mythologized superhuman persona and making himself the inescapable force at home and around the world.” (This is not a new observation about Trump, it’s a feature of human history. It’s what the ideals of the Enlightenment and Constitution were designed to prevent.)
- The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, 15 Feb 2026: This Is What Destroying the Vaccine Market Looks Like, subtitled “A shocking move by RFK Jr.’s team has the industry spooked—for good reason.” (If the US government resists vaccines, vaccine manufacturers will stop make them because the US is their biggest market, and not only the US but the world will suffer.)
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Introductory Philip Glass. I bought this as an LP when it came out, in 1982, bicycling from my apartment in Northridge to and back from a Tower Records on Van Nuys Blvd in Panorama City. I think I first knew of him via the radio station KUSC. It’s six movements in about 40 minutes. I think the prisms on the cover are entirely appropriate to Glass’s music. The comments to this YouTube post are revealing.
