Trump versus Clinton, Huntington versus Fukuyama

On the final day of the Democratic National Convention one of the speakers was Khizr Khan. Not the fifteenth century founder of the Sayyid dynasty in India, of course, but a Pakistani born immigrant to the United States. Khan condemned Republican candidate Donald Trump’s policies with regards to immigration as violating the American constitution. He talked about his son who had died as an American soldier in the Iraq War and asked what Trump had sacrificed.

Most of the discussion that this has generated over the last week or so has been long on emotion and short on fact. Although Khan had publicly attacked Trump, anything Trump said in response, no matter how reasonable, was condemned, because Khan was a grieving parent. One would think, from the propaganda that began appearing all over the progressive media, that Trump had been personally responsible for the death of Khan’s son. The irony is that Trump was against the Iraq War and has condemned it frequently throughout his campaign, while Khan’s own preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, as Senator for New York voted for the war and thus was in part responsible for his son’s death.

That did not come up very often in the media’s anti-Trump fest. It did not fit the narrative. Nor did the fact that Khan had a personal motive other than the death of his son for attacking Trump. He is a lawyer who specializes in helping Muslims immigrate to the United States. He is also an advocate of Shariah Law who has been accused of having connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic organization that is the parent organization of terrorist group Hamas and which - with the support of the Obama administration and especially his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – has fomented revolution against several secular Middle Eastern governments which, when successful, has resulted in those governments being replaced by jihadist theocracies.

What is most interesting in all of this is the way in which the American election this year is turning out to be a contest, not just between the two individuals Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but the alternate visions of post-Cold War geopolitics offered two decades ago by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington.

Fukuyama, who is currently a professor at Stanford University, was the author of a famous essay “The End of History?” which appeared in the September 1989 issue of The National Interest. He expanded the thesis of this essay into a book length treatise entitled The End of History and the Last Man, which was published in 1992. Fukuyama’s thesis was an update of the nineteenth century Whig Interpretation of History. He argued, that the triumph of the American-led free world over Communism in the Cold War, signalled, not just the end of that particular conflict, but the end of history itself in the sense that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism would become universally accepted and the basis of a new, world order. Fukuyama saw this outcome as both inevitable and desirable, and his vision of a Pax Americana – a new world order of liberal, democratic capitalism, benevolently policed by the American military – has been the basis of the foreign policy of every American administration since.

The late political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, saw the post-Cold War world as shaping up in a different way, and responded to Fukuyama’s book with an essay “The Clash of Civilizations”, published in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs. He too expanded his thesis into a book length treatise, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which was published in 1996. He argued that conflicts between civilizations and cultures, however regrettable, were an inevitable recurrence in human history, which he viewed as being more cyclical, as opposed to the very linear understanding of history found in the original Whig Interpretation and Fukuyama’s thesis. The end of the Cold War, he believed, signalled the end of a particular kind of conflict, the ideological type that had characterized the Twentieth Century, but that other inter-civilizational conflicts would arise, and that the next one was likely to be between Western civilization and the non-Western world, especially the Islamic world.

Fukuyama’s thesis seems to me to be not just utter foolishness but dangerous utter foolishness. The Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant argued in Lament For a Nation (1965) that the world seemed to be headed towards a “universal and homogenous state” of American style liberalism, like the kind Fukuyama believed to be desirable, but observed that the ancients had believed that any such universal state would be a tyranny. If the ancients were right, as Grant believed as do I, then all the recent efforts to build a borderless, global, society, however well-intentioned they may be, are leading us down a path to darkness and misery.

Huntington’s thesis, by contrast, has been borne out by the events of the last two and a half decades. Western civilization is now in a clash with the non-Western, and especially the Islamic world, and those who believe in Fukuyama’s vision of universal, liberal, democracy are jeopardizing the West’s ability to survive, let alone win, this conflict. Observe, for example, the consequences of the attempts of the last two American presidential administrations to introduce liberal democracy to Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The overthrow of the Hussein government in Iraq and the weakening of the Assad government in Syria has led to much of these countries being taken over by the Islamic State, the most formidable jihadist opponent the West has yet faced, while Hamas was voted in by the Palestinians, remaining in control of the Gaza Strip, and Islamic theocrats have come to power in Egypt and Libya. Meanwhile, as we have seen over the course of the last two years, the vision of a global liberal order in which borders do not hinder the free movement of either people or goods and the ensuing relaxed attitude on the part of most Western governments to migration and border security, has internalized the threat from the Islamic world. The conflict between Obama-backed rebels in Syria and the Assad government there, created the pretext whereby droves of invaders, claiming to be refugees from this crisis, have overrun Europe while the number of large scale terrorist attacks on Western soil has been rapidly multiplying.

Fukuyama’s theory has generated a losing strategy in the conflict against Islam, a conflict in which Western civilization was already handicapped by the victory of its own liberalism in the Twentieth Century. That victory was not so much over the twin evils of Communism and Nazism (1) as over the traditions and religion of Christendom, i.e., pre-modern, pre-liberal, Western Civilization. For a thousand years Christendom fought against Islam’s relentless attempts to conquer it. There were notable losses – such as the defeat of the kingdom of Serbia by the Ottomans in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the fall of Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Christendom, in the following century – but there were also major victories – such as when Charles Martel’s Franks defeated the Islamic hordes at Tours in 732 and when the Holy League turned away the invading Ottomans before the gates of the capital of the Holy Roman Empire in 1683. To Islam, the present conflict with the West is not something new but rather the renewal and continuation of its fourteen century long war of conquest against Christendom. The West, in which the Christendom that valiantly fought back against Islamic aggression has been replaced by a “Western Civilization” of modern, secular, liberalism, fails to understand this, and so is ill-equipped for the conflict.

The revival of Christendom would be the West’s best chance of surviving and winning this conflict. A Donald Trump presidency, in the American republic that is the centre of the modern liberal West, will not bring about a revival of Christendom. It would, however, be the second best thing, for it would mean the defeat of the Fukuyama inspired, idealistic, liberal triumphalism that, in its naïve belief that liberal democracy is destined to prevail over all its competitors, has been uniting the Islamic world, bringing it most fanatical proponents to power, and internalizing within the West, what was formerly an outside threat. Trump may be a crude, vulgar, egotist, with a tendency to speak before he thinks through what he is speaking about, but he is also a realist and a patriot, who understands that America and the West are in a war with Islam, in which open borders and unrestricted immigration can and will be exploited by the enemy for our own destruction. He is not ideologically committed to the idea that American liberal democracy is the only acceptable form of government and must become universal, and so has shown a willingness to get along with leaders like Russia’s Putin and Syria’s Assad who, while they may not govern in a way that American liberal democrats would approve of, have been fighting the jihadists and protecting the Christian communities in their own countries.

His opponent, by contrast, worked to destabilize the Assad government as Obama’s Secretary of State, which assisted the rise of ISIS at the expense of the safety of the ancient Christian communities in Syria, and has been rattling her sabre against Putin. Her assistance to rebel groups in Egypt against a government not pure enough by the standards of American democratic liberalism, brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt in the mercifully short-lived, presidency of Mohammed Morsi. The consequences of her similar actions in Libya are well known. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the Iraq War for which she voted as Senator also contributed to the rise of ISIS, and the wars her husband’s administration – in which she had an unprecedented amount of influence as First Lady - fought against Yugoslavian/Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic – recently exonerated of all the charges made against him at the time – benefited Muslim groups in Bosnia and Kosovo who were allied with Osama bin Laden.

The Trump vs. Clinton presidential contest this fall, therefore, is also, in a sense, a contest between a realism that has a degree of similarity to that of the late Samuel Huntington and the pure liberal idealism of Francis Fukuyama, with the survival of the West in its clash with Islam hanging on the outcome.

(1) Liberalism had largely been colonized by Communism by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. As Tomislav Sunic remarked, in Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007) that “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West”, an observation that seems rather justified when one compares the ten measures proposed in the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto with the accomplishments of which progressive liberalism is most proud in the United States and other Western countries. Historian John Lukacs has frequently made a similar observation about national socialism (of which Nazism is a contraction). Liberalism triumphed over these totalitarian enemies, in other words, at the expense of becoming the very thing it had defeated.

The Triumph of Power over Authority

“Order without liberty”, Theodore Roosevelt once remarked, “and liberty without order are equally destructive”. Libertarians of an anarchist bent tend to respond to statements like this by scoffing and saying that they are nothing more than sugar to disguise the taste of statist oppression and make it palatable to the masses. This is more or less what Karl Marx said about religion and both judgements, that of the libertarian anarchist and that of Marx, have about the same worth, i.e., none whatsoever. I think, however, that it would be more accurate to say with Samuel P. Huntington that “Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order”. (1)

The two men were talking about different things of course. The American President of a little over a century ago was talking about the necessary middle territory between tyranny and anarchy, whereas the Harvard political scientist was commenting upon modernization in societies that were not ready for it. His next words were:

Authority has to exist before it can be limited, and it is authority that is in scarce supply in these modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.

While I generally agree with what Huntington was saying here, I note that the wording of his comments assumes that liberty is the result of the limitation of authority. I would be more inclined to say that liberty is the result of the limitation of power and that furthermore it is authority that most effectively limits power and therefore authority that is the source and protector of liberty. This is the difference between the perspective of the classical conservative and the neoconservative and it is not a mere matter of semantics. Authority and power are different things. Authority commands obedience, power compels obedience. Authority is a matter of right, power is a matter of ability. People obey authority out of respect and power out of fear. Authority must be backed by power to ensure a stable order but the litmus test of the genuineness, strength, and security of authority is the extent to which it must rely upon the exercise of power. The more genuine, firm, secure, and stable authority is, the less it needs to exercise power. (2) The converse is also true and thus the “order without liberty” of which Roosevelt and Huntington speak, which is the reality of tyrannical states, is also “order without authority”, order that is enforced entirely by power.

Classical conservatives recognize that true authority, which limits and humanizes power, is the sine qua non of the kind of order which is the precondition of liberty. Liberalism, of which neoconservatism is a somewhat more realistic variety, is based upon the idea that liberty is the natural condition of man in a pre-order, pre-society, state and it has historically and erroneously regarded authority as the enemy of liberty. Is it perhaps, this mistaking of the true relationship between power, authority, and liberty, that produced the dark irony of the twentieth century in which so many liberal intellectuals, who regarded themselves as the champions of human enlightenment, prosperity, and freedom, were blinded to the reality of the oppression that existed in societies where traditional authority had been eliminated and replaced by regimes of sheer, naked, power, and so were duped into praising and practically worshipping, the least free society the world has ever known, the Soviet Union, precisely at the time when the worst tyrant in its history, Joseph Stalin, was at the height of his career of brutality and violence? (3)

The Modern Age, which give birth to liberalism and saw it grow, culminated in the twentieth century with liberalism triumphant everywhere in the Western world. The triumph of liberalism was at the expense of her old enemies, the established, institutional Church and the ruling houses of Europe. The kings and emperors of Christendom ruled with traditional authority, based upon ancient prescription and divine consecration. By weakening or eliminating them, in either case replacing their government with that of elected assemblies, liberalism replaced the authority it despised with naked power, for democracy is a form of power – the strength of numbers – rather than of authority. In countries where the traditional authorities were eliminated altogether, there were monstrous consequences. In the 1790s, the revolution against the king and Church in France, brought about the Reign of Terror. (4) In the twentieth century, when the Allies at the instance of liberal American President Woodrow Wilson, broke up the Austria-Hungarian and Prussian empires and deposed the houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern they removed the roadblock that had stood in the way of nineteenth-century pan-German nationalism, paving the way for a power-mad Austrian demagogue to be elected into office in Germany, unify the German-speaking peoples into a single power, and plunge the world into a second bloody conflict after creating the only twentieth-century regime to rival those of the Communist world in terms of sheer statist terror. (5)

Countries which retained their traditional ruling houses, albeit in a weakened, mostly ceremonial role, were spared having to go through this ordeal. A few Western statesmen, like that wise old Tory Sir Winston Churchill, acknowledged this correlation. (6) Most, however, attributed the survival of liberty in the English-speaking world and its ultimate triumph over the Third Reich – and later over Communism – to modernization, democracy, and liberalism. This continues to be the conventional understanding to this day, an understanding that involves a large degree of wilful blindness to the fact that in modern, liberal, democracies too, power has eclipsed authority. In Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, the United States, et al, it is soft power that is exercised domestically rather than the hard power of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. The vast difference between the two types of power – that of sensitivity and diversity re-education and “political correctness” on the one hand versus that of secret police, concentration and work camps, show trials and execution squads on the other – should not be taken lightly, of course. The boundry between the two, however, has a tendency to get fuzzy over time, a fact of which those who have followed our government’s attempts to squelch “hate speech” in recent decades are well aware. (7) This is inevitable, because, different as soft power and hard power are, and indisputably preferable as the former is over the latter, the gulf between power and authority is even greater and those who truly love liberty, ought always to rank authority over power.

Thomas Jefferson, in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, wrote that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”. In keeping with the foregoing discussion, it could be said that it was well that he used the word “powers” here, for it is power and not authority that governments derive from the governed through democratic election. Jefferson’s use of the adjective “just”, however, indicates that what he had in mind by “just powers” is something closer to what we have here called “authority”, in which case he got things backwards. If a government truly possesses “just powers” or “authority”, i.e., the right to command obedience to its laws in the territory and from the people over which it governs, it is this which produces consent among the governed, and not the other way around. Authority is something which, when it exists in an institution, is recognized by those under that authority, and either obeyed or rebelled against. It is the authority that produces the recognition and not consent which produces the authority.

Although we have been considering the authority and power of governments, government is not the only institution to possess authority, and if we consider the example of the most basic institution in which authority is vested, the family, we find a helpful illustration. There is no rational way in which it could be argued that parents, who are the authority figures in the family, derive their authority from the consent of their children. Their authority over their children arises out of the natural relationships within the family. It is recognized by the children and either obeyed or rebelled against. When rebellion occurs, and it always does, parents must enforce their authority with discipline – an exercise of power. If taken to excess, however, discipline will not reinforce parental authority but have the opposite effect. Children will cease to respect and love their parents, will obey them only out of fear, and ultimately will rebel more. When this happens parents have lost their authority. This is not because authority is something children give to their parents and can revoke if misused, but because authority can only survive in an atmosphere of respect which it generates. If it ceases to generate that respect it shrivels up and dies.

A government derives this respect-generating authority from such things as history, custom, tradition, constitutionality, and ancient establishment. It cannot obtain it from seizing power by force in a coup or revolution and it certainly cannot obtain it from winning a popularity contest. All it can obtain from these things is power. It needs power to reinforce its authority and as a source of power, elections are generally to be preferred over violent coups, which is one reason why a government in which an elected assembly is combined with a hereditary monarchy – the government institution best suited for and most likely to be vested with time-honoured, prescriptive authority – is the best possible government (8). We have that combination today, but liberalism, the prevalent and triumphant ideology of the day, insists that it be democratic in essence and monarchical merely in form, which, as we have seen, is another way of saying that power must trump authority. Liberalism believes that it is safeguarding liberty, but the order that makes liberty possible, is an order in which authority limits power and not the other way around. This means that the longer liberalism prevails, the more liberty itself, like the authority of the sovereign, will be reduced to a mere form. (9)


(1) Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968) p. 7.

(2) This condition, of authority that is backed by power which it has little need to exercise because it is firmly grounded in prescription (ancient usage) and tradition is what Roger Scruton calls “establishment” in The Meaning of Conservatism, (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1980, 2002)

(3) For an account of just how deluded some of these were, see the final chapter “Who Whom?” in Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Green Stick: Chronicles of Wasted Time Vol. 1,(London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1972), which chapter covers the years Muggeridge spent in Moscow as correspondent for the liberal/radical newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, in the 1930s. For the full details on what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time see Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Re-Assessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). This edition of a book Conquest originally put out in 1968 was revised when material from the Soviet archives became available at the end of the Cold War. The material vindicated Conquest’s original assessment.

(4) Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who visited the United States in the early 1830s and recorded his observations of that society in his Democracy in America, in his later discussion of own country’s revolution (The Old Regime and the French Revolution) noted that the revolutionaries seized the apparatus of state power from the Bourbon monarchy and turned it to their own ends. An argument could be made that this, and not the lofty ideals they proclaim, is the true goal of all revolutionaries. At any rate, revolutions are usually carried out against governments whose authority has grown weak, requiring them to rely more and more upon the exercise of power, which in turn generates the popular discontent that revolutionaries exploit against the government. Revolution is no solution, however, because it can only replace a government whose authority has weakened with a government that has no authority at all but only power, for authority arises out of prescription, i.e., long accepted and established usage. Revolutions may be started in response to real problems but they are never the solution to that problem. Francis Schaeffer, writing in response to the international student revolution of the 1960s and the rise of the New Left, was right when he said that these movements were correct in identifying the predominant culture as “plastic” (artificial and cheap), but he was very wrong when he said, in The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1970) that orthodox Christianity must teach its young people to be revolutionary in a Scriptural, Christ-like manner. (pp. 29-30, 40-41) There is no such thing. Joseph de Maistre had it right when he said “What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.” The contemporary use of “revolutionary” as an adjective of praise is a sign of the degradation of our culture, thought and language.

(5) John Lukacs in his The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), written in response to the end of the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”, contrasts the old Austria-Hungarian Empire, a civilization of the highest order in which people of various nationalities (such as “Austrian” and “Hungarian”) were united by a common loyalty to the Hapsburg monarchy with the Third Reich as the outcome of nineteenth century German nationalism. He discusses at length a theme that runs through all his writings - the difference between the older concept of patriotism and the modern phenomenon of nationalism, the superiority of the former, and the perversity of the latter. There is a similarity between Lukacs’ praise of the Hapsburg monarchy in the old empire (he, it should be noted, is an Hungarian Catholic who emigrated to the United States after the land of his birth was overrun first by the Nazis then by the Soviets) as the unifying object of loyalty in a multinational polity to the role of the monarchy in Canada as described by W. L. Morton, a Canadian historian of the old Tory school, in The Canadian Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972) p. 85. Contradicting the progressive notion that monarchy is an outdated institution, and in words quite pertinent to the theme of this essay, Lukacs writes “A hereditary (as distinct from an electoral) constitutional monarchy is especially suited to modern democracy, when masses of people are not only avid for the symbols of royalty but when, more than ever before, they need the visible presence and consequent authority of a compassionate father (or mother) figure, the presence of a respectable reigning family, with their children. Such authority ensures not fear and perhaps not even power, except that kind of intangible power that is the result of decent, honest, human respect. A constitutional and hereditary monarchy in the twentieth century is more than an instrument for continuity and tradition. Its function is historical, but also political and social”. (p. 70).

(6) Churchill is frequently quoted as having said “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He did indeed say this, although he also said “the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” More to the point he said “This war would never have come unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer on to the vacant thrones” and on another occasion “If the Allies at the peace table at Versailles had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittelsbach and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler. A democratic basis of society might have been preserved by a crowned Weimar in contact with the victorious Allies.”

(7) See my “The Long War Against Free Speech in Canada” for details: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/05/long-war-against-free-speech-in-canada.html

(8) Aristotle and Polybius foresaw this millennia ago. As Stephen Leacock put it this combination has joined “the dignity of Kingship with the power of Democracy.”

(9) High Tory journalist, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, gave an excellent talk to the Athenaeum club about how liberalism failed in its emancipation project and brought enslavement instead in 2006. An abridgement of his remarks can be found, ironically enough at the Guardian’s website, here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/21/comment.politics2