Danes, Davos and Denial

Steyn Online ^ | 29 Aug 2018 | Mark Steyn

[Rummyfan]

A quarter-century ago this summer, Samuel Huntington published the first version of what would become his book The Clash of Civilizations. I've quoted it many times over the years, not least its passages on what Huntington called "Islam's bloody borders". The man himself has been dead a decade now, and so on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his famous thesis it falls to Francis Fukuyama, Huntington's former pupil and author of The End of History, to do the honors:

Since Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations has been contrasted with my own End of History in countless introductory International Relations classes over the past two decades, I might as well begin by tackling at the outset the issue of how we're doing vis-à-vis one another. At the moment, it looks like Huntington is winning.

That's big of him, all things considered. Fukuyama has attempted to modify his thesis over the years but it doesn't get any sounder: He argued a book or two back that democratic societies were all trying to "get to Denmark", but, if you've actually set foot in Denmark recently, you might be inclined to think that the challenge for Danes is to figure out a way to get back to Denmark. Elsewhere in Scandinavia, it's easier to imagine Sweden getting to Sudan than Sudan getting to Sweden. Huntington discerned a lot of this, as Fukuyama concedes:

Huntington was very prescient in his depiction of "Davos Man," the cosmopolitan creature unmoored from strong attachments to any particular place, loyal primarily to his own self-interest. Davos Man has now become the target of populist rage, as the elites who constructed our globalized world are pilloried for being out of touch with the concerns of the working class.

[Rummyfan]

They got to Denmark

[Rummyfan]

Who wants to identify with a culture that reviles its own past, that blames itself for everything, that demolishes its statuary and denounces its greatest figures and insists that, while multiculturalism posits the equal value of all cultures, if you have to pick a villain pick the culture that built the modern world? In the void of modern western identity, people look elsewhere: Some find the new one-size-fits-all Islam, others find "intersexuality".

In the end, however, one of these is real, and the other isn't. And in those societies where the one buts up against the other (Denmark, say) the one that is real will one day steamroller the other. Samuel Huntington grasped the obvious; Francis Fukuyama is still trying to tap-dance around it.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Islam. When worshipping Satan just isn’t evil enough.