David Brewster
True, Samuel Huntington has fallen out of favor as a political scientist, but he seems to have foreseen the current retreat from cosmopolitan globalism pretty well. Here’s an appreciation of his final book dating to 2004. Summing up: “The point is not to kick internationalism to the curb; it is for elites to rediscover the delicate balance between cosmopolitanism and nationalism that they started to lose in the mid-20th century and abandoned altogether as the Cold War came to a close.
“As Francis Fukuyama, Huntington’s former student and protege, wrote last month: “The intellectual challenge is to see whether it is possible to back away from globalization without cratering both the national and the global economy, with the goal of trading a little aggregate national income for greater domestic income equality.” Figuring out how to do this should be one of the defining challenges of American politics over the next generation.”
Journalist/historian Robert W. Merry made much the same point at a fascinating Folio Forum on “Brexit, Trump and Populism” this past Thursday night.
In 2004, the eminent political scientist offered key insights into the nationalist-cosmopolitan divide at the heart of our society.
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