I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be proved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path. But his mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certain aspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events can transform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts, etched in stone. ~David Brooks

If Huntington may still be proved right, it isn’t clear that he has made very many mistakes. Saying that all people share certain aspirations doesn’t actually tell us very much. It is how people try to realize those aspirations, the way they prioritize them, and the importance they attach to them that reflect cultural values and contribute to cultural differences. When abstract terms are used for expressing those aspirations, it makes it much harder to know what these aspirations actually mean. I’m not sure that knowing that all people share certain aspirations is all that useful. At best, it is a truism, and at worst it can blind us to the deeper disagreements that lie behind these shared aspirations.

Time after time, middle-class political liberals (in the classical or European sense) have demanded an end to arbitrary government and the establishment of constitutional and representative government. They have quickly learned that the opening of the political system empowers majorities hostile to their interests. It is not an accident that political liberals have sometimes aligned themselves with monarchical, oligarchic or authoritarian systems in the fear that mass democracy will represent significant changes for the worse for them. Expanding the franchise has sometimes meant reviving the conservative forces that the liberals opposed earlier, and sometimes it empowers more social democratic and/or socialist movements, but in either case political liberals tend to lose as a result. That sometimes leads to support for coups and a return to a more restricted or advantageous electoral system. Anti-democratic backlash is one of the things Amy Chua warned about in World on Fire, and it is something that Kurlantzick has noted in his recent survey of the Asian nations that participated in the “third wave” of democratization. This backlash has been taking place in Thailand for the last five years. While Thailand is the clearest example of this, it isn’t limited to Thailand, as Kurlantzick explains:

During the eras of street protests, Filipino, Thai, South Korean, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Taiwanese middle classes stood at the forefront of demonstrations, much as middle class men and women are doing now in the Middle East. But less than a generation later, these same middle class men and women often now oppose democracy. In Indonesia and Taiwan, the middle class has continued to be a bulwark for reform, particularly in Jakarta. But in other nations, the middle class no longer always stands for reform and good governance.

Of course, reform and good governance are other terms that will mean different things to the middle class and the majority of the population. When democracy meant making the government more accountable to them, middle-class liberals were all for it, but when it means a government with economic and fiscal policies that challenge of threaten their interests they naturally become less enthusiastic. On the surface, the illiberal democratic majority and the liberal minority both want “freedom” and “democracy,” but what they mean by this is as different as can be.

Regarding nationalism, Huntington may have missed something, but if he did it wasn’t because he was paying too much attention to each civilization’s cultural values at the expense of “universal” values. If there was a mistake, it was in attaching too much importance to civilizational identities and not enough to more local and national identities. In other words, Huntington’s scheme is a useful corrective against universalism, but it can miss many of the other more particular values and attachments that matter as much or more. That said, the most effective protests movements we have seen so far are in the nation-states with some of the strongest national identities and relatively long traditions of secular nationalism. Libyan rebels claim to want to topple Gaddafi and establish a new government for all of Libya, but the heart of the rebellion remains in Cyrenaica, and the country is split by tribe and region. It’s very early to conclude that the primary attachment of most of the people in almost all of these countries is not religion. It would be quite strange if it were not one of the most important after immediate natural loyalties.