Ladies and Gentlemen, please take your seats for The Fight of the Century.  Victor Davis Hanson takes on Francis Fukuyama.   Any regular reader of mine knows that these 2 guys are some of my all time favorite pundits. This stuff is SO GOOD, it positively gives me a Salieri-complex.   I'm practically peeing in my pants.  Why has God armed me with the tools to recognize how amazing VDH's writing and penchant for observation is but callously not given me that ability myself?   It love it so much it hurts me in the pit of my stomach.  Cursed fate.

While both arguably "conservative" in their politics, VDH deeply disagrees with Fukuyama's famous End of History thesis -- that consumer capitalism and liberal democracy would sweep the world and bring forth a perpetual peace as humans have finally figured out how best to live with each other.   Instead, VDH paints a picture somewhat closer to Mearsheimer / Huntington but driven by perhaps more classical exegesis.   The world faces, VDH argues, a rather abrupt return to power politics and a rather striking bout of new American exceptionalism.  

Differences to date, he contends, have been glossed over by even more polarizing, bigger differences in the cold war:

The half-century of peace from 1945 to 1989 was not so much a dividend of new attitudes as the result of the presence of a quarter-million American troops, who really did keep the Russians out and Germany’s military down. Facing a mutual foe armed with the most advanced weaponry, fielding an enormous army, embodying a proselytizing revolutionary ideology, and willing to shed the blood of 30 million of its own citizens did wonders to paper over less pressing differences.

Observors like Huntington, in his famous Clash of Civilizations thesis, foresaw a general unity between Western Europe and the US.   Surely, Huntington argued, the differences in culture between the US, France, and Germany were small compared to an emergent China, Russia, or the Middle East.  By contrast, VDH believes in classical Pride driving a wedge even on an intra-civilizational basis:

Resentment of the U.S. runs deep on the Continent. In part, this is a psychological residue of World War II. With nations, as with people, no good deed goes unpunished. France would not exist today without Normandy Beach—a permanent blow to its self-esteem. American arms both destroyed Germany and helped make it the flourishing nation it is today. Should Germans hate us or thank us for saving them from themselves?

Do entire nations - Western ones at that - cast aside empirical, real-world evidence about the benefits of liberalism, democracy and capitalism in favor of the darker motives of pride and status?    Perhaps so.    And perhaps its possible to adopt the patina of support for these pillars while avoiding some of their deeper underlying philosophical roots.   The emotional reaction to the idea of America lies at the bedrock of these "other-Western" views:

...Our old-fashioned belief in right and wrong along with our willingness to act on that belief also infuriates the Europeans. Americans have an ingrained distrust of moral laxity masquerading as “sophistication,” and our dissident religious heritage has made us comfortable with making clear-cut moral choices in politics—“simplistic” choices, Euros would say. It is precisely because we recognize the existence of evil, pure and simple, that we feel justified in using force to strip power from ogres like Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein—or kill them, like Uday and Qusay Hussein. Europeans, cynical in politics and morals, think that this attitude makes us loose cannons.

In part as a consequence of this, the EU is a fundamentally different creature that reveals fundamentally different ideas about the nature of governance:

...This authoritarian arrangement allows the E.U. to rule by diktat rather than by consensus and review. Rural Montanans can complain to their congressmen that Washington is out of touch; to whom will Estonians complain that Brussels has no right to decide what goes on their restaurant menus?

But - as expected, VDH finds some hope in (some of) our youth who find a way to mix pop culture, patriotism, and a martial character into a historically American character:

Sure, postmodern, peroxide-topped Jasons and tongue-pierced Nicoles sulk at malls from coast to coast—bored, materialistic Fukuyamans all. But by contrast there are those American teens of the Third Mechanized Division, wearing their Ray-Bans and blaring rock, who rolled through Iraq like Patton’s Third Army reborn, pursuing George W. Bush’s vision of old-fashioned military victory, liberation, and nation building.

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