Don’t Believe the Hype
America’s Civilizational Crack-Up and the Myth of Huntington’s Clash
“I had lost my capacity for enthusiasm, to love deeply or to hate deeply… It was not a matter of intellect, but of emotion. My self was cracked — it could no longer be repaired.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1936)
Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations was the great hype of post–Cold War political theory. It claimed that the future would not be shaped by ideology or economics, but by ancient civilizational identities. The world, in his telling, would fracture along enduring cultural lines — Islamic, Sinic, Western, and others. It was neat, seductive, and wrong in the ways that matter most today.
Because the United States — supposed apex of “the West” — is not locked in conflict with other civilizations.
We are locked in a crack-up of our own.
Not a Clash, But a Crumbling
The signs are everywhere:
Elections are discredited before they are held.
Universities are defunded, censored, and politicized.
Histories are rewritten or erased.
Immigrants are scapegoated and stripped of humanity.
Public institutions are hollowed from within.
Many “public goods” are being privatized.
This isn’t “West vs. the Rest.”
It’s West vs. Itself.
Yet the real clash is not civilizational — it’s internal, epistemic, moral. Rather than a a war of faiths we are experiencing a breakdown of the very idea that truth, legitimacy, or shared reality can exist.
If Huntington were right, the West would be defending its values. Instead, we are watching those values be rewritten by factions within — often with zeal, sometimes with violence, and rarely with shame.
Civilization as Performance, Not Foundation
We have long called ourselves heirs to a civilization rooted in reason, liberty, inquiry, and law. But what should we actually call it when:
Reason is subordinated to rage?
Liberty is selectively granted?
Inquiry is attacked as heresy?
Law is bent to the will of power?
We are witnessing the inversion of Western ideals by those who once claimed to defend them. Civilization, it turns out, is not a fixed inheritance. It’s a performance. And the actors have changed.
The “Western tradition” has always contained contradiction: freedom built on slavery; republicanism paired with empire — but now, those contradictions are no longer latent. They have become the animating logic.
The Crack-Up as Civilizational Condition
I was introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up in high school by an English teacher who I like to believe knew that planting seeds of self-inquiry would lead to a higher level of civic consciousness in her students. The essay collection captures what it feels like when coherence gives way — when the self splits under pressure and illusion no longer holds. He wrote not of collapse, but of internal dislocation: a psychic disintegration beneath a polished surface.
“I had prematurely sold myself on all the broken things.
That line echoes in our politics, our media, our leadership. We too, have sold ourselves on broken things: on “American Exceptionalism,” on unexamined myths of greatness, on the fantasy that power ensures virtue.
But the crack is real now. And it runs through more than just institutions. It runs through meaning. It threatens to penetrate our souls.
We Were Warned: Fragility Was Always the Premise
This unraveling was not unforeseen. In First Principles, Thomas Ricks reminds us that the Framers — particularly Adams and Madison — understood liberty’s fragility. They did not assume that virtue would triumph unaided. They saw democracy as an experiment in restraint, not inevitability.
The American experiment was never a finished product. It was a wager — on character, civic education, and the will to govern ourselves without kings or mobs.
We are living through one of those moments when the wager feels lost.
But it wouldn’t be the first time.
When We’ve Come Back Before
This nation has stumbled before (and my forebears, in particular, bore the brunt):
After the Civil War, when Reconstruction was violently overthrown — only to seed generations of resistance, institution-building, and legal transformation.
In the 1930s, when fascist sympathies surged — met by the New Deal’s reinvention of federal legitimacy and civil society mobilization.
In the 1960s, when civil rights progress was met with violent backlash — pushed forward by courts, coalitions, and generational moral clarity.
In each case, the road back began with deliberate action:
Legislative reforms, court rulings, federal protections, and above all — a people willing to imagine a country that could live up to its stated ideals.
We have never done this perfectly. But we have done it before. And the path has always started with remembering who we said we wanted to be — and deciding to mean it.
The Prophets of Decline and the Narrow America They Preach
We are not short on voices in this moment. But many speak not of aspiration, but of grievance.
Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon preach betrayal and cultural war.
Russell Vought and Stephen Miller dream of restoration — of an America purified by exclusion.
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel offer an alternate religion: a techno-futurism that sneers at democracy as inefficient, soft, obsolete.
These are not prophets of possibility.
They are Court Philosophers of decline — nattering narrators of a narrow America, a zero-sum future where fear is governance and pluralism is threat.
They offer not just political tactics, but epistemic collapse:
A worldview in which compromise is weakness, diversity is dilution, and power justifies itself.
They are not wrong that something is breaking.
But they are wrong about what’s worth rebuilding.
After the Crack, the Choice
We have arrived at the crack. But Fitzgerald’s despair need not be our ending.
The question is not whether American civilization is fracturing.
It is what we choose to carry forward from the break.
We can double down on exclusion, on grievance, on hierarchy.
OR we can do what earlier generations — freedmen and freedwomen, abolitionists and suffragists, labor organizers and civil rights leaders, and countless others working quietly but persistently in their communities — have done:
Claim the unfinished work of democracy as our own.
And imagine again a country big enough for all of us.
Because if this democracy has failed, it is ours to redeem.
Not by restoring the myth, but by reanimating the aspiration.
We were sold a myth of Western virtue.
Let us write a story of American possibility.
Jasper Johns, “Flag,” 1954–55 | Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood | Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Johns built this flag using encaustic (heated wax) over newspaper clippings and fabric, creating a surface that’s both flag and painting, symbol and object. The technique makes the familiar strange — you can’t salute it or burn it, only contemplate what it means to build meaning from fragments.”
About the Author
Cecyl Hobbs is a leadership strategist, writer, and founder of Black Lotus Leadership. A third-generation FAMU alumnus, Harvard MBA, and descendant of enslaved people, he writes about power, institutions, and American possibility. His work bridges history, political theory, and lived experience — seeking not just critique, but transformation.
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Bravo, Cecyl: "ours to redeem"!