Huntington: Culture Matters

Writing at The American Interest, Francis Fukuyama quotes Samuel Huntington, from the latter’s book Who Are We? on the importance of culture:

Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.

In other words, charmingly colorful and musical, but basically a badly governed corrupt mess of no great import on the world stage.