Who Are We?: America’s National Identity and the Challenges It Faces
By Samuel P. Huntington
Simon & Schuster, 428 pages, $27
Debating our history, our politics and our future has long been a staple element of American politics and culture. For centuries Americans have repeatedly, and with considerable passion, argued about the character and meaning of America. How best can we characterize the country’s founding and subsequent development? What kind of country have we become? What traditions best represent our history and values? And, often with considerable trepidation, we ask about where we might be heading and the kind of country the U.S. may be becoming.
Joining these perennial debates is Samuel Huntington, prominent Harvard University political scientist and author of “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” a controversial 1996 polemic dealing with Islam and the West (among other subjects). In his new, alarmist, awkwardly written and often superficial treatise, “Who Are We?: America’s National Identity and the Challenges It Faces,” he insists that ” ‘We Americans’ ” are confronting “a substantive problem of national identity.”
What is it to be an American? Are we even a “we”? We once were a “we,” he contends, although he acknowledges that, historically, that “we” has excluded African-Americans, American Indians and many others. But today we are in danger of losing the values and culture that have long under-girded American identity. The consequences, he predicts, could be dire.
Central to Huntington’s argument is the notion of identity, usually a concept deployed by those on the cultural left but this time adopted, with a vengeance, by their ideological opposite. For Huntington, there is good identity and bad identity. On the positive side is what he calls America’s core Anglo-Protestant culture; on the negative, there are more recent identities organized around race, gender and ethnicity. But the bad is prevailing over the good. Once, Americans identified with their country; they were members of “one nation of individuals with equal rights, who shared a primarily Anglo-Protestant core culture, and were dedicated to the liberal-democratic principles of the American Creed.” We’ve fallen far since the 1960s, apparently, when “powerful movements began to challenge the salience, the substance, and the desirability of this concept of America.”
Making matters worse, the end of the Cold War deprived the nation of a needed “other” against which to define its identity. Militant and fundamentalist Islam, post-9/11, has provided a new “other,” but that may only be temporary: Short of new attacks on American soil or new wars, Huntington implies that the countervailing pull of “the pervasive and fundamental forces of economic globalization” will continue to erode American identity. What we are left with, Huntington maintains, is an America defined not by common history and culture but as “a conglomerate of different races, ethnicities, and subnational cultures, in which individuals [are] defined by their group membership, not common nationality.”
At the center of Huntington’s book are two related claims. First is the uncontroversial (if overstated) assertion that “America is a founded society created by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British, and Protestant.” Second, and more dubious, is the notion that this fact–of America’s white, British and Protestant founding–takes precedence over all else in explaining what the U.S. has become. Our “origins as an Anglo-Protestant settler society have, more than anything else, profoundly and lastingly shaped American culture, institutions, historical development, and identity,” he writes. For three centuries that culture has “survived,” albeit with some “adaptations and modifications,” as “the paramount defining element of American identity.”
Huntington attributes much that is of value in American history to the Founding Fathers and their religious and ethnic cohort: They led the Colonies to independence and gave the new country its language and legal culture. Crucially, these men, and these men alone, provided us with what Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, in the 1940s, called the “American Creed”–that now-familiar list including “the equality of man, inalienable rights,” the rule of law, representative government and human rights.
Fragmented, dangerous future
Never mind that African-Americans, American Indians, immigrants and women had to crusade long and hard and always at considerable cost to force Huntington’s Anglo-Protestant heroes to give real content to that “Creed” and make it a reality. Huntington would dismiss that contention as political correctness. Indeed, all that is good in Huntington’s constricted rendition of the nation’s past derives from its Anglo-Protestant heritage. To give but one example: The vast number of immigrants who settled in the U.S. have played a “central” role in American development, Huntington concedes, but to “describe America as a ‘nation of immigrants’ is to stretch a partial truth into a misleading falsehood” that detracts from our original British and Protestant founders’ legacy; immigrants’ contributions simply pale in comparison to those of the founders. And anything that diminishes our appreciation of Huntington’s version of that legacy, he grumpily implies, threatens to undermine the cohesiveness of our national culture and identity.
As important as the “Creed” is in American history, it is not enough, for a nation cannot be “defined only by an ideology or set of political principles.” More important to Huntington is that our founders were white, British and Protestant, and that they spoke English. He repeatedly insists that Americans today must recognize and venerate the founders’ religion, race and ethnicity, and swear fealty to that ultimately indefinable entity he terms “Anglo-Protestant culture”; anything less will lead to a fragmented and dangerous future.
What, precisely, is Huntington all worked up over?
First, he denounces supposed attacks on religion in American life. Atheists, secularists and other non-Christians don’t seem to understand what, for Huntington, is a fundamental truth: America is a “Christian nation,” and those people who challenge prayer in schools or otherwise protest governmental displays of Christian symbols are ” ‘outsiders’ ” who “do not have the right to impose their atheism on all those Americans whose beliefs now and historically have defined America as a religious nation.” Without God, ” ‘there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life,’ ” Huntington approvingly quotes President Dwight Eisenhower. “To deny God,” he adds, “is to challenge the fundamental principle underlying American society and government.” Apparently belief in any God isn’t enough, for Huntington trumpets the Christian God. And because religious tolerance prevails, he chauvinistically declares, non-Christians should accept the fact that they are strangers in this Christian nation and simply “recognize and accept America as a Christian society.”
Second, Huntington laments what he sees as the decline of patriotism and nationalism. An unabashed and self-declared patriot and nationalist, Huntington is dismayed by what he sees as the diminishing of patriotism since the 1960s and particularly after the end of the Cold War. Americans just don’t revere the flag as they once did (flag sales post-9/11 notwithstanding). Bemoaning what one writer has termed the more recent decline in ” ‘war-related stories designed to give children a common history and common political ideals,’ ” he waxes nostalgic for what retrospectively appears to be a golden age of patriotism a century ago, when hundreds of overtly nationalistic school text-books force-fed respect for and veneration of America’s founders. Rather than investigate their actual content, Huntington uncritically celebrates these works, never pausing to consider that what appears to him as patriotism might have been little more than chauvinism and crude propaganda.
Third, Huntington feels threatened by the waves of immigrants that have arrived in the U.S. in recent decades. In Huntington’s world there are good immigrants and not-so-good immigrants. Those who arrived prior to major immigration-law reform in 1965 are his good ones: They assimilated to American values, learned English and worked hard. The 23 million immigrants who arrived from 1965 to 2000 are more problematic for him. If they assimilate to Anglo-Protestant culture, learn English and identify as Americans like their predecessors did, Huntington will be happy. But he suspects that won’t happen, which makes him extremely apprehensive.
Immigration has historically given rise to nativist cultural concerns about the fate of the nation. In the 1840s and 1850s, many white Protestants railed against Irish Catholic newcomers. In the 1880s, they denounced the Chinese, and from the 1890s through the 1920s, they ranted against Eastern and Southern Europeans. All were said, at one time or another, to be undesirable, racially inferior and unassimilable. Huntington’s uninformed reflection that most earlier immigrants “came from European societies with cultures similar to or compatible with American culture” would have surprised many native-born white Americans in 1900, who xenophobically decried the racial status of these newcomers as anything but compatible with American culture.
In the end, yes, those newcomers did assimilate. Huntington attributes this in part not just to their determination but to early 20th Century Americanization programs in schools and work-places, both voluntary and mandatory, which he portrays in a benign, even positive light, ignoring the considerable evidence of intolerance, cultural disdain and coercion on the part of the Americanizers. The end, perhaps, justifies the means?
Today’s immigrants appear more threatening to Huntington. Whereas earlier immigrants learned English (had he heard my Polish immigrant grandmother, or read the voluminous literature on American ethnic history, his story might be a bit more complicated), Huntington now sees English as under full frontal attack by newcomers. Continual waves of legal and illegal immigration from Mexico and the prevalence of bilingual education have given Spanish a coequal status in Huntington’s eyes, constituting an affront to our national heritage and identity. What is more, he declares indignantly, new immigrants may not really even “want to become Americans.” Rather, they will become “ampersands,” people with dual national identities or dual citizenship made feasible by easy and frequent air or land visits to their countries of origin.
Of all the new immigrants, those from Mexico alarm Huntington the most. Their large numbers, propensity to speak Spanish, high rates of illegal border crossings, relatively lower naturalization and intermarriage rates, and geographical concentration threaten to transform America “into a culturally bifurcated Anglo-Hispanic society” with “two languages, two cultures, and two peoples.” Huntington’s nightmare scenario is the Mexicanization of portions of the country, a kind of cultural reconquista leading to the oppression of Anglo Protestants.
A cast of villains
Although he never resorts to the crude racist claims of earlier generations of nativists, his flimsy case against Mexican immigration sounds uncannily like the anti-immigrant screeds of a century ago in their focus on the dangers new-comers pose and the supposed incompatibility of their culture with ours. Just how it is incompatible is never actually established. Displaying an abundance of disdain toward Mexicans and Mexican-American culture, Huntington never stops to appreciate what he mentions in passing as their strong commitment to religion (the Catholic Church and, increasingly, evangelical Protestantism), the family and community, not to mention the work ethic.
And Huntington cannot bring himself to see the similarities of contemporary immigration to that of the past, immigrants’ substantial and continuing contributions to American society and its economy, and the extent to which many newcomers share many of the values he otherwise trumpets as the sole property of his Anglo-Protestant ancestors.
Huntington doesn’t hesitate to attribute what he sees as America’s current predicament to a cast of villains he names and blames. High on his list are American business leaders who privilege corporate interests over national ones, academics, and even government officials who have become “de-nationalized” and have developed “transnational and cosmopolitan identities superseding their national ones.” Transnational elites, he feels, undermine our national security by supporting the International Criminal Court, the United Nations and the rule of international law.
Then there are the “deconstructionists,” a term he uses bizarrely to describe not just literary theorists (whose cultural power he surely exaggerates) and other academics but judges, bureaucrats (who promote “programs to enhance the status and influence of subnational racial, ethnic, and cultural groups”) and various transnational elites. Their subversive activities include promoting multiculturalism–what he calls “an anti-Western ideology”–diversity, bilingualism and affirmative action. Black and Hispanic civil rights groups are reduced, in his analysis, to lobbyists for “special government-sponsored privileges.” (He might just come out and say that it’s the contemporary Democratic Party that is largely to blame.) Those in this diverse deconstructionist coalition, he insists, are “increasingly divorced from their country.” Out of touch, unpatriotic, anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan, these elites advance radical positions that the overwhelming majority of sensible Americans would reject out-right. Inundating his readers with cherry-picked survey data and anecdotes, Huntington offers up a most-simplistic analysis of the political pulse of the nation and the issues that divide it.
Discussions of American identity necessarily require an understanding of American history. In “Who Are We?” Huntington’s version is highly selective, at times outdated, often cliched and conveniently self-serving. On countless occasions he takes the nation’s lofty ideals, or observers’ or historians’ grandiose claims, at face value. Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, that constantly invoked French observer of early 19th Century American life, Huntington tells us that America ” ‘was born equal and hence did not have to become so,’ ” a pithy if sweepingly inaccurate claim. Citing Arthur Schlesinger Jr., he informs us that earlier newcomers to these shores ” ‘yearned to become Americans,’ ” with no appreciation of real immigrants’ actual motives or experiences. He also gets many of his historical specifics wrong: Colonial Virginia did not have ” ‘religious origins,’ ” the U.S. did not begin acquiring “colonial territories with substantial non-American populations” in the 1880s, and the end of Reconstruction did not literally lead to a “withdrawal of federal troops from the South.” While one can’t deny the powerful contribution of Protestantism to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, it’s a little odd, not to mention misleading, for Huntington to credit a religious revival–and not African-American civil rights activists–with the successful challenge to Jim Crow.
“Who We Are?” reveals much more about the cultural insecurities of its author than it does about the state of our nation. Ultimately, Huntington provides little convincing evidence that American identity is collapsing, that patriotism is withering or that the work ethic or individualism are in danger of extinction. To the contrary, he firmly establishes that the U.S. remains a highly religious country and that the work ethic is extremely strong. While recent years have witnessed the impressive rise of extensive scholarship–and classroom courses–on the history of racial and ethnic groups, Huntington offers no evidence that the “teaching of national history gave way to the teaching of ethnic and racial histories.” At best what he musters is a lament that kids today don’t get enough Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, Daniel Boone or Paul Revere. And the new immigrants who so bother Huntington seem at least as committed to religion and the family as are other Americans. So what is the problem here?
To be fair, there are complex arguments for and against Huntington’s litany of allegedly dangerous issues–affirmative action, bilingual educaion and immigration policy, to name but a few of his targets. But Huntington offers only stick figures and caricatures, providing little more than slogans against the inadequately or inaccurately recounted points of view of his opponents and offering little informed defense of his own positions. This is unfortunate, for it renders “Who Are We?” just one more volume in the river of books that speak only to the converted and refuse to engage in sincere exchange across partisan lines. Despite the media attention lavished on the author and his book, “Who Are We?” is hardly destined to become a piece of classic political commentary or political science. Nor will it likely have much impact in policy circles. Given its weaknesses, that’s a good thing.
