"E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United." Carlos
Lozada, July 18, Washington Post, in Notes and Essays (July 23, 2017)
***
David Montejano, Who is Samuel P. Huntington?
The intelligence failure of a Harvard professor, Texas Observer
Who Are We? The Challenges
For the past year or so, in the wake of September 11 and Gulf War II, we have heard much about “intelligence failure.” We have witnessed an embarrassed Bush administration attempt to explain, in the absence of any “weapons of mass destruction,” the rationale for the current Iraqi war and occupation. The temptation to place responsibility solely on George W. Bush is great. But this would grossly simplify the intelligence problems that have become apparent since September 11. The thinking of the “intelligence community”—and perhaps its composition as well—has to be examined and questioned.
A chilling reminder of the depth of the problem of “intelligence failure” appeared in March of this year in an article published in Foreign Policy, arguably one of the most prominent policy journals in the country. In “The Hispanic Challenge,” the author, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, warns of the cultural and political threat posed by non-assimilating Mexican immigrants. If such immigration remains unchecked, “the cultural division [JB emphasis]between Hispanics and Anglos will replace the racial division between blacks and whites as the most serious cleavage in American society.” The United States will become a bifurcated nation with two languages and two cultures. Salvation lies, according to Huntington, in a patriotic recommitment to “Anglo Protestantism,” the cultural core of the country.
The article—an advance chapter from a forthcoming book—set off a firestorm of criticism. Foreign Policy editors noted that the media and reader response was unprecedented in its 34-year history. Most responses were from academics and policy analysts, Anglo and Hispanic alike, and most were extremely critical. “Shoddy research,” “offensive and false,” “nativism,” “unnecessarily alarmist,” “bizarre,” “unabashed racism,” “xenophobic” were common descriptions offered in the critiques.
The controversy quickly spilled beyond the pages of Foreign Policy. Mexican intellectual Enrique Krauze described Huntington’s method as a “crude civilizational approach.” Carlos Fuentes called Huntington “profoundly racist and also profoundly ignorant” and accused him of adopting the favored fascist tactic of creating a generalized fear of “the other.” Henry Cisneros noted that Professor Huntington was “hand-wringing over the tainting of Anglo-Protestant bloodlines.” Andres Oppenheimer of Miami called Huntington’s work “pseudo-academic xenophobic rubbish” and called for national protests against Harvard University and publisher Simon & Schuster.
Even those sympathetic to Huntington’s anxiety about Mexican immigration stood their distance. Alan Wolfe said that at times Huntington’s writing bordered on hysteria, and that he appeared to be endorsing white nativism. The editors of the British magazine The Economist questioned Huntington’s notion of Anglo Protestant culture, noting that it had been “a long time since the Mayflower.” And Patrick Buchanan gently chided the professor for joining the anti-immigrant resistance at such a “late hour,” but welcomed him, anyway, to the Alamo.
Who is Huntington? A Harvard professor and chair of its Academy of International and Area Studies, founder of Foreign Policy, past president of the American Political Science Association, and most importantly, former coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council in the late 1970s. In short, he is not just some loopy professor. He is a policy analyst with direct ties to the political, military, and academic networks concerned with foreign policy and now with “homeland security.” His conjectures, however bizarre and unfounded, unfortunately carry some weight.
Much of his reputation comes from his best-selling book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster), published in 1996. In that book, Huntington noted that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, culture now counted more than ideology, and that as societies with cultural affinities cooperated with each other, a civilization-based world order was emerging. In this post-Cold War environment, local politics was the politics of ethnicity, global politics the politics of civilizations. Of special concern were the efforts of “Islamic and Confucian states” to develop “weapons of mass destruction.” With Gulf War I as his backdrop, Huntington forecast a “clash of civilizations” between the Muslim world and the Western one. The events of 9/11 made Huntington appear to be prophetic.
Although his focus was on the global arena, Huntington was already sounding the alarm about the internal challenges to Western culture “from immigrants from other civilizations.” “While Muslims pose the immediate problem in Europe, Mexicans pose the problem for the United States,” he noted in the earlier book.
Given this background and the advance controversy, Huntington’s follow-up examination of the internal problems of the United States turns out to be rather disappointing. The sequel to The Clash is a rambling, repetitive book of 400 pages. One gets the impression that much of the text was tape-recorded and then embellished with references and footnotes. It appears that the advance article, like the hyped-up preview of a weak movie, contained the best dramatic lines.
More troubling is the careless reasoning reflected by such casual writing. One would think that the presentation of such a provocative argument—the identification of a potential enemy in our midst—would require some fairly strong documentation and reasoned analysis. But Huntington is content to play loosely with the facts.
He places considerable attention, for example, on the challenge to the English language presented by Hispanics. Yet he acknowledges that “over 90 percent of the U.S.-born people of Mexican origin spoke English fluently.” So he attempts to shore up his argument by “supposing” that with the rapid expansion of the Mexican immigrant community, people of Mexican origins would have less incentive to become fluent in and to use English.
Huntington engages in the same kind of “supposing” when he turns to intermarriage, usually the clincher as a marker of assimilation. Here again he chooses to ignore contrary data. Acknowledging that the intermarriage rate for third-generation Hispanics as a whole is 33.2 percent, he supposes that specific Mexican intermarriage rates “are probably lower” because “members of large, low-status, geographically concentrated groups” are more likely to marry within the group. Moreover, one would further suppose that:
As the absolute number of Mexican immigrants increase and their high birth rate produces still larger numbers of offspring, one would expect the opportunities and incentives for them to marry each other to increase.
He concludes, rather dismissively, that “Mexicans marry Mexicans.” What Huntington does not report, although he has the data in his hands, is that the intermarriage rate for third-generation-plus Latinos in Los Angeles County was 57 percent! In other words, over half of the third-generation-plus in Los Angeles, the epicenter of his feared reconquista, is marrying outside the group. Huntington deliberately ignores contrary data.
He claims that his argument is “not about race or ethnicity” but about culture. Yet Hispanic culture in his mind is an unchanging, sealed-off, homogeneous entity. His worry about “soaring” Mexican fertility rates betrays his supposition that the children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants will remain culturally “Mexican.” In fact, Huntington recognizes few distinctions between Mexican immigrants and “Mexican Americans not born in Mexico.” Indeed Hispanics of all types—Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, rich and poor, Republican and Democrat—are suspect in Huntington’s mind.
The wealthy Republican Cubans of Miami, for example, draw his ire because they transformed “a normal American city” into “an enclave city with its own cultural community and economy, in which assimilation and Americanization were unnecessary and in some measure undesired.” As went Miami, so could go Los Angeles and the Southwest. In spite of his bemoaning the lagging educational and economic progress of Mexican Americans, Huntington is actually more concerned that they might follow the Cuban model and become a political and economic force.
What also becomes apparent is that his disquiet with the Hispanic presence is not really about the acquisition of English and American culture. He is concerned about the persistence of bilingualism and biculturalism. As proof of loyalty to this country, Hispanics must reject Spanish. Thus he chastises Republican millionaire and Bush confidante Lionel Sosa (of San Antonio) for encouraging Hispanic entrepreneurs to dream the “Americano dream.” Sosa is wrong, declares Huntington:
There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.
A final note about assimilation concerns fighting in America’s wars. Huntington writes that the success of the Americanization movement of the early 20th century became manifest “when the immigrants and their children rallied to the colors and marched off to fight their country’s wars.” In his clumsy but revealing language:
wars have furthered assimilation of immigrants not only by reducing their numbers but also by giving them the opportunity and the impetus to demonstrate their loyalty to America.
This is an important point. But if fighting in America’s wars is a key indicator of assimilation, why didn’t Huntington ascertain the service record of Mexican Americans? The estimated half-million Mexican Americans who fought in WWII, and the one-hundred-thousand-plus who fought in Korea, Vietnam, and now in Iraq deserve some recognition from this Cold War scholar. The most prominent Mexican American soldier lately has been Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, until recently the commanding general of the armed forces in Iraq. I wonder if he is bilingual or if he dreams in Spanish.
One discussion that I find intriguing in Huntington’s wide-ranging book concerns the possibility of an “exclusivist” scenario, where a movement of “native white Americans” revives an America that excludes and suppresses those who are not white or European. He mentions the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and compares this (again, rather clumsily) to the situation in California. While saying that California whites will not react like the Serbs, he notes the referenda against illegal immigrants, affirmative action, and bilingual education, and the movement of whites out of the state. Then he adds ominously, “As the racial balance continues to shift and more Hispanics become citizens and politically active, white groups may look for other means of protecting their interests.”
Unlike the Mexican cultural threat, which he fears, he seems to understand these white nativists: Their movements are “a possible and plausible [emphasis added] response to these trends, and in situations of serious economic downturn and hardship they could be highly probable.” Is this an endorsement or hurried writing?
It is apparent that this Harvard professor has just taken note of the Southwest and its large Mexican presence. Does he know any Mexicans? Has he heard of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the most prominent Latino civic organization in the country, which has been advocating for the development of patriotic, English-speaking citizens since the 1920s? Or more to the point, why hasn’t he done his research? Huntington seems unaware that transnationalism, bilingualism, biculturalism, and a concentrated Mexican presence have been facts of border life since the region was annexed more than 150 years ago. Applying the East Coast immigrant experience to the Southwest doesn’t work quite so neatly. Nonetheless, the readily available evidence demonstrates that “Mexican Americans not born in Mexico” speak English fluently, intermarry frequently, are often economically successful, and loyally fight in America’s wars.
There is much more to criticize in this thick book about America’s national identity. His history of Anglo Protestantism as the cultural foundation for the “American Creed” of freedom, justice, and fair opportunity, for example, is much romanticized. American Protestantism has not had one simple face. In fact, one can speak of several Protestantisms, much as one can speak of several Catholicisms and Judaisms. In the 19th century, a militant form of Protestantism on a “holy mission” easily morphed into “manifest destiny.” There was the Protestantism that abetted and sanctified slavery, just as there was the Protestantism of the abolitionists. In the 1920s, there was the Protestantism of a revitalized KKK, just as in the 1960s Protestantism—both of the Anglo and African-American variety—underlay much of the civil rights movement. There is no discussion of these different Protestantisms in Huntington’s book.
He says that his book is about Anglo Protestant culture, not about the people. Yet the distinction often seems academic. He employs the phrase “native Americans” to refer to the “charter group” of English settlers and their descendants: “The American people who achieved independence in the late eighteenth century were few and homogeneous: overwhelmingly white (thanks [emphasis added] to the exclusion of blacks and Indians from citizenship), British, and Protestant, broadly sharing a common culture.” European immigrants who arrived afterwards, including Catholics, eventually became part of this “native American” core once they were “Protestantized.” The contrast of this experience with that of African- American Protestants is never explored.
And American Jews? Huntington says surprisingly little about Judaism, except to use the words of Irving Kristol to remind us that we live in a Christian nation, “a fact they [the Jews] must accept.” There is no fluffy “Judeo-Christian” language in Huntington. His book is a stern warning that if America is to remain strong, we must recommit to Christianity, speak English only, maintain a European cultural heritage, and heed the principles of the Creed.
In spite of the sermonizing tone of Who Are We?, it is important to remember that this is the work of a seasoned national security specialist. When Huntington writes that the collapse of the Soviet Union left America “for the first time in its history” with no enemy and without any clear “other” against which to define itself, one senses that he is talking about himself and perhaps his cohort at the NSC. This Cold War scholar has projected his sense of loss, as well as his view of religiosity, onto an American society, which of course he must protect. Thus Huntington is on guard to seek out and identify our country’s new enemies. He believes he has found one in the Hispanic presence, but what he has found is a caricature of his own making. His carelessly documented finding can only be described as a “failure of intelligence.”
Sociologist and historian David Montejano is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A former director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT-Austin, he is the author of Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986.
***
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI MAY 28, 2004, New York Times
Books of the Times; An Identity Crisis for Norman Rockwell America
WHO ARE WE? The Challenges to America's National Identity
By Samuel P. Huntington
428 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Samuel P. Huntington's 1996
book ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order'' became a best
seller. Its thesis was that in a post-cold war world, conflicts between cultures would
replace conflicts between nation-states and conflicts between ideologies.
Mr. Huntington's portentous new book looks at the flip side of that thesis: if
peoples and countries with similar cultures (that is, values, traditions, religions) are coming together, then countries made up of different cultures are in danger of
coming apart. He argues in ''Who Are We?'' that multiculturalism, diversity and
bilingualism in the United States are strengthening racial, ethnic and other
''subnational identities'' at the expense of an overarching national identity, while
global business ties, global communications and global concerns (about matters like the environment and women's rights) are increasingly promoting ''transnational'' identities among American elites.
As a result, Mr. Huntington suggests, the United States is not only undergoing a
profound identity crisis, but it may eventually find its very existence threatened:
''Historically the substance of American identity has involved four key components: race, ethnicity, culture (most notably language and religion), and ideology,'' he writes. ''The racial and ethnic Americas are no more. Cultural America is undersiege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community. Reasons could exist, as Robert Kaplan observed, why 'America, more than any other
nation, may have been born to die.' ''
In laying out these ideas, Mr. Huntington -- a Harvard professor and chairman
of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies -- has written a
crotchety, overstuffed and highly polemical book.
Like its predecessor, this book tries to grapple with huge, sweeping social and
political developments, but turns out to be a considerably more shopworn volume, recycling arguments made by a wide array of earlier thinkers, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Nathan Glazer to S. I. Hayakawa, while glossing masses of research with decidedly subjective analysis. Many of its arguments feel like leftovers from the 1980's and 90's, when debates about multiculturalism and core curriculums were all the rage; an era that feels strangely distant given the post-9/11 surge of patriotism and the more recent red state-blue state divisions of this war-torn campaign year.
Mr. Huntington writes, he says, ''as a patriot and a scholar,'' and his book clearly
interprets facts, polling data and historical events in light of his own firmly held
beliefs: namely that the United States is defined ''in large part by its Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity,'' that Americans ''should recommit themselves'' to those values, and that old-fashioned cultural assimilation played (and should continue to play) a major role in America's success.
In what is by far this book's most alarmist chapter, Mr. Huntington contends
that ''the continuation of high levels of Mexican and Hispanic immigration plus the
low rates of assimilation of these immigrants into American society and culture
could eventually change America into a country of two languages, two cultures, and two peoples.'' He writes that illegal immigration is a ''threat to America's societal security,'' and snidely adds that ''Mexican-Americans will share'' in the American dream ''only if they dream in English.''
In another chapter Mr. Huntington argues that two currently popular attitudes -
- cosmopolitanism (in which ''the world reshapes America'') and imperialism (in
which ''America remakes the world'') -- fail to reflect the state of the early-21st-century world, as both notions ''attempt to reduce or to eliminate the social, political, and cultural differences between America and other societies.'' What he seems to be proposing instead is a sort of neo-isolationist nationalism in which ''the American
identity that has existed for centuries'' is preserved and strengthened.
Mr. Huntington tries to drive these ideas home by delivering what amounts to a
400-page PowerPoint presentation. Every argument is neatly divided into an
arbitrary series of parts, each phenomenon given a neatly enumerated series of
causes and consequences. We are told that there are four challenges to America's
core Anglo-Protestant culture and its political Creed of liberty and democracy, four phases to the evolution of America's national identity, three ways of responding to potential threats posed by immigration, three important consequences to sustained high levels of immigration, and so on and so on.
This schematic approach is reductive in the extreme, turning enormously
complex, often ambiguous developments into bite-size entries on a flow chart, and it seems especially unsuited to grappling with the sort of broad historical and social developments that Mr. Huntington has tackled in this volume.
In fact ''Who Are We?'' is riddled with gross generalizations: ''Immigrants
become citizens'' today, Mr. Huntington writes, ''not because they are attracted to
America's culture and Creed, but because they are attracted by government social
welfare and affirmative action programs.'' And equally questionable assertions: ''The past difficulties, discomforts, costs, risks, and uncertainties of migrating to the United States have now largely evaporated. Contemporary immigrants may have the grit, determination, and commitment of previous immigrants, but they do not have to have them.''
This book is also pockmarked with perplexing contradictions and curiously
blindered observations. Early on Mr. Huntington writes that ''crises of national
identity have become a global phenomenon,'' but later states that ''nationalism is
alive and well in most of the world.'' He spends a lot of time arguing that Americans today are increasingly religious and increasingly worried about a moral crisis in the country, but fails to reconcile such observations with evidence of a more laissez-faire attitude, from Bill Clinton's continuing popularity post-Monica-gate to the lucrative celebrity enjoyed by Paris Hilton in the wake of her much-talked-about sex video.
''Who Are We?'' may want to be provocative the way ''The Clash of Civilizations'' was, but in the end it simply rehashes a lot of familiar debates about immigration, religion and WASP culture, while injecting them with a bellicose new spin.
***
The last throes of patriotism
Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity; Samuel P. Huntington; Simon & Schuster: 428 pp., $27
May 02, 2004|Jim Sleeper, Los Angeles Times
With the publication of this, his thirteen book, the magisterial, sometimes dyspeptic Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has once again indulged - nay, has stage managed - his inclination to administer jolts of counterintuitive, debate-changing Truth to distracted American elites. Once again, establishment players of many stripes are swooning in dismay at his dark revelations or girding up their loins to join him in another long, twilight battle for Western civilization. Once again, Huntington is arrestingly right about challenges facing liberal democracy that many liberals have been loath to acknowledge.
But never before has so big a part of his argument been so thunderously wrong and so cheaply sustained. Those who value his chastening realism about liberalism's dicey prospects will have to work hard to follow his most important insight in Who We Are?: that American cosmopolitans who would like to dispense with nations and multiculturalist zealots who would like to dismantle them have converged with American multinational profiteers to fray the fabric of liberal democracy, which only a renewed civic patriotism here at home can sustain. This argument, eminently worth arguing about, has already been overshadowed by another: about Huntington's ill-conceived, crotchety and (pardon the word) undocumented jeremiad against Latino immigration.
The distraction is the fault of Huntington the stage manager as much as of Huntington the thinker. In 1993, to prompt a national debate about themes that would figure in his 1996 book, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," he published a Foreign Affairs essay of virtually the same title highlighting his most important warning: The economic, ideological and nationalist rivalries that most global analysts and activists presumed were driving world affairs would soon be eclipsed by deep cultural and religious differences among civilizations. He foresaw the ferocity of our conflict with Islamicist terrorists and warned against the American unilateralism and moralism that have been brought to bear on it, widening the civilizational divide.
Huntington didn't clearly define these civilizations; he seemed unsure whether Latin America is a distinct civilization or is part of the West. Two months ago he seemed to answer the latter question by heralding Who We Are? with an essay in Foreign Policy, this one called "The Hispanic Challenge." It has made the book a lightning rod for the least credible of his warnings: America's Latino immigration deluge, he claims, is so little like any earlier wave, so hostile or resistant to sharing the common American language, civic rites and virtues upon which our republican self-governance depends, that it constitutes "a major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the United States." If this clash isn't civilizational, what is?
The problem is that, most likely, it isn't, and Who We Are? doesn't persuade this reader that most Latino immigration is a threat to liberal democracy. Two months ago, Huntington also published (in the conservative journal National Interest) a less-noted essay, "Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite," whose title and contents come from another, smaller section toward the end of the book. Contradicting his own claims that the Latino tidal wave is shifting the balance of American political culture against patriotism, he announces, "A major gap is growing in America between its increasingly denationalized [academic, corporate and cultural] elites and its 'Thank God for America' public." The latter, he reports, has remained consistently patriotic over time, even as the former "reject expressions of patriotism and explicitly define themselves as multinational…. The CIA … can no longer count on the cooperation of American corporations … [which] view themselves as multinational and may think it not in their interests to help the U.S. government." And we're supposed to wring our hands instead about Mexican immigrants?
He opens Who Are We? by admitting he's too close to our crisis of American identity to address it only as a scholar; he's writing also as a patriot to defend a distinctive "Anglo-Protestant" political culture, which he believes is indispensable to republican self-governance here. Anyone of any race or ethnic background can join this "nonracial society composed of multiracial individuals," but only after having absorbed and adapted - or been absorbed into - the enduringly Anglo-Protestant idiom and ethos that most Americans of all colors and ethnicities do share but which, he says, most Latino immigrants resist.
But Huntington is disappointingly dull in evoking the Anglo-Protestant civic nationalism he wants to defend. These sections are as potted and derivative as an undistinguished term paper. "Eighty-five percent of Americans … cited their 'governmental, political institutions' as that aspect of their country of which they were the most proud, compared with 46 percent of Britons, 30 percent of Mexicans, 7 percent of Germans, and 3 percent of Italians. For Americans, ideology trumps territory." Endless recitations like this trump reader engagement.
Sometimes his flinty realism yields observations as arresting as they may be uncongenial: "America was created as a Protestant society just as and for some of the same reasons Pakistan and Israel were created as Muslim and Jewish societies in the twentieth century." This is classic Huntington - an understatement so true it makes us realize how much we have forgotten. (It also makes me wonder if he understands how much we have changed.) He chooses interestingly among familiar culinary metaphors for American civic identity, rejecting "melting pot" (too monolithic and suppressive of legitimate differences) and "tossed salad" (too diffuse) for a sturdy Anglo-Protestant "tomato soup," to which new arrivals contribute croutons and distinctive spices without changing its basic constitution.
Most new Americans have been glad to do this, but Huntington turns the holdouts' own words against them with a trademark sang-froid: Writers such as the black nationalist Harold Cruse declared that "America is a nation that lies to itself about who and what it is. It is a nation of minorities ruled by a minority of one - it thinks and acts as if it were a nation of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants." To which Huntington responds, Kabuki-like: "These critics are right." Then he says that Anglo-Protestant conformity, which absorbed people of many colors and faiths into a common identity that made possible the New Deal, the war against fascism and the rise of a new middle class, has "benefited them and the country."
Why doesn't it do so now? Here he sounds diversionary and at times testy. Pondering widespread adoption of the name "African American" over "black" in the 1980s, he writes, "Given the pervasive penchant of Americans to prefer single-syllable over multi-syllable names for almost everything, this high and growing popularity of a seven syllable, two-word name over a one-syllable, one-word name is intriguing and perhaps significant." As is Huntington's own preference for the eight-syllable "white Anglo-Saxon Protestant" over "WASP" to denote his own ethno-religious group.
He doesn't take black Americans seriously in this book, by whatever name. It was the black civil rights movement that made Huntington's Anglo conformism even possible for millions of nonwhites, and yet he takes no cues from that breakthrough and its subsequent breakdowns: The fabric of American civic trust has been nowhere more severely tried than in blacks' cultural, electoral, legal and public psycho-dramatic renderings of disaffection with white America.
Nor does Huntington examine such Latino responses to black disaffection as a 1992 editorial in San Diego's Mexican American newspaper La Prensa that declared Latinos the new "bridge between blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos." Latinos, the editorial said, "will have to bring an end to class, color, and ethnic warfare. To succeed, they will have to do what the blacks failed to do: incorporate all into the human race and exclude no one."
If Huntington wants "a non-racial society composed of multiracial individuals," shouldn't he reach for those Latino immigrants whose notions of race are more fluid and ecumenical than those of most blacks and whites, locked together for so long in a brutal embrace? Mightn't they lead in renewing the quasi-ethnic bondings of an American civic culture that, shorn of racist exclusions, could ask more of citizens than does the current ethnic pandering in commercialism and demagoguery?
There's no denying Huntington's observations about the uniqueness of the 2,000-mile-long border that (barely) separates Mexico's northern states from its former provinces in the United States, or that Mexican and other Latino immigrants' sheer numbers and concentration bring them linguistic and political hegemony, not only in southern Texas and California but also in Miami and parts of New York.
But he conflates demographic and political developments through intuition, stray anecdotes, newspaper stories and poll after vapid poll, whose findings are often contradictory: At times the gaps between Latinos and the rest of us in patriotism and perception are growing; at other times the American public - already 12.5 percent Latino, thanks to immigration that is 50 percent Latino - is maintaining its patriotism, defying cosmopolitan and capitalist elites. He can't have this both ways and describe a Latino "reconquista" of former Spanish territories in California, Texas and Florida that is "well underway."
Although he gives no evidence of having left a metaphorical armchair, Huntington sometimes writes as if he's just returned from a visit like the ones Henry James made to Eastern European Jewish immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he concluded that the Yiddish- speaking "hard glitter of Israel" could never be truly American. And Huntington glosses the tortuous reception of peasant, supposedly anti-republican, "papist" waves of Irish Catholics, and of Germans in the Midwest who long resisted efforts to impose English.
Not surprisingly, the public and private bureaucrats in our vast, national race industry are lambasting Huntington's claims. Some have noted quite rightly that American forces in Iraq are commanded by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who grew up in one of the dirt-poor, 98 percent-Latino counties in Texas that prompted Huntington's quasi-civilizational despair. But they and Huntington's Latino "nationalist" critics ignore his condemnation of American interventions abroad, such as the very war Sanchez is fighting. That skews debate about who we are as a nation. (It also misses the possibility that Huntington would be relieved if his pessimism about Latinos' becoming full Americans provoked enough of them to prove him wrong.) Keeping him busy answering charges of racism only spares him the trouble of having to own up to his book's anti-corporate arguments and implications.
For example, even as he angers multiculturalist activists by condemning the Ford Foundation's national "diversity" crusades - on the grounds that a country as diverse as ours should work overtime to deepen some common bonds - he also condemns Ford Motor Co., one of the corporations he tells us no longer describes itself as American and has non-Americans as top executives. The company, even more than the foundation, drives what he bemoans as the "deconstruction" of civic patriotism. That's a point worth developing, as are his criticisms of such enemies of civic trust as these companies' intrusive culture of consumer marketing and what he considers our government's faux-patriotic interventions abroad.
Huntington's condemnation of the latter, in which some honorable conservatives are now joining, is squarely in the tradition of his Harvard predecessors William James and Charles Eliot Norton, and of Andrew Carnegie and Carl Schurz, who opposed the Spanish-American War on republican grounds. And since he's writing about clashes between Mexican and American identities, why not examine Woodrow Wilson's disastrous, humiliating efforts to impose "democracy," Iraq-like, in Mexico in 1917?
Why doesn't he ponder the irony that George W. Bush and Jeb Bush, two of this country's most prominent "Anglo-Protestant" political leaders, accept the corporate defections from America and, in the former Spanish territories, including Texas, Florida and California, bear responsibility for immigration policies that Huntington would tighten and enrich with stronger civic socialization?
When the venerable black former U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in 1995, she called for just such programs to induct immigrants more fully into American civic life. She noted that the word "Americanization" had "earned a bad reputation when it was stolen by racists and xenophobes in the 1920s…. But it is our word and we are taking it back." Shouldn't Huntington join Jordan's successors against both facile multiculturalists and caste-forming, low-wage employers, instead of sniping at blacks and uttering dire prophecies about Latinos? This book and the way he has promoted it suggest he isn't up to the challenge.
***
Roy Hattersley, The Guardian, Sun 6 Jun 2004
Who Are We? America's Great Debate
by Samuel Huntington
Free Press £18.99, pp320
Secure in our ancient heritage, we British have only just begun to think about our national identity. Even now, with immigration and asylum exciting passions out of all proportion to these issues' effects on society, we do little more than worry about alien influences damaging an ethos which we can recognise but have never bothered to define. So, on this side of the Atlantic, 'America's great debate' on what it means to be American sounds like the self-indulgence of an insecure people. Perhaps it is.
But what the remaining superpower thinks of itself determines how it relates to the rest of the world. That - apart from the intrinsic merits of careful scholarship and elegant style - is what makes Samuel Huntingdon's Who Are We? essential reading.
Its subjects are the importance that Americans attach to being American, what they think they have in common with other Americans and what distinguishes Americans from the rest of humanity. Religion is becoming an increasingly important part of each equation. 'Muslim hostility encourages Americans to define their identity in religious and cultural terms, just as the Cold War promoted political and creedal definitions of that identity.' Huntingdon has invented the word 'creedal'. But the noun from which it is derived plays an important part in the analysis of what unites the United States.
The Creed is the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers. It includes liberty under God, human rights (at least for humans within the Creed's culture), the rule of law and representative government. It is irrevocably associated with 'the English language... and the dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic and the belief that humans have a duty to build a heaven on earth'.
For 200 years, immigrants to America shared (or pretended to share) those ideals. They went to America to become Americans. Now the aspiration has changed. Mexicans 'can easily go back and forth to Mexico and maintain contact with their family and friends there'. Almost 250,000 of them migrated in the 1990s. Not unreasonably, they want to remain Mexican.
The problem of American nationality has been complicated by the moral agonies of the progressive minority. 'Liberal political beliefs fostered (among academics, intellectuals, journalists and others), feelings of guilt towards those whom they saw as victims of exclusion, discrimination and aggression.' Sympathy led to support for diversity. The old patterns of identity were increasingly regarded as symbols of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy.
The most famous of the old definitions is the 'melting pot' - an 18th-century notion popularised by a play of that name which captivated American audiences during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The immigrant 'left behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, received new ones from the new mode of life he had embraced, the new government he obeyed and the new rank he held'. The result was thought to be a unified, though not homogeneous, national identity.
The alternative concept, the 'Anglo-Protestant' model, is - according to Huntingdon's metaphor - tomato soup. 'Celery, croutons, spices, parsley and other ingredients' enrich the mixture. But it remains tomato soup. The society which that image illuminates is a more realistic prospect than the creation of a totally new cultural identity. But it became at least as objectionable to enlightened opinion as the melting-pot. 'A major gap developed between portions of America's elite and the bulk of the American people over the fundamental issue of what America is and what Americans should be.'
Huntingdon argues that the 'efforts by a nation's leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were quite possible without precedent in human history'. He qualifies that implied sympathy for uniformity with the explanation that he believes in 'the importance of the Anglo-Protestant culture... not the importance of Anglo-Protestant people'.
That may be a liberal view in the American context. But when the same principle is applied to different societies, difficulties arise. British Muslims increasingly believe that Islam should dictate their secular behaviour as well as their religious beliefs. In a free country they are entitled to live (as well as worship) according to their convictions. That may require no more than the guarantee of basic liberties. But if a nation allows, yet still overtly deplores, their minority position, the only possible result is increasing alienation for men and women who feel social outcasts. Many young British Muslims feel detached from British society.
Much of what Huntingdon writes will strike a chord with those British politicians who invented the idea of incomers swearing oaths of allegiance and learning about the mores of their adopted country. But, in this tight little, right little, island we imposed those obligations for pragmatic reasons. It is easier to live in Britain if you understand the British. The American search for identity is far more metaphysical. And therein lies its danger. If America believes itself to be the 'city on the hill' - Governor Winthrop's noble hope for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - it will regard much of the world as both morally deficient and in desperate need of being born again in the image of the United States.
Religious extremists, writes Huntingdon, are on the march - Islamic fundamentalists on the east and fundamental Christians in the United States. Asked who was his favourite political philosopher, President George W. Bush replied: 'Jesus, because he changed my life.' The events of 11 September 2001 changed America into a nation which bought 250,000 Stars and Stripes flags in one day. The nationalism which is a product of fear and the animosity which flows from moral certainty is a dangerous mixture. If you doubt it, read Who Are We?
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