BOOKS: By Ross Douthat Ross Douthat on Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity by Samuel Huntington
Samuel Huntington. Samuel
huntington is a Harvard professor and an
American patriot, categories less mutually exclusive than they
might at first glance appear. What makes Huntington an anomaly
among his intellectual peers is not his love of country but the brand of patriotism he
espouses — specifically, a deeply unfashionable belief that being
American has meant, and should continue to mean, more than
allegiance to the set of political principles that make up the
American creed. In Huntington’s view, Americans aren’t
just a people with a Constitution, but a people with a culture — a culture handed down from the English-speaking Protestants
who founded the republic three centuries ago, and a culture that is now
in danger of disappearing.
Huntington puts forward the case for this
understanding of America, and American-ness, in his latest book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s
National Identity, which has earned an
outraged, spluttering, Bell Curve-esque reception since its release this summer. In
the wake of the firestorm, actually reading the book is a peculiar
experience, akin to sifting through a haystack of cautious,
uninflammatory prose in search of a needle of controversy. The
reader is conditioned to expect a jeremiad, but Huntington has
produced a mild book — a careful, dryly written book —
and a book whose diagnosis of the present American situation seems
inarguable, if its prognosis leaves something to be desired.
Throughout our history, Huntington argues,
America has been understood to be more than a vast “nation of
immigrants” united only by their allegiance to the Bill of
Rights. In point of fact, the first Americans were not
“immigrants” at all, but rather “settlers”
who planted a preexisting society and culture on the
seventeenth-century Atlantic coast. This distinction is crucial for
Huntington, who insists that it is the initial settler culture
— English in language and custom, Protestant in religious
inclination — into which every subsequent immigrant group has
assimilated, losing their own particular identity in a general
Anglo-Protestant sea.
Of course, the story of America is more than
simply a matter of ethnic group after ethnic group dropping its old identity
in favor of a static Anglo-Protestant American-ness — as
Huntington sometimes implies. Even in the colonial era, it was the
American colonies’ willingness to welcome a wide pool of foreign
immigrants that distinguished them from rival colonies, where only
subjects of the ruling monarch, French or Spanish, were permitted to
settle. But this caveat aside, the core of Huntington’s case is
convincing: “Americanization” has always required two
shifts, one from an ancestral language to English, and the other from
an ancestral religion either to Protestantism itself or to a
Protestantized version of the original faith (think of Reform Judaism
or “cafeteria Catholicism”).
Convincing, too, is Huntington’s
insistence that neither shift took place in a vacuum. During the
waves of industrial-era immigration, European immigrants became
Anglo-Protestant Americans in large part because of pressure from a
motley coalition of Progressive politicians, intellectuals, and
industrial leaders like Henry Ford, who sought to educate
immigrants in the language, mores, and civic ideals of their new
country. And there was pressure from within immigrant communities
as well, where the ethnic and religious leadership — bishops
and rabbis, politicians and bosses — often took the lead in
encouraging assimilation and in cultivating and celebrating
American nationalism.
The decade following World War ii marked the peak of
American national unity — in part, Huntington argues, because
of the unifying impact of a global conflict and in part because of
the 1920s
curtailment of immigration, which allowed the nation a breathing
space in which to fully assimilate its millions of new inhabitants.
But the peak was also the turning point and the beginning of a slow
fraying of the United States’ common culture that continues
to the present day.
To some extent — it’s here that
Huntington’s argument has generated the most critical
hand-wringing — this decline has been driven by an
unprecedented wave of immigration from a single country (Mexico)
with a single language (Spanish). In the nineteenth century, the
vast majority of immigrants arrived in the United States legally,
from countries with widely disparate languages and cultures,
separated from the American mainland in many cases by a thousand
miles of ocean and weeks of travel. As a result, as late as 1960 the
foreign-born population was divided nearly equally among a variety
of ethnicities — Italian, German, Canadian, English, and
Polish.
Today, by contrast, most immigrants cross into
the United States illegally — coming, as Huntington puts it,
from “a poor, contiguous country with more than a third the
population of the United States . . . across a two-thousand-mile
border marked historically simply by a line in the ground and a
shallow river.” Thus, the number of Mexican-born immigrants
— nearly eight million, by the 2000 census — dwarfs the next-largest
foreign-born group by nearly seven-to-one.
This population, all of whom speak the same
language and nearly half of whom inhabit a single state,
California, would have posed a challenge to assimilation in the
most nationalistic of eras. But the strain on American unity from
the wave of Mexican immigrants has been accompanied by pressure
from the American elite, which once labored to forge a national
identity and preserve a common culture, but has increasingly turned
its back on both.
Driven by a transnational, post-patriotic loss
of interest (among business elites) and a commitment to a
fashionable multiculturalism (among intellectuals, policymakers,
and the political leadership of immigrant communities),
America’s leaders have actively discouraged assimilation,
Huntington argues, by allowing the spread of dual citizenship, by
encouraging the maintenance of ethnic and linguistic enclaves, and
by doing almost nothing to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into
the Southwestern United States.
Huntington’s critics have hammered
him for a variety of supposed sins, but they have barely
disputed his portrayal of the American elite’s multicultural
and anti-assimilationist predilections, perhaps because these are
positions most of them share. Indeed, one suspects that these
prejudices — which see the specter of racism in any attempt
to talk seriously about immigration’s impact on the body
politic — are largely responsible for the overheated reviews,
whose hysteria is wildly disproportionate to the book’s
actual sins.
In fact, little of Huntington’s analysis
seems particularly controversial, or even particularly debatable.
His detractors have argued with his suggestion that Mexican rates
of assimilation — in language, education, and patriotism
— are lower than historical rates for earlier immigrant
groups, though he himself allows that the data are as yet too
sketchy to draw any definitive conclusions. They have accused
Huntington of conflating Hispanics and Mexicans, though he
explicitly distinguishes between them. Most outrageously, they have
claimed that he endorses a resurgence of white nativism when he
does no such thing.
It’s
a shame, because these knee-jerk
reactions haven’t just prevented critics from seeing the good
in Who Are We?, the uncomfortable truths that Huntington puts forward and
the important questions that he raises. They’ve also kept
them from recognizing the book’s major flaw, which lies not in its
analysis of where we find ourselves, but in its vision for where
America is likely to go from here.
This vision, Huntington’s vision, is at
once too optimistic and too dark — too sanguine about the
chances to arrest the decades-long transformation of
America’s national identity and too pessimistic about what
such a transformation portends for the country’s future.
His optimism places its hope for the future in
the common man, the average American, who is patriotic,
pro-assimilation, and still Anglo-Protestant in language and
custom. Despite the trend away from a common culture, the
“overwhelming bulk of the American people,” Huntington
insists, are committed “to preserving and strengthening the
American identity that has existed for centuries.”
This is true enough in theory — but many
of the problems facing the preservation of a common culture are
unlikely to disappear even with a renewed commitment to
America’s waning Anglo-Protestant identity. Even with a
reformed immigration system, for instance, Mexican-Americans would
still be more likely than previous migrants to enter the country
and create ethnic enclaves in the American Southwest, thanks to
Mexico’s economic weakness and its proximity to the United
States — and more likely as well to maintain what Huntington
labels “ampersand identities,” thanks to the speed of
modern travel and communication. Neither of these realities,
geographic and technological, can be wished or legislated away.
Similarly, the mass industrial economy in which
the earlier waves of immigration and assimilation took place has
largely disappeared, and with it the industrial barons who saw the
promotion of assimilation as being in their economic self-interest
and applied principles of the assembly line to citizen-making. Save
for the military, no institution with a similar interest in
Americanization exists today, and most economic incentives actually
push the other way. In an age of health benefits and the minimum
wage, the uneducated and undocumented alien is a boon to a thrifty
businessman; the Americanized, upwardly-mobile employee
isn’t.
Above all, though, Huntington offers no reason
to expect that the “overwhelming bulk of the American
people” can overcome the principal barrier to a revitalized
sense of national identity — specifically, the fact that the
large American ruling class, the prime movers of American society,
no longer sees itself as “American” in the sense that
Huntington desires.
Elite Americans still love their country, and
Huntington’s claim that they consider patriotism passé isn’t
quite fair, as anyone who has watched the aclu wrap itself in the
stars and stripes can attest. But they direct their love toward a
misty, unhistorical vision of America — an America that has
no common culture and perhaps no common language; an America with a
“wall of separation” between church and state; an
America that subordinates its foreign policy to various
multilateral institutions; an America, above all, where the very
term “American” is emptied of any meaning beyond
“one who lives within America’s borders.” Their
ideal nation resembles a federalized version of the United Nations
— an institution dear to many elite hearts — or a
peculiar variety of empire, in which American-governed but
essentially foreign provinces are created within the national
borders.
Such an elite is poorly equipped, if it were
inclined that way at all, to create the ambitious Americanization
programs that Huntington would presumably like to see, or to reform
the educational system to inculcate patriotism, or even to propose
and implement a serious reform of immigration law. And elite
attitudes are so deeply entrenched (extending as much to the
leadership of George Bush’s Republican Party as to John
Kerry’s Democrats) that it would take a groundswell indeed to
alter them.
The hope of a groundswell may be why Huntington
so often invokes military conflict — the only obvious source
for such a paradigm shift — as a crucible for national
identity. Indeed, one gets the sense, particularly in his
discussions of September 11 and its flag-waving aftermath, that some small part
of him even hopes for a grand international struggle, grander even than the
war on terror, to shake America from her drift away from nationalism.
But as Huntington himself would doubtless be
the first to admit, wars of the totalizing, paradigm-shaking kind
— the Revolution, the Civil War, the Second World War —
are neither desirable nor easily conjured. Nor would such a
conflict necessarily have a salutary impact on national unity. The
Cold War may be cited wistfully, by Democrats and Republicans
alike, as a time when “we knew who the enemy was.” But
the struggle with the Soviet Union tended to divide Americans as
much as unify them.
Even at this early date, one suspects that the
war on terror may eventually have a similarly negative effect on
attitudes toward patriotism and national identity. Imagine the
impact on the elite consciousness of a dozen Abu Ghraibs, extending
through the limitless years of a battle with an elusive foe. And we
at least won the
Cold War, whereas the outcome of the conflict with radical Islam is
far less certain.
But
if Huntington’s optimism is
unfounded, and the trends that he limns so well are not arrested, what
then will be the fate of the United States? It’s here,
unfortunately, that the tone of the book veers from sobriety to
alarmism. He notes darkly that unspecified
“Mexican-Americans” believe the Southwest “was
taken from them by military force in the 1840s, and that the time for la reconquista has
arrived”; he invokes an obscure academic who predicts the
foundation of a “Republica Del Norte” in the American
Southwest by the arbitrary date of 2080; he warns balefully that “the greatest
surprise might be if the United States in 2025 were still much the same
country it was in 2000 rather than a very different country (or
countries).” He compares the U.S. to Gorbachev’s Soviet
Union, speeding toward a political breakup — and then, more
egregiously still, to Yugoslavia, drawing a parallel between
California’s dwindling white majority and the Bosnian Serbs,
who resorted to ethnic cleansing to preserve their power.
By giving in to such alarmism, Huntington has
fallen into a trap common among those who map disquieting trends:
He conflates the impending disappearance of an America he loves
with the collapse of America itself. For people who share his
unfashionable form of patriotism, the problem is not that America
cannot continue on its present course, but rather that it can
— that the end of Huntington’s America will not mean
the end of America itself.
If Huntington’s hoped-for reaction
against “the challenges to America’s national
identity” fails to emerge, the likely alternative is not
political disunion — a Mexifornia, a Cuban-ruled Miami, a
Muslim Michigan. Rather, it’s a country like the one we
already have, except more so: a semi-bilingual America in which a
cosmopolitan and post-patriotic elite governs a shrinking middle
class and an ever-expanding, badly-assimilated population of
immigrants.
One need not share the more perfervid fantasies
of Pat Buchanan to worry that this emerging America is closer to a
democratic imperium than it is to the democratic republic of the
founding fathers. But while the term “empire” may be
redolent of decline and dissolution in this post-colonial age,
America’s position in the world has never been more secure
— her military and economic might unmatched, her supposed
rivals (China, Russia, the eu) weak and beset with internal contradictions, her
cultural power unparalleled. The threat of terrorism and the wave
of global opposition to U.S. policy are both challenges, to be
sure, but they are challenges that flow from American strength, not
from weakness or decay.
What decay there is lies within, in “the
challenges to America’s national identity” that
Huntington so ably describes. But there is nothing in the evidence
he marshals to suggest that the hour is late, nothing to justify
the specters of Soviet Russia and Yugoslavia that haunt his prose.
Even if the declinists are right and the United States is slowly
undergoing the transition from republic to empire that Rome once
endured, then we are doing so while maintaining remarkable domestic
tranquility and political continuity. And however grave the
challenges we face today, they are minor compared to those facing
our rivals — the spread of Islam in Europe, the mixture of
overpopulation and old age in East Asia, the political and
religious sclerosis of the Middle East — and minor, too,
compared to the challenges of racial strife, depression and civil
war that faced America in the past.
No, insulated by a professionalized military
and an overwhelming technological advantage, protected from foreign
threats (with the obvious exception of terrorism) by two oceans,
enriched by a strong economy and vast natural resources, there
seems no reason that America can’t continue in the direction
that so dismays Huntington for many years to come, without
forfeiting either political unity or global power. We are, and will
continue to become, a less unified country, a less orderly country,
and a less virtuous country than we once were — and
eventually, no doubt, a less prosperous and less powerful country
as well. But eventually can be a very long time. It was 500 years, after all, from
the fall of the Republic to the fall of Rome.
In the meantime, in this new dispensation,
people who hold to the earlier form of American patriotism —
people like Samuel Huntington, who has served this country so
wisely and so well — will need to decide whether the America
that we increasingly inhabit is an America they can continue to
love and call their own.
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