One English-speaking America.

AuthorHowell, Llewellyn D.
PositionWorld Watcher - Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity - Book Review

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON, the prescient author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order again has challenged readers with another controversial thesis in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. The earlier book became a classic debate in international political economy courses until Sept. 11, 2001 when Al Qaeda came down strongly on Huntington's side. A year after the publication of Who Are We?, the debate about Huntington's positions and immigration in general rages on in vitriolic fashion.

Huntington's argument is pretty straightforward: There is a core American identity and work ethic shaped by Anglo-Protestantism that underlies American political and economic success; the mass immigration of Hispanic and mainly Mexican peoples into the U.S. is undermining the culture that is a function of Anglo-Protestantism; that the heavy implantation of a second language (Spanish) presents communication difficulties that ultimately will be insurmountable; and that the divisive cultural nature of the polyglot society and the dissipation or the Anglo-Protestant ethic will result in a decline of the U.S.

His solution is not that Mexicans be prevented from immigrating to the U.S.--he recognizes that this still is a nation of immigrants--but that the U.S. elites should enforce assimilation in a planned and replicative way. Only assimilation will provide for a continuing and competitive state.

For those who are longtime readers of Huntington, his crafted and coherent arguments are easily recognizable. Most of his critics respond emotionally and bitterly. They would not if Huntington had not come close to the mark.

Ordinary Americans clearly are expressing the very nativist sentiments he describes, emotional reactions that we have seen evoked in other societies where multiple cultures have not merged into multiculturalism and separate languages have not coexisted as multilingualism. These failures at integration litter the global landscape.

In his argument, Huntington gives considerable emphasis to the unique qualities of Anglo-Protestantism, including "Individualism and the Work Ethic" as they have contributed to economic success in the West. Much of the criticism fails to convince when it is given in the context of ideological pluralism, without any empirical basis for arguing that successful societies can shed the very attributes that made them successful, or that cultures cannot be differentiated in terms of their...

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