When E. F. Hutton talks,” the famous TV ads for the financial firm once declared, “people listen.” No one is going to make TV ads on his behalf, but the same deserves to be said of Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, the most important political scientist in America. His last book, The Clash of Civilizations, forecast the civilizational tensions that became obvious to everyone in the post-9/11 world. When Huntington writes, people listen–or they should.
Huntington’s prodigious credibility makes his warning of the possible end of the United States as we know it in his new book, Who Are We?
, all the more alarming.
He writes that “few Americans now anticipate the dissolution of…the United States.” But few anticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union either. Huntington warns, “The greatest surprise might be if the United States in 2025 is still the country it was in 2000 rather than a very different country (or countries) with very different conceptions of itself and its identity.”
Huntington sees an America gripped in a “crisis of national identity.” What is that identity? It is partly based on what Huntington calls The Creed, our belief in liberty, democracy, individual rights, etc. But The Creed has a particular source: America’s Anglo-Protestant culture, which includes “the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create heaven on earth, a ‘city on the hill.’”
This culture forged a country where people from across the world could arrive and become rich, happy and free–if they assimilated. Huntington writes, “Throughout American history, people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values.” He notes that this is “an argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people.” The continued vibrancy of this culture is crucial for the country’s future. Without it, according to Huntington, The Creed that sprung from it is in danger of collapsing–thus eliminating the two fundamental supports of America as it has been defined for centuries.
But Anglo-Protestant culture has taken a pounding during the past three decades. From multiculturalism, which rejects the idea of a dominant culture. From the assertion of group identities based on race, ethnicity and gender. And from “denationalized” elites, hostile to America’s culture and determined to weaken it in myriad ways. “These efforts by a nation’s leaders,” Huntington writes, “to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.” All these forces have weakened the nation’s ability to assimilate immigrants, just as it is experiencing a massive, decades-long wave of immigration. Feeling less pressure to learn English or naturalize, the new, largely Mexican and Hispanic immigrants have been able to establish unassimilated ethnic enclaves.
Huntington worries that this dynamic could create “a country of two languages, two cultures, and two peoples,” as America’s distinctive culture and The Creed atrophy. Huntington hopes for a better future–for the sake of all of us. “Americans should,” he writes, “recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions, and values that for three and a half centuries have been embraced by Americans of all races, ethnicities, and religions and that have been the source of their liberty, unity, power, prosperity, and moral leadership as a force for good in the world.”
A world of grief awaits Huntington. He will inevitably be misunderstood and smeared. On the contrary, only a writer of Huntington’s stature has a chance to punch through the oppressive pieties surrounding these issues and force a forthright debate of them. Huntington says he undertook his new book in the spirit of “a patriot and scholar.” A courageous one.
–Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
(c)2003 King Features Syndicate