PATRIOT GAMES:The new nativism of Samuel P. Huntington.

LOUIS MENAND. The New Yorker. New York: May 17, 2004. Vol. 80, Iss. 12; p.
092

In polls conducted during the past fifteen years, between ninety-six and
ninety-eight per cent of all Americans said that they were "very" proud or
"quite" proud of their country. When young Americans were asked whether they
wanted to do something for their country, eighty-one per cent answered yes.
Ninety-two per cent of Americans reported that they believe in God.
Eighty-seven per cent said that they took "a great deal" of pride in their
work, and although Americans work more hours annually than do people in
other industrialized countries, ninety per cent said that they would work
harder if it was necessary for the success of their organization. In all
these categories, few other nations of comparable size and economic
development even come close. By nearly every statistical measure, and by
common consent, Americans are the most patriotic people in the world.

Is there a problem here? Samuel P. Huntington, who provides these figures in
his new book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity"
(Simon & Schuster; $27), believes that there is. The problem is the tiny
fraction of Americans in whom national pride, patriotic loyalty, religious
faith, and regard for the work ethic might possibly be less than
wholehearted. He has identified these people as the heads of transnational
corporations, members of the liberal lite, holders of dual citizenship,
Mexican-Americans, and what he refers to as "deconstructionists." He thinks
that these groups are responsible for an incipient erosion of national
identity, a development that he views with an alarm that, while it is
virtually unqualified, is somewhat underexplained. Although the erosion of
national identity at the hands of multiculturalists and liberal lites is
something that people were fretting and fighting about five or ten years
ago, a lot of the conviction leaked out of the argument after the attacks of
September 11th. This is partly because the public response to the attacks
was spontaneously and unequivocally patriotic, suggesting that the divisions
animating the so-called "culture wars" ran less deep than the cultural
warriors supposed, and partly because the cultural pluralism that had once
seemed threatening became, overnight, an all but official attribute of
national identity. Inclusiveness turned out to be a flag around which
Americans could rally. It was what most distinguished us from them. The
reality, of course, is more complicated than the ideology, but the ideology
is what Huntington is worried about, and either his book is a prescient
analysis of trends obscure to the rest of us or he has missed the point.

Huntington's name for ideology is "culture." The advantage of the term is
that it embraces collective beliefs and assumptions that may not be explicit
most of the time; the trouble with it is that it is notoriously expansive.
Culture, ultimately, is everything that is not nature. American culture
includes American appetites and American dress, American work etiquette and
American entertainment, American piety and American promiscuityall the
things that Americans recognize, by their absence, as American when they
visit other countries. What Huntington wants to talk about is a specific
cluster of American beliefs, habits, assumptions, and institutions. He calls
this cluster "America's core culture." It includes, he says, "the Christian
religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English
language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government
power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music,"
plus "the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality,
individualism, representative government, and private property." ("Human
rights" was on the list in the copies sent to reviewers; it does not appear
in the finished book.) This, he maintains, is the culture of the original
European settlers; it is the culture to which, until the late twentieth
century, every immigrant group assimilated; and it is the culture that is
now imperilled.

Huntington's core values are rather abstract. It would probably take many
guesses for most of the Americans who score high in the patriotism surveys
to come up with these items as the basis for their sentiments. What
Americans like about their country, it seems fair to say, is the quality of
life, and if the quality of life can be attributed to "a legacy of European
art, literature, philosophy, and music" then Americans, even Americans who
would be hard-pressed to name a single European philosopher, are in favor of
those things, too.

It could be argued that Americans owe the quality of life they enjoy to
America's core culture, but Huntington does not argue this. He cares about
the core culture principally for its unifying effects, its usefulness as a
motive for solidarity. He is, in this book, not interested in values per se;
he is interested in national security and national power. He thinks that the
erosion or diffusion of any cluster of collective ideals, whatever those
ideals may be, leads to weakness and vulnerability.

Most readers who are not political scientists know Huntington from his book
"The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," which was
published in 1996, and which proposed that cultural differences would be the
major cause of global tension in the future. The book was translated into
thirty-three languages and inspired international conferences; its argument
acquired new interest and credibility after the attacks of 2001 and the
American response to them. Huntington's thesis could be taken as an answer
to Francis Fukuyama's idea of "the end of history." Historythat is,
conflicts among groupsdid not come to an end with the Cold War and the
demise of liberalism's main ideological opponent, Huntington argued. The
defeat of Communism did not mean that everyone had become a liberal. A
civilization's belief that its values have become universal, he warned, has
been, historically, the sign that it is on the brink of decline. His book
therefore appealed both to people in the West who were anxious about the
diversification or erosion of Western culture and to people outside the West
who wanted to believe that modernization and Westernization are neither
necessary nor inevitable.

The optimal course for the West in a world of potential civilizational
conflict, Huntington concluded, was not to reach out to non-Western
civilizations with the idea that people in those civilizations are really
like us. He thinks that they are not really like us, and that it is both
immoral to insist on making other countries conform to Western values (since
that must involve trampling on their own values) and nave to believe that
the West speaks a universal language. If differences among civilizations are
a perpetual source of rivalry and a potential source of wars, then a group
of people whose loyalty to their own culture is attenuated is likely to be
worse off relative to other groups. Hence his anxiety about what he thinks
is a trend toward cultural diffusion in the United States.

You might think that if cultural difference is what drives people to war,
then the world would be a safer place if every group's loyalty to its own
culture were more attenuated. If you thought that, though, you would be a
liberal cosmopolitan idealist, and Huntington would have no use for you.
Huntington is a domestic monoculturalist and a global multiculturalist (and
an enemy of domestic multiculturalism and global monoculturalism).
"Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes," as he put it in "The Clash of
Civilizations." The immutable psychic need people have for a shared belief
system is precisely the premise of his political theory. You can't fool with
immutable psychic needs.

"Who Are We?" is about as blunt a work of identity politics as you are
likely to find. It says that the chief reasonit could even be the only
reasonfor Americans to embrace their culture is that it is the culture that
happens to be theirs. Americans must love their culture; on the other hand,
they must never become so infatuated that, in their delirium, they seek to
embrace the world. "Who Are We?" would be less puzzling if Huntington had
been more explicit about the larger vision of global civilizational conflict
from which it derives. The new book represents a narrowing of that vision.
In "The Clash of Civilizations," Huntington spoke of "the West" as a
transatlantic entity. In "Who Are We?" he is obsessed exclusively with the
United States, and his concerns about internationalism are focussed entirely
on its dangers to us.

The bad guys in Huntington's scenario can be divided into two groups. One is
composed of intellectuals, people who preach dissent from the values of the
"core culture." As is generally the case with indictments of this sort,
recognizable names are sparse. Among those that do turn up are Bill Clinton,
Al Gore, the political theorist Michael Walzer, and the philosopher Martha
Nussbaum. All of them would be astonished to learn that they are
deconstructionists. (It is amazing how thoroughly the word "deconstruction"
has been drained of meaning, and by the very people who accuse
deconstruction of draining words of meaning.) What Huntington is talking
about is not deconstruction but bilingualism, affirmative action,
cosmopolitanism (a concept with which Nussbaum is associated), pluralism
(Walzer), and multiculturalism (Clinton and Gore). "Multiculturalism is in
its essence anti-European civilization," Huntington says. "It is basically
an anti-Western ideology."

He thinks that the deconstructionists had their sunny moment in the late
nineteen-eighties and early nineties, and were beaten back during the
culture wars that their views set off. They have not gone away, though. In
the future, he says, "the outcomes of these battles in the deconstructionist
war will undoubtedly be substantially affected by the extent to which
Americans suffer repeated terrorist attacks on their homeland and their
country engages in overseas wars against its enemies." The more attacks and
wars, he suggests, the smaller the deconstructionist threat. This may strike
some readers as a high price to pay for keeping Martha Nussbaum in check.

The other group in Huntington's analysis is composed of what could be called
the globalists. These are the new immigrants and the transnational
businessmen. The new immigrants are people who, as Huntington describes
them, "may assimilate into American society without assimilating the core
American culture." Many maintain dual citizenship (Huntington calls these
people "ampersands"); some do not bother to become American citizens at all,
since the difference between the benefits available to citizens and those
available to aliens has become smaller and smaller (a trend that originated,
Huntington notes, among "unelected judges and administrators"). In a society
in which multiculturalism is encouraged, the loyalty of these immigrants to
the United States and its core culture is fragile. What distinguishes the
new immigration from the old is the exponential increase in global mobility.
As Huntington acknowledges, it has always been true that not all immigrants
to the United States come to stay. A significant proportion come chiefly to
earn money, and eventually they return to the countries they were born in.
Transportation today is so cheap and available, though, that people can
maintain lives in two nations indefinitely.

Mobility is also what distinguishes the new businessmen, the transnationals.
These are, in effect, people without national loyalties at all, not even
dual ones, since they identify with their corporations, and their
corporations have offices, plants, workers, suppliers, and consumers all
over the world. It is no longer in Ford's interest to be thought of as an
American company. Ford's market is global, and it conceives of itself as a
global entity. These new businessmen "have little need for national loyalty,
view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see
national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function
now is to facilitate the elite's global operations," Huntington says. "The
distinction between America and the world is disappearing because of the
triumph of America as the only global superpower." This drives him into the
same perverse position he got himself into at the end of his attack on the
deconstructionists: it is better to have rivals than to be dominant. It is
good to compete, but it is bad to win. If we won, we would lose our national
identity. The position, though, is consistent with the argument Huntington
made in "The Clash of Civilizations"the argument that nation-states ought to
remain inside their own cultural boxes.

The most inflammatory section of "Who Are We?" is the chapter on Mexican
immigration. Huntington reports that in 2000 the foreign-born population of
the United States included almost eight million people from Mexico. The next
country on the list was China, with 1.4 million. Huntington's concern is
that Mexican-Americans (and, in Florida, Cuban-Americans) demonstrate less
motivation to learn English and assimilate to the Anglo culture than other
immigrant groups have historically, and that, thanks to the influence of
bilingualism advocates, unelected judges, cosmopolites, and a compliant
Congress, it has become less necessary for them to do so. They can remain,
for generations, within their own cultural and linguistic enclave, and they
are consequently likely to be less loyal to the United States than other
hyphenated Americans are. Huntington believes that the United States "could
change . . . into a culturally bifurcated Anglo-Hispanic society with two
national languages." He can imagine portions of the American Southwest being
ceded back to Mexico.

This part of Huntington's book was published first as an article in Foreign
Policy, and it has already provoked responses, many in the letters column of
that journal. Michael Elliott, in his column in Time, pointed out that in
the Latino National Political Survey, conducted from 1989 to 1990,
eighty-four per cent of Mexican-Americans expressed "extremely" or "very"
strong love for the United States (against ninety-two per cent of Anglos).
Ninety-one per cent said that they were "extremely proud" or "very proud" of
the United States. As far as reluctance to learn English is concerned,
Richard Alba and Victor Nee, in "Remaking the American Mainstream:
Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration" (Harvard; $39.95), report that in
1990 more than ninety-five per cent of Mexican-Americans between the ages of
twenty-five and forty-four who were born in the United States could speak
English well. They conclude that although Hispanic-Americans, particularly
those who live close to the border, may continue to speak their original
language (usually along with English) a generation longer than other groups
have tended to do, "by any standard, linguistic assimilation is widespread."

Huntington's account of the nature of Mexican immigration to the United
States seems deliberately alarmist. He notes, for example, that since 1975
roughly two-thirds of Mexican immigrants have entered illegally. This is the
kind of statistic that is continually cited to suggest a new and dangerous
demographic hemorrhaging. But, as Mae Ngai points out, in "Impossible
Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America" (Princeton; $35),
a work a hundred times more nuanced than Huntington's, the surge in illegal
immigration was the predictable consequence of the reform of the immigration
laws in 1965. In the name of liberalizing immigration policy, the new law
imposed a uniform quota on all countries, regardless of size. Originally,
Western Hemisphere countries were exempted from specific quotas, but the act
was amended in 1976, and Mexico was assigned the same annual quota (twenty
thousand) as, for example, Belgium. This effectively illegalized a large
portion of the Mexican immigrant population. "Legal" and "illegal," as
Ngai's book illustrates, are administrative constructions, always subject to
change; they do not tell us anything about the desirability of the persons
so constructed. (Ngai's analysis also suggests that one reason that
Asian-Americans are stereotyped by other Americans as products of a culture
that places a high value on education is that the 1965 immigration act gives
preference to applicants with professional skills, and, in the
nineteen-sixties and seventies, for reasons internal to their own countries,
many Asian professionals chose to emigrate. Like professionals from any
other culture, they naturally made education a priority for their children.)

Finally, some of Huntington's statistical claims are improperly derived.
"Three out of ten Hispanic students drop out of school compared to one in
eight blacks and one in fourteen whites," he says, and he cites other
studies to argue that Hispanic-Americans are less educationally assimilated
than other groups. Educational attainment is not an index of intellectual
capacity, though; it is an economic trade-off. The rate of high-school
graduation is in part a function of the local economy. For example,
according to the Urban Institute and the Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, Florida has one of the worst high-school graduation rates in the
United States. This may be because it has a service economy, in which you do
not need a diploma to get reasonably steady work. To argue that
Hispanic-Americans are disproportionately less likely to finish school, one
would have to compare them not with non-Hispanic Americans nationally but
with non-Hispanic Americans in the same region. Huntington provides no such
comparisons. He is cheered, however, by Hispanic-Americans' high rate of
conversion to evangelical Protestantism.

This brings us back to the weird emptiness at the heart of Huntington's
analysis, according to which conversion to a fundamentalist faith is counted
a good thing just because many other people already share that faith.
Huntington never explains, in "Who Are We?," why Protestantism, private
enterprise, and the English language are more desirable features of social
life or more conducive to self-realization than, say, Judaism, kibbutzim,
and Hebrew. He only fears, as an American, their transformation into
something different. But how American is that? Huntington's understanding of
American culture would be less rigid if he paid more attention to the actual
value of his core values. One of the virtues of a liberal democracy is that
it is designed to accommodate social and cultural change. Democracy is not a
dogma; it is an experiment. That is what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg
Addressand there is no more hallowed text in the American Creed than that.

Multiculturalism, in the form associated with people like Clinton and Gore,
is part of the democratic experiment. It may have a lot of shortcomings as a
political theory, but it is absurd to say that it is anti-Western. Its
roots, as Charles Taylor and many other writers have shown, are in the
classic texts of Western literature and philosophy. And, unless you are a
monoculturalist hysteric, the differences that such multiculturalism
celebrates are nearly all completely anodyne. One keeps wondering what
Huntington, in his chapter on Mexican-Americans, means by "cultural
bifurcation." What is this alien culture that threatens to infect
Anglo-Americans? Hispanic-American culture, after all, is a culture derived
largely from Spain, which, the last time anyone checked, was in Europe. Here
is what we eventually learn (Huntington is quoting from a book called "The
Americano Dream," by a Texas businessman named Lionel Sosa): Hispanics are
different because "they still put family first, still make room in their
lives for activities other than business, are more religious and more
community oriented." Pull up the drawbridge!

Insofar as multiculturalism has become, in essence, an official doctrine in
public education in the United States, its effects are the opposite of its
rhetoric. "Diverse" is what Americans are taught to call themselves as a
people, and a whole society cannot think that diversity is good and be all
that diverse at the same time. The quickest and most frictionless way to
nullify difference is to mainstream it. How culturally unified do Americans
need to be, anyway? In an analysis like Huntington's, a nation's strength is
a function of the strength of other nations. You don't need microchips if
every other country on the planet is still in the Stone Age. Just a little
bronze will do. But if the world is becoming more porous, more
transnational, more tuned to the same economic, social, and informational
frequencyif the globe is more global, which means more Americanizedthen the
need for national cultural homogeneity is lesser, not greater. The stronger
societies will be the more cosmopolitan ones.

Perhaps this sounds like sentimental internationalism. Let's be cynical,
then. The people who determine international relations are the political,
business, and opinion lites, not the populace. It is overwhelmingly in the
interest of those lites today to adapt to an internationalist environment,
and they exert a virtually monopolistic control over information,
surveillance, and the means of force. People talk about the Internet as a
revolutionary populist medium, but the Internet is essentially a marketing
tool. They talk about terrorist groups as representatives of a civilization
opposed to the West, but most terrorists are dissidents from the
civilization they pretend to be fighting for. What this kind of talk mostly
reveals is the nonexistence of any genuine alternative to modernization and
Westernization. During the past fifty years, the world has undergone two
processes. One is de-Stalinization, and the other is decolonization. The
second is proving to be much more complicated than the first, and this is
because the stamp of the West is all over the rest of the world, and the
rest of the world is now putting its stamp on the West. There are no
aboriginal civilizations to return to. You can regret the mess, but it's too
late to put the colors back in their jars.

And why isn't internationalism, as a number of writers have recently argued,
a powerful resource for Americans? The United States doesn't have an
exclusive interest in opposing and containing the forces of intolerance,
superstition, and fanaticism; the whole world has an interest in opposing
and containing those things. On September 12, 2001, the world was with us.
Because of our government's mad conviction that it was our way of life that
was under attack, not the way of life of civilized human beings everywhere,
and that only we knew what was best to do about it, we squandered our chance
to be with the world. The observation is now so obvious as to be banal. That
does not make it less painful.

The new nativism of Samuel P. Huntington.