Who Are We?
The Challenges to America's National Identity
by Samuel P. Huntington
Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., $27

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is the author of some of the most important works of political science of this generation, ranging from Political Order in Changing Societies (1969) to The Clash of Civilizations (1998). His latest book, Who Are We?, is without question his most personal. Huntington has written this book not just as a scholar but as a patriot at a time when, according to Huntington, the nation is confronting an "identity crisis." The very unity and cohesiveness of the country are under siege, and the dominant trend--only "temporarily obscured" by Americans' response to the attacks of September 11--is toward national disintegration.

If creating and preserving a common identity is the most important element in maintaining a nation, then it is correct to focus an historical inquiry on two and only two essential moments: the seventeenth century, when "the core Anglo-Protestant culture" was established with the original settlement of North America, and the late twentieth century, when "the primacy of national identity came under challenge."

For the first four centuries, despite massive tides of immigration and enormous demographic shifts, America remained fundamentally the same, as newcomers sought these shores in order to assimilate into this culture. Only in our times has a new ethos emerged in which assimilation is no longer the clear objective. More and more people pass our frontiers with no intention of becoming citizens or embracing the American way of life. In this

As dangerous as this situation is, Samuel Huntington is not prepared to claim that America has arrived at a stage of inevitable decline. He is no Oswald Spengler or Paul Kennedy. Things can still be turned around. Nations under some circumstances are "capable of postponing their demise by halting and reversing the processes of decline and renewing their vitality and identity." Who Are We? is intended as Huntington's contribution to saving America.

THE MOST IMPORTANT CAUSE of national disintegration lies in the realm of ideas. Although an intellectual himself and a faculty member at Harvard University, an institution with considerable intellectual pretensions, he has not flinched from launching a frontal assault on the dominant opinion of the intelligentsia. Intellectuals, according to Huntington, have widely abandoned the concept of the nation. Their opposition manifests itself first in the movement that encourages primary identity with sub-national entities linked to racial and ethnic groups. Known as multiculturalism, this movement has promoted a sustained campaign in our schools against any form of civic education, having as its objective, in the typical jargon of one of its proponents, the transformation of the schools into "authentic culturally democratic sites" that give emphasis to the cultures of sub-national groups. But encouraging identification with these cultures hardly begins to describe the depth of multiculturalism's opposition to America. Its moving spirit, according to Huntington, is above all an animosity to Western civilization, which is regarded as the engine of oppression of all nonwhite peoples. Multiculturalism, writes Huntington, "is basically an anti-Western ideology."