"And You Know Nothing of My Work"

You may recall my April item concerning Alan Wolfe's labeling of Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? as "Patrick Buchanan with footnotes" in a Foreign Affairs review. Huntington sure noticed Wolfe's remarks, though probably not my blog, even though I went and gave him his own category without badness attached to his name, which is an honor only Christopher Ricks and Plum Sykes have managed... Anyway, as I was saying, Huntington saw the review, and boy is he pissed. And then he sets about explaining to readerss what his book's really about.

Central to American identity from the beginning has been the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Would America be the America it has been (and, in some measure, still is today) if it had been settled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.

"In addition," he claims, "for two and a half centuries, Americans defined themselves ethnically, first as British and then as northern European." That last bit must have been when Huntington remembered the Pennsylvania Dutch. After Huntington has his say, Wolfe shoots back that the book "is not a treatise on a fashionable academic concept. It is a cri du coeur lamenting the threat to American unity its author sees coming from immigrants, primarily those from Mexico" before noting that "American culture has never been uniformly Anglo-Protestant." Then Huntington pretty much calls Wolfe either a liar or an idiot.

Looking back at my original post on Wolfe's review, I wondered aloud then when the NYTBR was going to get around to reviewing this book. Unless I'm missing something in the archives, neither McGrath nor Tanenhaus ever assigned a review; Michiko panned it, but Sunday readers never found out about it...a glaring oversight considering Huntington's stature and the extent to which his earlier tomes have wound up shaping contemporary views in some establishment circles. And now it's probably too late--although if Tanenhaus wants to drop me a line, I'm right here!

Somebody, Somewhere, Must Have Liked Who Are We?

Michiko Kakutani is the latest addition to the dogpile on Samuel Huntington over Who Are We? After three opening paragraphs in which she appears to give the book's best argument for itself, she then reverses gears and calls it "crotchety, overstuffed and highly polemical."

Many of its arguments feel like leftovers from the 1980's and 90's, when debates about multiculturalism and core curriculums were all the rage; an era that feels strangely distant given the post-9/11 surge of patriotism and the more recent red state-blue state divisions of this war-torn campaign year.

And then she accuses him of "delivering what amounts to a 400-page PowerPoint presentation" (ouch!) on the need for "neo-isolationist nationalism," "riddled with gross generalizations" and "pockmarked with perplexing contradictions and curiously blindered observations." Ah, the joys of thesaurus ownership...

Just Out of Curiosity,
Is Anybody Going To Stick Up for This Guy at Some Point?

Samuel Huntington takes another drubbing for Who Are We?, as Robert Lovato "can't but wonder what awaits all Americans of Latin American descent as Huntington lunges into the domestic component of his perilous vision known as 'The Clash of Civilizations...'" Lovato then goes on to call the book psychological warfare, "another very dangerous installment in the career of a seasoned national security specialist," and all but accuses Huntington of stirring up racism for political effect.

Seriously--I'll cop to my own political biases readily enough, but is the only reason I haven't seen anybody supporting Huntington simply that I'm not looking hard enough? I mean, this is a guy of whom Robert Kaplan says, "His view of the world will be the way it really looks." So surely somebody out there in the mainstream media must be on the record as seeing eye to eye with Huntington on the Latino immigration issue. As always, if you've got something for me to look at, put it in a comment!

El Diablo Habla Espanol?

The debate over Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? gets a little hotter, as Carlos Fuentes weighs in for NPQ, accusing Huntington of propagating a "brown menace" argument, but not before reaching back to slam The Clash of Civilizations for its "profound ignorance of the true kulturkampf evident in the Islamic world." Fuentes is particularly hard on Huntington for assuming that waves of Spanish-speaking immigrants will divide the United States solely by the sound of their voices:

To stigmatize the Spanish language as a divisive, practically subversive, factor demonstrates the racist, divisive and provocative spirit of Professor Huntington. To speak a second (or a third or fourth language) is a sign of culture throughout the world excepting, it would seem, in the Monolingual Eden invented by Huntington. To establish the requirement of a second language in the US (as occurs in Mexico and in France) would eliminate the Satanic effects that Huntington attributes to the language of Cervantes.

"Patrick Buchanan with Footnotes"

Alan Wolfe reviews Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? for Foreign Affairs, praising some of its "realist" take on the impact of immigration on American culture yet also finding the book "riddled with the same kind of moralistic passion -- at times bordering on hysteria -- that Huntington finds so troubling in American Politics." Like, for example, his "romantic nostalgia for Anglo-Protestant culture," and fatalistic sense that said culture will be subsumed by waves of non-Anglo immigrants with their different languages and their different values.

Judge for yourself: a huge chunk of Huntington's argument was published in Foreign Policy a few months ago, leading to sharp rebukes from David Brooks and Gregory Rodriguez. But nothing yet, it would seem, from the NYTBR, though I'm sure something much like Wolfe's essay must be in the works. Given Huntington's high place in the firmament of the intelligentsia, it strikes me as impossible to ignore his attempt to resurrect American nativism, even as he attempts to purge it of its racist connotations. (And again, whether he manages that feat is something individual readers will have to judge for themselves.)