Problems of identity in America: two views.

I

THIS IS A RARE BOOK -- erudite and readable, analytical but urgent, a work of political science which the author admits he wrote as "a patriot." While few political theorists outside of certain radical circles are likely to admit that they are not patriotic, one encounters fewer still who write from an explicit desire to preserve and to protect their country. Not just its political institutions, or the ideology which undergirds them, but the concrete, shared reality that is America--so much of which, Huntington convincingly demonstrates, is the result not of inexorable historical processes, or the unfolding of mankind's deepest yearnings and some obscure divine decree, but happy historical accidents. Serendipity.

Among these accidents, the author is not embarrassed to point out, is the national character which marked the North American colonists--specifically, their "Anglo-Protestant culture." Samuel Huntington convincingly challenges the corpus of Cold War (neoconservative and liberal) apologetics for American exceptionalism, which grounded America's virtues exclusively in the Enlightenment ideology of some of the Founders.

Professor Huntington notices that literally dozens of other nations were founded at almost the same time, by Enlightened liberal Freemasons from Colombia to Paraguay, yet few of them persevered in their liberal institutions. Why did Bolivar's Republic founder into chaos and tyranny while Washington's prospered and stayed (in certain ways) free? Because political seeds can only flourish when they fall in fertile ground. The soil in which liberal, decentralized government could survive--insofar as it has survived--was one which had been prepared for centuries before Jefferson ever set pen to paper.

Huntington points to the suspicion of centralized authority which persisted in the dominant (Presbyterian, Quaker, and Puritan) strands of Protestantism to which the overwhelming majority of American settlers adhered, the century or more of congregational (rather than papal or episcopal) decision-making through which these churches were governed, and the very worldly work-ethic which dominated men of these creeds. These churches, he says, were the "reformation of the Reformation." He contrasts their anti-authoritarianism, pragmatism, and general suspicion of institutions with the ways of Anglicans and Catholics--whose faith entails deference to established authority, resignation in the face of suffering, and a reverence for poverty. These are stereotypes, but who can look at Mexico and Texas (for instance) and fail to see their basis in fact? Compare, for that matter, the attitudes towards poverty, war and peace, and religious authority of President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI. One need not agree with the Puritan worldview to recognize that the psychological attitudes it inculcated still dominate American culture and are responsible for its most identifiable virtues and vices.

This Anglo-Protestant root was planted by America's earliest settlers--which Huntington carefully distinguishes from immigrants, dispelling the myth that this is a "nation of immigrants." The Puritans of Massachusetts, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Scots-Irish of Tennessee were not impoverished individuals asking admittance of a developed, pre-existing polity to which they would assimilate. They were alien invaders, arriving in groups with clearly defined communal beliefs, determined to buy or wrest a continent away from divided, mutually hostile tribes of hunter-gatherers. That is not the situation faced by subsequent and contemporary immigrants to the United States--at least, not yet.

With loving detail, Huntington shows how members of every ethnic group that arrived in the United States came to accept the cultural and political mores of its Anglo-Protestant founders. Jews who were not particularly observant in the Old Country established synagogues so they could attend weekly services like the Protestants. Catholics embraced the separation of Church and State--eventually dragging their mother Church after them. Even when religious groups set up their own parochial schools--to resist the steady pressure of Protestantization imposed in the public schools--they invariably laid heavy emphasis on patriotism, mastery of English, and the virtues of "Americanism." Yet such institutions of Americanization, Huntington warns, have by now largely broken down--leaving a degraded commercial culture and the mass media as the sole means by which new Americans learn the ways of their adopted country.

Huntington analyzes other developed and developing countries, in comparison and contrast with America, to suggest four themes around which national unity can develop:

1) Ethnic, based on perceptions of a close-knit, consanguineous group. Examples include the nationalism which arose in Japan, Germany, Ireland, India, and the early American colonies.

2) Racial, based on visible differences among peoples. Such a unifying principle, Huntington argues, inspired white Americans of various ethnicities once they had begun to intermarry and assimilate--until this identification was rendered morally repugnant during the Civil Rights Movement.

3) Cultural, based on shared ways of living, unspoken preconceptions, and social mores. This mode of identification, Huntington suggests, is what unites most Americans today--although it is threatened by the racialism implicit in identity politics and affirmative action, and by the mass immigration of people from a single nation with a self-confident alternative culture, namely Mexico. He warns, compellingly, that these phenomena might well re-awaken an intolerant white nationalism, inflamed among members of a race who dare not speak its name, aware that their interests are under attack by other, self-conscious racial groups.

4) Propositional, based on ideological maxims derived from political theory. Nations defined this way included Jacobin France and the Soviet Union. This principle of organization--surely the most fragile--is the only one offered as morally viable (and moral) both by liberal and by neoconservative theorists today. The extension of the American proposition, by force of arms if necessary, seems to be the defining creed of those thinkers whom Professor Claes G. Ryn calls, in his book of that name, The New Jacobins.

Huntington examines the curious but encouraging persistence of religious practice among Americans--almost unparalleled in any developed country--and concludes that the United States simply cannot be described honestly as anything but a Christian nation. However, America's mode of Christianity is intrinsically tolerant, individualistic, even entrepreneurial--again, with all the positive and negative attributes that follow along. He cites Irving Kristol's famous advice to American Jews that they accept and welcome the country's Christian orientation, which has guaranteed for them an environment almost entirely free of the bigotry Jews encountered in other societies.

Furthermore, Huntington argues, most of the advances which America has seen towards equal opportunity and social reform have been driven by Gospel values and explicitly Christian movements--from abolitionism to the Civil Rights Movement--rather than by socialist activism, as happened through much of Europe. It is in this Christian core, which now encompasses Catholics, welcomes Jews, and accepts other, more alien faiths, so long as they accept the fundamental principle of tolerant co-existence, that Huntington hopes to ground the unified American identity of the future.

Huntington does not spend time exploring the roots of our Founders' creeds and concomitant political virtues, although he points to one writer who does: David Hackett Fisher, author of the invaluable ethnographic study of American settlement, Albion's Seed (1989). That book, which ought to be read in tandem with this one, grounds the intellectual and political habits of early Americans in the inherited folkways they carried with them from England, and suggests how they developed. Equally important--perhaps as a corrective to Huntington's fervent embrace of the Reformation--is Russell Kirk's The Roots of American Order (1974), which shows how the institutions essential to liberty developed in medieval England, grounded in Common Law developed by Catholic jurists, before they were smothered during the Renaissance by the revival of pagan, Roman Law. Indeed, the reliance of both Protestant and Catholic churches on the support of centralizing monarchs to promote their ecclesiastical interests effectively demolished the Church as a countervailing force to the power of the state. It was left, ironically, to the most anti-Catholic movements in Christendom to restore that balance--which was achieved, irony of ironies, in America. The novus ordo seclorum had more in common with the older ordo than the American founders knew. And perhaps that fact is the real source of America's exceptionalism.

--John Zmirak

II

AS A CONSERVATIVE and an historian, I am pulled in different ways by Samuel Huntington's book; and, whatever you think about it, this is an interesting work and one that deserves widespread attention. As a conservative and, in European terms, a Euro-sceptic unhappy with the gathering face of European federalism, I am very sympathetic to organic theories of the nation-state, and also to a sense of their cultural identity and historical distinctiveness. These are each central aspects of the Conservative response to human diversity, aspects that are lost when ideologues, generally from the left, but sometimes these days from the right, propound universal nostrums that challenge cultural specificities. Much of Huntington's text indeed is a measured rage in defense of American exceptionalism in the shape of cultural distinctiveness, and, to him, this is crucial to the lived patriotism of a successful organic nation-state.

As an historian, however, I have to say that this book will not do as an account of American origins and historical exceptionalism. The fault is possibly the a historical character of Huntington's profession, as a political scientist, or maybe a preference for assertion over analysis, but here are just a few of the troubling points. Huntington propounds a foundation myth in terms of the Anglo-Protestant culture of the original settlers, but that underplays the diversity and divisiveness of the pre-independence settlers. To argue that Anglo-Protestantism defines this culture is to underrate or neglect other immigration flows in the colonial period. These included non-Britons, such as the settlers of New Sweden conquered by the Dutch and of New Holland conquered by the British, as well as the large numbers of non-Britons who settled during the period of British rule. They affected both the general character of the colonies and specific locations. Germans were particularly concentrated in Pennsylvania, but not only there. In North Carolina in 1710, a group of German and Swiss immigrants established the town of New Bern, which was so successful that it became the capital of the colony in 1770, and, by then, perhaps as much as 34 per cent of the colony's population was of German descent. Religious refugees were particularly encouraged in Georgia, many coming from the Archbishopric of Salzburg. Under the Plantation Act of 1745, it was possible for all, barring Catholics, to become eligible for naturalization after seven years in a British colony. There were, however, many Catholic settlers, especially in Maryland. Another important migrant stream were enslaved Africans. The number of slaves in British North America rose from about 20,000 in 1700 to over 300,000 by 1763, and they were particularly numerous in South Carolina and Georgia. Indeed, but for the harsh demographic regime stemming in large part from disease, the slaves would have been a more substantial proportion of the population.

Even focusing solely on Anglo-Protestants, it is mistaken to see them simply as the source of American identity. Instead, they were the key players in the British Atlantic world, and America only emerged from that as a result of conflict, a conflict that bitterly divided British North America. The quest for independence was a civil war and one in which the proponents on both sides were Anglo-Protestants. Rather like Linda Colley in Britons, her study of the development of British national identity, Huntington has downplayed the extent and the impact of divisions within the Anglo-Protestant world. That, of course, is also true of the American Civil War, which was scarcely an anti-immigrant or anti-Catholic struggle. These divisions within the Protestant world included that between the Presbyterians, with their strong sense of community, and the Episcopalians, who tended to emphasize hierarchical authority. Strife resulted from other quarters as well. The backcountry opposition to authority that led to conflict in North Carolina in 1766-70 was to be repeated after independence in Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion.

It is not only questionable history that is at stake. To turn to the present, there are repeated questionable judgments. Huntington makes much of the Christian identify of modern America but underplays the diversity of belief and experience that Christianity, including Protestantism, entails in that context. Furthermore, in order to emphasize a sense of present threat, especially from multiculturalism, Latino immigration, and bilingualism, Huntington downplays the extent to which his Anglo-Protestant culture was affected not only by earlier waves of immigration, but also by the serious concerns to which they gave rise. This entailed not only nativism in its cultural, political, and self-proclaimed ethnic aspects, but also an important degree of religious tension. Catholic immigration, particularly from Ireland, Italy, and Poland, but also from elsewhere, for example Germany, was seen as particularly un-American, alongside Jews, the Chinese, and the Japanese, but the sects of Protestant immigrants could also be unacceptable. Since Huntington likes to be counter-intuitive, let us suggest that, far from accepting his assertion, we need to develop a methodology in which we can compare nativist concerns and campaigns. Under this head, present concerns are actually less acute than those of a century earlier, or indeed the panic of the early 1920s compounded of anxiety about Communism and concern over immigration flows, especially from China and the "new Italian" immigration from southern Italy.

I cannot comment profitably on the claims by some reviewers, including in thoughtful conservative publications such as the Economist, that Huntington has failed to understand many aspects of Latino society, not least the desire to acculturate, to learn English, to educate themselves and their children, and to become Americans and prosper--the positive appeal of immigration not being that, as Huntington suggests, of reclaiming parts of America for Mexico or under-pricing American labor. It is more instructive as a conservative to consider the political dimension. Huntington describes himself as "an old-fashioned Democrat" and a "patriot," but in his work this combination offers a rather defensive, negative, and limited account of nationality. Difference is seen as a challenge, and, in practice, there is scant room for people to follow life styles or express beliefs that Huntington sees as un-American.

This is the unappealing side of organic notions of the state, and it is a side that liberatarian conceptions of conservatism find unwelcome, not to say toxic and in some contexts (not that of Huntington) fascistic. Huntington argues that "multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization," but in order to make his case, he propounds a stark juxtaposition, rather than the continuum that more accurately describes the situation.

The combination of organic notions of the state with individual liberty is scarcely easy, but it is the most fruitful one for a conservative who wishes to take note of the nature of modern society and to appreciate that democracy is a matter not only of the freedom to vote and to consume, but also to consider one's self an American and an atheist, or an American and a supporter of Mexican sports teams, both combinations that Huntington seems to find difficult. Wishing to qualify freedom, Huntington is unhappy with certain multiple identities, and he sees them in terms of menace: "In 2000 the proportion of foreign-born was somewhat less than in 1910, but the proportion of people in America who were also loyal to and identified with other countries was quite possibly higher than at any time since the American Revolution." As academic analysis, this will not do: "loyal to and identified with" is a misleading running together of ideas that is designed by Huntington to query loyalty to America, but the evidence on this point is scanty and the chronological comparison perfunctory. He also appears to find unwelcome the ability of American corporations to act as they see fit in terms of hiring (Latino) labor, but constraining this would lead to an unwelcome degree of government direction of the economy, and is reminiscent of the economic interventionism and the zeal for regulation that are such handicaps in Europe, and that will not help the United States to compete with China.

Huntington is best known abroad for his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Like Who Are We?, that was a book that worked by addressing current concerns, offering a relatively clear panorama, and apparently anticipating future trends. Empirically, however, there are serious problems with the work, not least the prevalence of conflict within as well as between "civilizations." More generally, as a defining organizational principle in history, claims of cultural clashes rest on a structuralist perspective, and present identity and power in terms of clear-cut blocks, a dated view that corresponds to the classic age of geopolitics and crucially underplays the role of agency. Furthermore, there is the danger of confusing the rhetoric of obvious rivalry for the complexities of overlapping cooperation and confrontation.

The clash of civilizations is brought home and given an American context in the new book, but the analysis is no more profound. If that simply reflected the confusion of "an old-fashioned Democrat," or indeed of trying to offer policy prescription from the perspective of a political scientist, it might not matter. More serious is the light the debate throws on the difficulties of defining a conservative patriotism and internationalism in a state that is simultaneously a major democracy and the beacon of much of the free world. India is the world's most populous democracy but, despite its attempts with the "non-aligned" movement, cannot act in this fashion. To define a conservative patriotism and internationalism as a "fortress America" will weaken America and jeopardize support for its values and interests elsewhere in the world. The latter should be of concern to Americans; it is certainly so to those elsewhere who support Western values.

The weaknesses of Huntington's books are unfortunate as he is correct to focus on the degree of flux in world affairs, whether in terms of the rise of aggressive (and destructive) fundamentalist Islam or far greater rates of migration, but it is far from clear that the best response is that of fortification. This negative affirmation of interests and values in an exclusionist fashion is seen from societies and systems that perceive themselves threatened, and present themselves as weak as a consequence. This is true of Islamic fundamentalists who, feeling that the Western model is a threat, seek to prevent or to limit the spread of information about Western life. Television was banned by the Taleban regime in Afghanistan. Another instance of such defensiveness is provided by the Franco-Benelux conception of affirming and strengthening the European Union through a process of "deepening." This reflects the notion of state-building, nationalism, and patriotism as stemming from the response to threats, a course, however, that can lead to authoritarianism or indeed to an oppressive populism. The European Union threatens to lead to the former.

America, instead, is strong when it is in a position to help influence the process of flux. In 1963, the distinguished military theorist J.F.C. Fuller presented the propagation of an attractive image of the West as the way to win the Cold War:

    Picture the world as consisting of three billion buyers and two
    great department stores competing for their patronage. Then pose the
    question: which of the two is the more likely to gain control of the
    world market and eventually bankrupt the other? The answer is, the
    one which best supplies human needs and popular demands ... the
    Western problem is not a defensive (passive) one: to defend its way
    of life and preserve it as it is. Instead, it is an offensive
    (active) one: to improve its way of life, and render it so
    attractive that the Soviet way of life will go bankrupt, and Karl
    Marx--if anything is left of him--will wither away.

Democratization is the profound process that characterizes recent decades, since governments, institutions, and individuals have to respond to far more than the formal democratic process. This entails both individual consumerism and notions of political and social accountability. Such social shifts and demands create problems for all governments and for movements across the political spectrum, but, if ably led, the United States and popular conservative politics are well placed to respond to the challenges, not only in America but also further afield. They also need to do so if they are to be successful.

--Jeremy Black

BOOK DISCUSSED in this ARTICLE Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity, by Samuel P. Huntington, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

JOHN ZMIRAK is author of The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living (2005) and editor of Choosing the Right College. JEREMY BLACK is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His sixty books include War and the World, 1450-2000 and The British Seaborne Empire.