Samuel Huntington was here in Washington, DC this evening.
He appeared at Politics and Prose bookstore to talk about his new book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. He deserves credit for facing a hostile audience, and Carla Cohen deserves credit for inviting him--it was the first time Huntington spoke at the capital city's most famous bookstore. Hostile questioners included a follower of Lyndon LaRouche who told the audience to pay attention to the man dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit protesting in front of the shop. Not quite a circus, Huntington was allowed to make his presentation without interruption.
In the end, the bookstore protesters may be evidence that Huntington is right about one thing--the Protestant tradition is alive and well in the USA.
In a larger sense, Huntington makes a case for a new American nationalism.
But his cracks a few eggs in making his omlette. In addition to being hard on immigrants, Huntington is hard on cosmopolitans, as well as "citizens of the world." Such nationalism can turn out to be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on how people approach it. After all, Lincoln was a nationalist in a good way, finally putting an end to slavery.
So, Huntington sketches four different scenarios for the future of American nationalism, ranging from a new melting pot to tribal warfare. He's got his bases covered, at least.
Overall, Huntington seems to reject American universalism in favor of particularism; he had some harsh words about American attempts to reform the Middle East in Iraq, "and the rest of the world." Although he said he didn't want to discuss it, he ought to.
Because Reformation is certainly at the heart of the Protestant project. John Winthrop went to "New England" to build a city on a hill to enlighten the whole world, not just Belmont, Brookline, Quincy, or Waltham.
In any case, the American experiment has had continual tension between nationalism and universalism since the American Revolution. Which really springs from French Enlightenment roots, despite all of Huntington's attempts to say America is just an offshoot of Great Britain. It wasn't only French ideas, or universal ideas, more accurately, that were the foundation for America. There were also French money, French arms (DuPont), and French soldiers and sailors from Haiti, as well as those "cosmpolitans" and "citizens of the world" like Von Stueben and Pulaski, volunteers from many countries who saw themselves as part of an international revolutionary struggle.
After Lafayette and his French comrades under General Rocheambeau defeated the British here, they went back to make the French Revolution--and were known in Paris as "the Americans." That was regime change long before Saddam Hussein, internationalist, cosmpolitan, and universalist. Oh yes, and a lot of "Anglo-Protestants" ran away to Canada. And some French soldiers decided to stay.
Huntington's thumb is on the scale of nationalism; but to fully understand the American version, and explain our history of expansionism, he would need to equally recognize America's universalism. America does have an Anglo-Protestant element, of course, especially the Establishment described by sociologist Digby Baltzell, but it is safe to say that there is much more to America than the Eastern Establishment. Alistair Cooke did a wonderful job of this in his television history series, America, opening the show in New Orleans, and visiting bordellos as well as jazz clubs. But unlike Huntington, Cooke really was an Englishman--who rejected Britain, renounced his sovereign, gave up his passport, and became an American citizen.
In a way, to accept Huntington's case whole may be a victory for multiculturalism, for his America may be a mere hypenated fraction of the nation, the "Anglo-Protestant-America."
National identity, like the conflict of civilizations, is an important issue. Huntington deserves credit for wrestling with it, and facing down protesters. One does not have to agree with his prescriptions, to find his presentation thought-provoking and worthwhile.
