Who Are We?

Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard University and author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, advances a central thesis: American national identity rests on an Anglo-Protestant cultural core established by 17th- and 18th-century British settlers, and this core is under unprecedented threat. The book traces the historical development, triumph, and erosion of that identity and argues for its renewal.

Huntington opens with the surge of patriotism following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. On Boston's Beacon Hill, a single American flag flew on the morning of the attacks; two weeks later, 17 flew on the same block. Yet Huntington treats this revival as a symptom of deeper uncertainty. He distinguishes between the salience of national identity (how important it is relative to other identities) and its substance (what Americans believe they share). Before September 11, he argues, both had been eroding as ethnic, racial, and gender identities gained prominence, corporate executives defined themselves as global citizens, and massive immigration raised questions about linguistic unity. He situates this crisis within a global pattern, noting that countries from Japan to Brazil were grappling with similar questions driven by globalization, rising migration, and the end of the Cold War.

To frame these concerns, Huntington establishes a theoretical account of identity. Drawing on social psychology, he argues that identities are constructed rather than inherited, that individuals hold multiple identities whose importance shifts with context, and that every identity requires an "other" for definition. He contends that humans have a deep psychological need for enemies, citing psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's argument that people possess both preserving and destructive instincts. He critiques the common scholarly distinction between "civic" nationalism (based on shared principles) and "ethnic" nationalism (based on ancestry), arguing that it conflates ethnic-racial identity, which is largely fixed, with cultural identity, which can change. This distinction is central to his argument: He seeks to defend the importance of American culture without defending racial or ethnic exclusion.

Huntington identifies four components that have historically defined American identity: race, ethnicity, culture, and political ideology. He argues that the first two have been largely eliminated. The racial definition was dismantled by the civil rights movement. The ethnic definition faded as descendants of southern and eastern European immigrants assimilated, a process accelerated by shared military service in World War II. What remain are culture and ideology, and Huntington devotes the bulk of the book to arguing that culture is the more fundamental of the two.

He begins by distinguishing settlers from immigrants. The 17th- and 18th-century British Protestants who founded American society were settlers creating a new community, not immigrants joining an existing one. Invoking cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky's "Doctrine of First Effective Settlement," which holds that the first group to establish a viable society in a territory exerts disproportionate and lasting influence, Huntington argues that these settlers established the cultural foundation of American life: the English language, Protestant religious values, English legal traditions, individualism, the work ethic, and a moralistic impulse toward social reform.

The American Creed, the set of political principles including liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, and rule of law, is often treated as the sole defining element of American identity. Huntington argues this is only a partial truth. The Creed emerged in the mid-18th century when colonists needed a political justification for independence from Britain, and its principles drew on Enlightenment ideas compatible with the dissenting Protestant culture already established. Huntington contends that the Creed is a product of Anglo-Protestant culture and cannot survive the loss of that culture. Religion, he argues, is central to American identity in a way unparalleled among industrialized democracies. He traces the Americanization and effective Protestantization of Catholicism and describes a civil religion that fuses patriotic and religious sentiment.

Huntington traces the arc of national identity through four phases. In the first, from the 17th century to the 1770s, colonial identities gave way to American consciousness through the Great Awakening (a transcolonial religious revival), wars against the French, and British tax policies. In the second, from the Revolution to the Civil War, national identity competed with state and sectional loyalties. The third phase, from the 1860s to the 1960s, was the era of nationalism triumphant: patriotic organizations proliferated, massive Americanization programs integrated immigrants, and two world wars cemented cohesion. The fourth phase, beginning in the 1960s, saw national identity erode through multiculturalism, subnational identity movements, and elite denationalization.

The heart of the book examines the challenges of this fourth phase. Huntington argues that federal administrators and judges reinterpreted the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act to mandate racial preferences, despite consistent public opposition; voter referenda in California and Washington banning state racial preferences passed despite near-unanimous elite opposition. He traces the multiculturalist challenge in education, documenting the decline of patriotic content in textbooks and noting that students could graduate from 78 percent of American colleges without a course in Western civilization. He also documents how the 1967 Bilingual Education Act, designed to help Mexican-American children learn English, was expanded into a system that often kept students in Spanish for years. In 12 language referenda between 1980 and 2002, pro-English measures won 11 times despite elite opposition.

Huntington treats Mexican immigration as a unique challenge, distinguished by contiguity (a 2,000-mile land border), scale (Mexicans constituted 27.6 percent of the foreign-born population in 2000), illegality (an estimated 4.8 million unauthorized Mexican immigrants by 2000), regional concentration in the Southwest, persistence, and historical presence in territories the United States took from Mexico in the 1840s. He presents evidence that Mexican assimilation lagged on measures including education, naturalization, and income, and that generational progress stalled after the second generation. He describes how Cuban immigrants transformed Miami into a Hispanic-dominated city and argues that a slower Hispanization is under way in the Southwest.

Huntington also examines the denationalization of American elites, contrasting corporate executives and academics who reject patriotism with the 96 to 98 percent of ordinary Americans who express pride in their country.

In his final chapters, Huntington identifies four trends shaping the future: the ending of white ethnicity through intermarriage, the blurring of racial distinctions, the growth of the Hispanic community, and the elite-public divide. He warns that the demographic decline of non-Hispanic whites could provoke white nativist movements. He contends that the Creed alone cannot sustain national identity, pointing to the collapse of communist states such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that defined themselves solely by ideology. He documents a major religious resurgence and argues that the 2000 presidential election was among the most religiously significant in American history, with church attendance rivaling income as a predictor of voting behavior.

Huntington concludes by presenting three conceptions of America's future role: cosmopolitan, imperial, or national. He rejects the first as dissolving American identity and the second as unsustainable, and advocates the third. Americans, he argues, should recommit to the Anglo-Protestant culture and religious traditions that have defined their country, not as a racial or ethnic prescription but as a cultural one open to people of all backgrounds who embrace it.