Samuel Huntington claims that American national identity is under attack

What then about Huntington’s third point - the "revolt of the elites?" Huntington is scathing in his attack on those who have so assiduously sought to downplay the importance of a national identity and who have actively sought to dismiss the cultural component of that identity. Again the argument is powerful. There is no doubt that in deconstructionist and multiculturalist mode, America’s leaders downplayed any notion of a distinctive American identity. In one of his most telling points, Huntington shows how American leaders in politics, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the universities, assisted by corporate leaders and many of the major philanthropic foundations, attacked notions of American distinctiveness and cultural specificity. The goal was to create a loose transnational identity into which could be fit all of the specifics of identity politics so prevalent in recent American history. Anglo-Protestantism declined so that specific racial and gender identities could develop; in the process loyalty shifted from the collective nation to the specific group. The result is, Huntington says, a non-sustainable situation: a national identity only temporarily salient, resting on abstract political ideas without a cementing cultural core.

Resisting the revolt of the "white establishment,” the "liberal intelligentsia," and the "well-educated five to six percent of the population who had gone to graduate school", says Huntington, was "the patriotic public". Huntington seeks to enlist in their cause and evidently to enlist them in his.

Adding immediacy to his rather abstract crisis is a new, and to my mind, unlikely force - the vast numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants to contemporary America - immigrants both legal and illegal. In the circumstance of already weakened substantive national identity, the vast numbers of Hispanics now in the United States, threaten, Huntington insists, to divide America into two nations, one English-speaking, one Spanish-speaking, with the latter less identified with America than any other immigrant group in American history. The 23 million Mexicans now in the United States - Catholic, poor, undereducated, resident largely on lands the United States took from Mexico 150 years ago and with a loyalty to Mexico - constitute an unprecedented threat to American identity. They also threaten Huntington’s hoped-for revival of the Anglo-Protestant culture that has made America.

This is undoubtedly the weakest aspect of the book. Huntington’s alarm exceeds his analysis and he fails to make the case that the Mexican population is distinctively "unmeltable", although the Mexicans are certainly different from any other large immigrant group to the United States. This is not the only "excess" in this book; Huntington’s denunciation of the elite of which he is a part, while always interesting if not ironic, too often strays over the line of fairness.

America’s future is of course unclear. It may become, as Huntington fears, either a bifurcated nation or a mere association of cultural sub-groups. Or it may be that Huntington’s hope is realised: September 11 may help create a renewed America with a strong identity based in its distinctive creed and culture. If a nation is a "remembered community", Huntington reminds us of the importance of culture as the basis of that community. And this is a lesson for Australia no less than America.