A couple of decades ago, Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) published Who Are We? The Challenges of American National Identity (2004). This is a book that anticipated or foreshadowed the Trump era long before it was even hinted at as a political possibility. From the American collective imagination – not necessarily conservative, nor affiliated only with the Republican Party – the essay could be seen as little or not at all alarming. Except for some risqué allusions to the subject of Mexican immigration, and also certain maximalist assessments of the supposed social decomposition of the sixties, the book did not diverge too much from the standardized ideas of the average American. In Europe, on the other hand, Huntington's text caused a certain stupor. The naturalness with which religious sentiment was juxtaposed with American national identity, for example, returned the average European reader to times that we consider outdated.
According to Huntington, the United States is not the result of a set of heterogeneous cultural sediments – the famous melting can– but they have a unique The root of the identity: the Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture brought by the first settlers throughout the 17th century, the English language, the different confessions of Lutheran origin, the way of understanding the law, etc. This is the American creed, which simultaneously defends individualism and equality of opportunity; which supports the initiatives of civil society instead of basing the country on an administration that directs the lives of citizens; which believes in hard work; which places religion –whatever it may be– in a very important place in the lives of individuals and also in the community. In this sense, the United States is not only a place, but a certain way of understanding the world. This is Americanism. Huntington claims that this phenomenon is specific: there is no ideology that can be seriously classified under names such as Frenchism, Italianism, etc. (I was unaware of Catalanism, among others) Why did he deny the – apparently obvious – existence of melting can American? Very simple: because Huntington draws a sharp dividing line between the settlers who founded the nation and the immigrants who only –only!?– helped to make it what it is today: the first world power. The Irish Catholics, the Chinese, the Jews of central Europe, the Italians, the Mexicans, etc. did not arrive –according to Huntington– to a simple territory, but to an already existing nation, with a defined and recognizable cultural identity, endowed with specific political-administrative structures, with laws derived from a law to which they belong. westerns (John Ford, for example). In general, these immigrants integrated themselves – at different speeds and under different historical contexts – into the culture of the founding fathers. They contributed their grain of sand to American culture, which they complement, but they don't go createThe settler/immigrant distinction is therefore crucial to understanding the rest. It is Huntington's main argument for neutralising emerging multiculturalism.
There are striking omissions and half-truths in this book. The first concerns the notion of Christianity, which Huntington used twenty years ago in a very selective way: when it suited him he made a strict distinction between Catholics and Protestants, and when it didn't, he ignored it. As for Americans of Jewish origin, when it seemed to him they were fully Western – regardless of being, at least nominally, outside of Christian culture – and when it didn't suit him, they weren't. The second omission revolved around the extremely high racial tension that has always been present in the United States. It doesn't appear anywhere: Huntington considers it "overcome since the sixties" (!?), which is rigorously false. And there is still a third misleading view that has recently surfaced in a striking way. Implicitly, but also very clearly, Huntington presents the United States as a overcoming, in every sense, of decadent Europe. Over the past twenty years, this perspective has been politicized within the Republican Party with increasingly primal and contemptuous language. The climax came last week with the public ridicule urbi et orbi Zelensky, which was actually an indirect act of humiliation in the European Union. The United States is no longer an ally of Europe. They are on their own in search of rare earths and cute submissives. Bye.
