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juxtaposed with American national identity, for example, returned the average European reader to times that we consider outdated.