Decrying divided loyalties and a lack of patriotism
Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity
By Samuel P. Huntington
Simon & Schuster, 428 pp., $27
In his new book, ''Who Are We?," Samuel Huntington portrays America as a threatened society about to disintegrate, or become balkanized. The enemy, in Huntington's eyes, is manifold. It includes a transnational elite made up mostly of intellectuals and CEOs whom he describes as ''ampersands," dual citizens with a foot in more than one culture and with a questionable loyalty to the United States. He worries that a sizable wave of fresh immigrants appears to be reluctant to assimilate to Anglo-Protestant culture.
Huntington is neither fool nor hysteric. He lays out his argument patiently. Unfortunately, his thinking is not grounded in reality. The views he offers of America are rigid, obsolete, and inconsistent.
Our country, he says, used to define itself in terms of race (white), ethnicity (British, then Northern European), culture (Anglo-Protestant), and ideology (principles found in the Declaration of Independence). These are the ingredients that make up ''the American character," according to Huntington, and the country's success depends on keeping American values unalterable.
This, he theorizes, had been the case until a few decades ago. ''One of the great achievements, perhaps the greatest achievement, of America," Huntington says, ''is the extent to which it has eliminated the racial and ethnic components that historically were central to its identity." When last I checked, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, America was still divided across a multicolor line.
In his 1996 bestseller, ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order," Huntington offered a post-Cold War model in which ''civilizations" supplanted ideologies as the fault lines in world affairs. His was an extraordinarily muddled concept of civilization based on a circumscribed concept that divided the good guys from the bad rather simplistically. Still, he sold the idea -- particularly after 9/11 -- to a frightened country eager to respond to threats to national security. The book was instrumental in shaping the current Bush doctrine of using democracy as a global tool of colonization. His slogan was simple: West is best!
Huntington's new slogan is equally straightforward: America is one! He understands immigration and assimilation to be a one-way street whereby a newcomer is acculturated into a welcoming environment that hardly changes. However, the mounting evidence is to the contrary: Hindus and Pakistanis are changing England, as are Arabs in France, Turks in Germany, and Latinos in the United States.
Mobility is good: It gives way to change. But change generates impurity, which, in Huntington's take, is a threat: ''All societies face recurring threats to their existence, to which they eventually succumb. Yet some societies, when so threatened, are also capable of postponing their demise by halting and reversing the process of decline and renewing their vitality and identity."
In programmatic terms, America would stop what Huntington sees as its destruction by emphasizing patriotism and committing to Anglo-Protestant culture and the creed of the founding settlers. ''If that commitment is sustained, America will still be America long after the WASPish descendants of its founders have become a small and uninfluential minority," he says.
So he does recognize that the Anglo-Protestant minority is undergoing an eclipse. In ''Who Are We?" his anxiety gives way to a tirade against dual citizenship, a source, in his opinion, of un-Americanism. The fluidity of modern life enables people to travel easily. The result isn't impoverishment but enrichment. Does this enrichment come at the expense of patriotism? Only if patriotism is portrayed as a blinding, univocal faith. A binational life is not a life lacking in loyalty.
Far more worrisome is Huntington's central target: the Mexican-American community. Today Mexican-Americans are the new blacks. Huntington sees them as having crossed the border illegally, having little interest in education, and not intending to become ''like us."
Obviously, Huntington should care. After all, we all worry about our country. But he should at least make an effort to understand who Mexican-Americans are. The composite picture he provides betrays a deeply rooted ignorance: His knowledge of Mexican-Americans comes only from books. It would do him well to talk to some of the Mexicano soldiers stationed in Baghdad or to visit a Latino neighborhood in Boston where he would be exposed to the desire of adolescents to learn English.
Huntington is wrong on two counts: Mexican-Americans are no more bicultural -- and defined by duality -- than Jews, blacks, Irish, Italians, and other ethnic groups. And neither race nor ethnicity has disappeared in our Promised Land. Diversity, in the end, is what makes us strong.
Is Anglo-Protestant culture under threat? No, it is simply in the process of reconfiguration. Should we lament the demise of American values? Perhaps, but not because ampersands and Mexican-Americans have brought them down. Look at the photographs of torture taken in Abu Ghraib prison. Are those the values the Founding Fathers endorsed? Who is to blame?
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and editor in chief of the forthcoming Encyclopedia Latina. 
