Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity

Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. By Samuel P. Huntington. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. 448p. 27. 00. Samuel Huntington suggests in this book that American national identity is threatened by a tidal wave of Latino—primarily Mexican—immigrants who are refusing to assimilate to American “Anglo-Protestant” values, and who are facilitated in this resistance by the erosion of elite support for those very same values. That erosion is a consequence of the “cults of multiculturalism and diversity” (p. 144) that have collectively “denounced the idea of Americanization, ” “downgraded the centrality of English, ” and “advocated legal recognition of group rights and racial preferences” (p. 142), strong charges indeed.