Creedal Passions
Second, Wolfe praises me for making elites the "heroes" in my previous works but then criticizes me for allegedly portraying them as villains and embracing a distasteful populism in Who Are We? This effort at line-drawing is without merit. Military professionals are certainly the heroes of The Soldier and the State, but they are shown to be a dissident minority whose conservative outlook is rejected by the overwhelming liberalism of American political elites and the American public. They were, I say, the "universal target group." He also gets the thesis of American Politics totally backward when he alleges that I argue that, in the Revolution, the Jacksonian period, the Progressive era, and the 1960s and 1970s, "Americans' unrealistic expectation of moral perfectibility prevented their leaders from doing the right thing." The central argument of that book is that the major efforts at reform in these "creedal passion periods" were essential to American development and stability because they brought American institutions and practices more in line with American values. What Wolfe calls "hopeless moral crusades" were in fact, I say, "the major source of political change in America." In Who Are We?, I do contrast the highly patriotic and nationalist attitudes of the American public with the growing cosmopolitanism and "denationalization" of many business, professional, media, and scholarly elites, who are largely the product of economic globalization. I clearly am critical of this recent trend among elites-but no more so than I am of elites in my other books.
Third, Wolfe claims that Who Are We? is permeated with "fatalism," the view that America is "hapless," "too fragile for the challenges it faces," and that the book "ends on a note of relentless pessimism." This is total nonsense. At the very start I argue that all societies face threats to their existence from time to time but that America is one of those societies that are "capable of postponing their demise by halting and reversing the processes of decline and renewing their vitality and identity." Throughout the book, I stress that America's future is open-ended and will be shaped by the choices its people make among four broad alternatives: a multicultural America united only by the principles of the American creed; a bilingual, bicultural, and probably bi-creedal Anglo-Protestant and Hispanic America; an exclusivist America in which renewed white nativism makes race and ethnicity again central to American identity; and a culturally revitalized America in which Americans reinvigorate their Anglo-Protestant culture, religious faith, and creed. Wolfe quite falsely accuses me of partiality toward the exclusivist option, thereby missing the obvious central argument of the book, which is in favor of the revitalization of American culture.
Much of Wolfe's argument is vitiated by his refusal to recognize the distinction between ethnicity and culture and his belief that I assume that only those who are ethnically Anglo-Protestant adhere to Anglo-Protestant culture and that all those of other ethnicities do not. In fact, I make exactly the opposite point and criticize other scholars for confounding culture and ethnicity. Americans of all races and ethnicities, immigrants and nonimmigrants, can and have absorbed this country's Anglo-Protestant culture; it was, I argue, precisely that culture and the opportunities it promised that attracted immigrants to America. When I talk about America's pervasive Anglo-Protestantism to Jewish friends, a common response is, "Of course! I am an Anglo-Protestant Jew!" I explicitly state that so long as Americans, whatever their race, religion, or ethnicity, continue to embrace America's founding Anglo-Protestant culture, then "America will still be America long after the waspish descendants of its founders have become a small and uninfluential minority." That, I say, "is the America I know and love," and it is "the America most Americans love and want."
But somehow Alan Wolfe did not get the message.
WOLFE REPLIES:
When a reader has as much admiration for an author as I do for Samuel Huntington, when he is as passionately interested in a subject as both Huntington and I are in immigration, and when he has spent a very large portion of his career reviewing books without prompting undue controversy, it is highly unlikely that what he writes will be "total nonsense" or that he will "quite falsely" characterize the views of the author about whom he is writing. Huntington's use of epithets such as these in response to a fair and even generous review is further proof that on the subjects he addresses in Who Are We?, he has set aside dispassionate analysis in favor of embittered polemic.
To say that Who Are We? is about "the salience and substance of American national identity" and not primarily about immigration is like saying that Macbeth is about jealousy, not regicide. Professor Huntington should refer to his own index. There one finds 6 lines devoted to identity and 14 to immigrants (and the latter do not include the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Immigration Forum, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, or the Immigration Restriction League, let alone the "specific nationalities" to which readers are also referred). Far from being confined to two chapters, as Huntington claims in his response, his references to immigration run throughout the entire book. Who Are We? is not a treatise on a fashionable academic concept. It is a Cri Du Coeur lamenting the threat to American unity its author sees coming from immigrants, primarily those from Mexico.
