Huntington, Herder, Volk

Louis Menand has an excellent review of Samuel Huntington's latest salvo in the culture wars, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.

You, gentle reader, may recall the elevation of Sam Huntington's simplistic tract Clash of Civilizations to an article of faith for neocons in the Bush administration looking for an excuse to justify arbitrary unilateral military intervention by the United States, whenever and wherever we feel like it, just because. In a nutshell, Huntington expands on uber-Volk arguments first articulated by Johann Herder in the late 1700's, setting in motion the long slow rise of German nationalism that culminated in the Nazi catastrophe a century and a half later (to be fair to Herder, there is more to his philosphy than a simple excuse for racism - it took awhile to twist his work into the monster that it became). Every human "culture" is seen as defining all individuals within that culture, and all cultures are seen as both incompatible, and adversarial. It is a zero sum game, with only one culture ultimately prevailing. It is a recipe for endless conflict on a global scale.

Huntington's latest defines American volk culture as Protestant, British, and rooted in individualism and private property. Apparently, everything has been OK so far because everybody who didn't fit the above criteria simply assimilated. The contaminants that now threaten to utterly destroy this bucolic scene are:

-intellectuals,

- transnational corporations, and

- Latinos.

As Menand puts it:

It could be argued that Americans owe the quality of life they enjoy to America’s core culture, but Huntington does not argue this. He cares about the core culture principally for its unifying effects, its usefulness as a motive for solidarity. He is, in this book, not interested in values per se; he is interested in national security and national power. He thinks that the erosion or diffusion of any cluster of collective ideals, whatever those ideals may be, leads to weakness and vulnerability.

Huntington's argument against intellectuals and corporations is basically rewarmed rhetoric from the wingnut right and wingnut left, respectively. His case against Latinos is more troubling. In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Mexican presidential candidate Jorge Castaneda pointed out that the core issue Huntington is riffing off of is a serious one - absent significant economic restructuring in Mexico, there will be a massive shift of population to the United States over the next generation or so, creating a large and permanent economic underclass. But that's not what Huntington is most concerned about - he's focused on the swarthy brown hordes hijacking our culture. Menand has trouble understanding why:

One keeps wondering what Huntington, in his chapter on Mexican-Americans, means by “cultural bifurcation.” What is this alien culture that threatens to infect Anglo-Americans? Hispanic-American culture, after all, is a culture derived largely from Spain, which, the last time anyone checked, was in Europe. Here is what we eventually learn (Huntington is quoting from a book called “The Americano Dream,” by a Texas businessman named Lionel Sosa): Hispanics are different because “they still put family first, still make room in their lives for activities other than business, are more religious and more community oriented.” Pull up the drawbridge!

I don't think that Huntington, or Herder for that matter, set out to be racist. But the simple parse of this kind of rhetoric gets you there very, very quickly. In the case of dealing intelligently with what happens between the US and Mexico over the next couple of generations, the racist war has already begun.