*Samuel Huntington recently passed away. This is long but worth the read.
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December 29, 2008
National Review
Assimilation Nation An NRO Flashback

Editor’s note: This review of Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? by John Fonte appeared in the May 31, 2004, issue of National Review.

Harvard’s Samuel Huntington is perhaps America’s foremost political scientist. His forte is comprehensive intellectual analysis of the deepest issues we face. In the 1970s, on President Carter’s National Security Council staff, Huntington organized the most thorough strategic review of the Cold War ever undertaken, influencing the Brzezinski and, later, Reagan counteroffensives against world Communism. In the 1990s, his detailed analysis of the new global fault lines in The Clash of Civilizations alerted a complaisant pre-9/11 world to the dangers ahead. Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity is Huntington doing what he does best: It is a classic — perhaps the definitive — overview of the future of the American nation-state.

Huntington argues that American identity today is based on both ideology and a common culture. The ideology — the “American Creed,â€