Dissolving the American Identity

“Historically American national identity has been defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property.  In the late twentieth century both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists.  In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings.  They have denounced, in the words of one of their reports, the ’systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives’ in education and ‘the dominance of the European-American monocultural perpective.’  The multiculturalists are, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., said, ‘very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes.’  Their ‘mood is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European heritage and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.’” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p.305.