There is much that is odious in Samuel Huntington but the worst is a relentless racism that is targeted at almost anyone who is "non-Western" and includes Muslims, Chinese, Africans and most pointedly Hispanics. Huntington reserves a great deal of his vituperation against Latinos. His disdain for Hispanic culture is almost pathological but then again so are his positions on other issues. Huntington, for example, provided the theoretical basis for carpet-bombing Vietnam – it will urbanize the peasants who support the Viet Cong. As well he promoted the idea that the best kind of government for developing countries was the monolithic authoritarian single party state exemplified in the pitiful Mexican dictatorship that was the PRI’s 90 year rule. Not one to fade away, Huntington provided much of the neo-con garbage that justified the West’s war with Islam. He leaves a disgrace for a legacy
I wrote my first blog about Samuel Huntington. I felt a need to express my outrage at his blatant racism. As a graduate student in Latin American Studies and an undergrad in Politics we were forced to seriously quaff down the patently inane chauvanism of this disgraceful man. I feel nauseous just thinking about it. In 2007 I wrote that Samuel Huntington, wrote his nativist tome against Latinos entitled, "The Hispanic Challenge," Foreign Policy, March/April 2004 (). Huntington makes no secret of his fears. We, the "white, British and Protestant" are threatened in every way possible: "values, institutions and culture."
Most Americans see the creed as the crucial element of their national identity. The creed, however, was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a "city on a hill."
Nothing less than "heaven on earth" is threatened. Notice the facile values that "we Americans" are said to possess and which are presumably absent in Hispanics – Christianity, religious commitment, the work ethic, etc. Values which are not only ambiguous but which are arguably as present in the Hispanic culture as they are in the also-vaguely defined "Anglo-Protestant culture." Using the same loose paradigm that defined his "civilization" tome, Huntington employs it to argue against the brown menace. He sets up a synthetic civilization that is alleged to have existed and given us a unitary culture. However, the civil rights movements changed that and consequently, "Americans now see and endorse their country as multiethnic and multiracial. As a result, American identity is now defined in terms of culture and creed." This pseudo-liberal verbiage is intended as a set-up for what is threatened – a monolithic "other" as in civilization- which will wipe out "our culture and our creed." From here on, Huntington is not so much interested in giving any rigor to these disordered ideas. Rather, Huntington sets forth the familiar elements of the Tancredo nativist framework, a framework that is not intellectual but rather puffery giving comfort to bigotry.
Given the fallacious assumptions underlying his argument, Huntington retreats to racist stereotypes – namely the lazy Mexican. An Anglo-Protestant "work ethic" is counterposed to the supposed "mañana syndrome" that lazy Mexicans allegedly adhere to. "Author Robert Kaplan quotes Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona, as saying that he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in "education and hard work" as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to "buy into America." This disingenuous use of the racist stereotype does not bother Huntington who then proceeds to argue that Hispanics are undermining our standard of living by taking jobs at lower pay from Americans. I doubt that Huntington even sees the contradiction in his argument since such bigotry very much informs his views.
What is most disturbing about the Samuel Huntington’s fallacious and racist diatribe is its respectability in mainstream circles. These articles are published in the leading academic journals on foreign affairs. As noted earlier they were warmly received and nary a mainstream commentator bothered to note the logical lapses in Huntington’s pieces. Were it not for leftist commentators Huntington’s words would be, as they are to the Republican right, gospel truth. These are not merely the rantings of an obscure academic. They are the assumptions which now inform the so-called immigration debate and they form the foundation of the resurgent anti-Latino nativism. As well, it is indisputable that Samuel P. Huntington is a racist.