In 2004, Samuel Huntington published Who Are We? on the disintegration of American identity. At the time of its publication, Huntington's willingness to even bring up identity as an issue was radical, even after sterilizing it. The idea that there was a coherent “we” half a century after progressives had sunk their teeth into American institutions of power, was—and still is—transgressive.
Huntington's project, so radical to his critics, was simply to rediscover conservatism in terms of culture: to ground conservative politics in something deeper than abstraction. Huntington insisted that America was an essentially WASP conception, but wanted little to do with the “white” part, or even the more narrowly ethnic “Anglo-Saxon” part. Essentially, Who Are We? provided an academic justification for why English-derivative culture provided the essential support for Protestant-derivative creed in America. When James Nuechterlein reviewed the book in Commentary, he called it “defiantly unfashionable and counter-cultural.”
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