The Final Falsification of Samuel Huntington
The irony of the 2024 election.
Full disclosure: the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is not looking forward to Trump 2.0 for multiple reasons. But there is an irony in the nature of Trump’s recent victory that is worth highlighting. One could argue that the composition of Trump’s winning coalition represents the final falsification of Samuel Huntington’s last, worst argument.
Huntington, who passed away in 2008, was a Harvard University political scientist best known for his controversial “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis. That argument spawned a veritable geyser of critiques, as well as Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.1
Huntington wrote a lot of path-breaking books prior to Clash. Unfortunately, he also wrote one horrible book afterwards: 2004’s Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. An excerpt of the book published in Foreign Policy. That essay encapsulates Huntington’s argument in Who Are We? — the changing demographic composition of the United States threatened America’s identity:
In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives. Americans like to boast of their past success in assimilating millions of immigrants into their society, culture, and politics. But Americans have tended to generalize about immigrants without distinguishing among them and have focused on the economic costs and benefits of immigration, ignoring its social and cultural consequences. As a result, they have overlooked the unique characteristics and problems posed by contemporary Hispanic immigration. The extent and nature of this immigration differ fundamentally from those of previous immigration, and the assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America. This reality poses a fundamental question: Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).
I was… let’s say “skeptical” of Huntington’s thesis when I assessed it twenty years ago:
Huntington is hardly the first to make this kind of argument. Benjamin Franklin complained during the colonial era that Germans immigrating to Philadelphia "are generally the most stupid of their nation. ... Few of their children know English." In 1921, Arthur M. Schlesinger wrote, "The new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, with its lower standard of living and characteristic racial differences has intensified many existing social problems and created a number of new ones."….
[Huntington] also contends that Hispanic immigrants are more likely to retain ties with their country of origin. But he conveniently overlooks that nineteenth-century immigrants often did the same thing. According to [Kevin] O'Rourke and [Jeffrey] Williamson, U.S. officials estimated that between 1870 and 1914, 30 percent of immigrants emigrated back to the country they came from. Among Italians, the rate approached 50 percent because young Italian men went back and forth between the new world and the old country in search of work. Searching for evidence of the putatively limited loyalty of Mexican-Americans to their adopted country, Huntington is reduced to relaying anecdotes and the self-serving comments of Mexican politicians.
Needless to say, however, Huntington’s argument resonated among conservative Republicans — as well as Donald Trump. His first presidential campaign was built on hostility to Mexican immigration. His most recent one was even more restrictionist on immigration from Latin America. The idea that waves of Hispanic immigration was changing the character of America eventually led to a GOP embrace of great replacement rhetoric.
The core of Huntington’s thesis was that Mexican and other Latino immigrants were different from previous waves of immigration because they retained their Latin American identity. Surely, then, they would have reacted negatively to Trump’s immigration rhetoric, right?
Anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to the 2024 election already knows the answer to this question. And the answer flatly falsifies Huntington’s claims.
The marked shift in the Latino vote towards Trump “is upending the American political map,” according to Politico’s Ally Mutnick. Indeed, Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin goes even further:
If there’s one takeaway from the latest election results for both parties, it’s that it should explode the “demographics” conversation that’s been dominating American politics this century….
After Obama romped in 2012 with Latino voters, Republicans debated whether to pursue them with immigration reform or focus on running up the score with white voters with red meat conservatism. Donald Trump answered that debate in 2016 with a none-of-the-above option, moving to the right on immigration, while pivoting away from the tea party’s small government approach and drawing in new droves of blue-collar white voters. Democrats, sensing an opportunity to run up the score with Black and Latino voters even further in response, moved left on immigration and racial justice issues. They instead won in 2020 with incremental improvement with white voters, while ceding some ground to Trump with nonwhite voters. Then in 2024, the dam broke and Trump made sweeping gains in Latino communities that had until recently voted strongly Democratic — all while making immigration crackdowns central to his message. As Jon Stewart noted in a viral segment, almost none of it unfolded as pundits predicted after each election….
It’s ice cold comfort for Democrats today, but a world in which Republicans grow confident they can win a majority of voters in a majority-minority country — even in ways that horrify progressives and shift the demagoguery to new groups instead — may be a healthier place than the alternative in the long run.
ProPublica’s Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg also concluded that contrary to Huntington’s Latino identity argument, older Hispanic immigrants — even undocumented immigrants — resented the newer waves of Hispanic immigrants and the ease with which they could integrate themselves into American society:
ProPublica interviewed dozens of long-established Latino immigrants and their U.S.-born relatives in cities like Denver and Chicago and in small towns along the Texas border. Over and over, they spoke of feeling resentment as they watched the government ease the transition of large numbers of asylum-seekers into the U.S. by giving them access to work permits and IDs, and in some cities spending millions of dollars to provide them with food and shelter.
It’s one of the reasons so many Latino voters chose Donald Trump this election, giving him what appears to be Republicans’ biggest win in a presidential race since exit polls began tracking this data. Latinos’ increased support for Trump — who says he could use the military to execute his plans for mass deportations — defied conventional wisdom, disrupting long-held assumptions about loyalties to the Democratic Party….
Rosa said she is glad her children voted for Trump. She’s not too worried about deportation, although she asked to be identified solely by her first name to reduce the risk. She believes Trump wants to deport criminals, not people like her who crossed the border undetected in the 1990s but haven’t gotten in trouble with the law. “They know who has been behaving well and who hasn’t been,” she said.
Just to be as clear as humanly possible, Hispanic immigrants are no less American in their identity if they choose to be liberal Democrats. But the fact that so many shifted to Trump not in spite of but because of his restrictionist immigration rhetoric falsifies Huntington’s claims about the identity of Hispanic Americans.
As someone who has doubted that hypothesis for a generation, it’s nice to see its final refutation. Who knows, maybe Republicans might even internalize this lesson and stop demagoguing on immigration. Because — to repeat a theme — America’s ability to take people from everywhere and turn them and their future generations into Americans remains this country’s greatest superpower.
Full disclosure: I was a post-doc at Huntington’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies the year the Clash book came out.
It definitely fits the pattern of every other wave of immigration: People come over and get shat on, and after enough of them accumulate and integrate, they veer rightward and co-sign on a restrictionist backlash. A generation or so later, as their descendants gain upward mobility, they liberalize and join the elite, reopening immigration for the next wave to start the cycle all over again.
I wasn't familiar with Huntington's non-academic biographic, but now note his connection to the Democratic Party. Advisor to Hubert Humphrey during the 1968 election, chairman of the party's Foreign Policy Advisory Committee in the mid-70s, and working for Carter at the NSC. His thesis about the "non-integrability" of Hispanic immigrants to the US presumably did not directly and explicitly influence Democratic thinking, but was consistent with the total misunderstanding of immigrants that has increasingly characterized the party. "Assimilation" became a dirty word in progressive ranks, with the notion of preserving the specificity (but also by implication the insularity and non-integration) of immigrant groups gaining traction. In fact, immigrants overwhelmingly do not wish to remain hyphenated Americans, and Democratic rhetoric based on an identity group by identity group model of America has clearly lost a lot of immigrant support. I say this as a lifelong Democrat, but also as the child of immigrants who experienced first hand the challenges, but also the enormous benefits, of integration into broad American society.