Believers in a Certain America

...But where exactly does that identity stand today...

...Huntington partakes of this smiling version of American history, citing such cheerleaders as Robert N. Bellah and Daniel J. Boorstin...

...Lincoln thought too many American were willing to tolerate slavery because they had little dedication to labor, and Veblen demonstrated how work came to be stigmatized the more wealth was idolized...

...The "lesser evil" refers to whatever actions a society may be forced to undertake when it faces possible destruction by a greater evil...

...His new book targets liberal elites, who have absorbed a multiculruralism that affirms relativism and denies fixed identities...

...Perhaps the relevant question at this point is, has America advanced the cause of terrorism...

...George Santayana once described afanatic as one who redoubles his effort when he has lost his way...

...Absent from this bright perspective are the darker visions of America offered by Ralph Waldo Emerson and by Henry David Thoreau, who saw his fellow citizens "leading lives of quiet desperation...

...Consider the following passage: "To the degree that any political goal remains, it ceases to be the attainment of a real objective—such as self-determination—and is deformed into a desire to humiliate, shame, degrade, and kill...

...America's core culture, says Huntington, consists of "the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of lawjustice, and the limits of governmentpower," Western philosophy, art and music, and "the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property...

...It is enough to destroy lives...

...They will never succeed in turning men away from wealth but can still persuade them to grow wealthy by honorable means alone...

...Thorstein Veblen, who viewed the acquisition of property as having little to do with honest labor...

...But for many Americans this spring, "depraved May" (Eliot again) surely was one of the most shameful moments in the history of the Republic...

...Like many scholars, he addresses his arguments not to foreign policy issues but to the attitudes of other intellectuals who had doubts about the war and questioned the government's cavalier approach to civil liberties...

...The Cultural Core of American National Identity By Samuel P. Huntington Simon & Schuster...

...At times, though, his reliance on his own political beliefs seems more willed than true...

...Huntington's learned book will undoubtedly incite controversy over the nature and extent of the forces supposedly imperiling America's identity...

...Yet the split is hardly "absolute...

...Eliot told us, "is the cruellest month...

...Rather, he seeks to balance the values of liberty against the demands of security...

...His critics insist that he has exaggerated the low performance of Hispanics...

...There is not much doubt that liberal democracy's very history and identity is tied up in an absolute prohibition of torture," he writes...

...Where Ignatieff uses logic and historical example to warn us about the potential dangers of misusing our legal institutions, though, in Who Are We...

...Tocqueville, Veblen and Max Weber might remind Huntington that if Americans still lived by "honorable means alone," they would cease importing foreigners to do the work they refuse while they pursue the life of the leisure class...

...Other social critics—especially his former Harvard colleagues Daniel Bell, Louis Hartz and Seymour Martin Lipset—have long debated this subject, and we have heard about civil religion, voluntary associations and the like...

...instead, they are the crimes of an irrational sect of desperadoes with no political objectives and no demands that can be met, other than the self-fulfilling desire for death as a quick entry to eternal life...

...H.L...

...Then we have no choice but to admit our error and reverse course...

...now we must face what we have done to ourselves by doing evil to others...

...deconstructionists, who have absorbed French theories that affirm moral contingency and self-definition while denying objective truth...

...Ignatieffmakes a thoughtful and valiant case against the Bush Administration's "Patriot Act," which allows the government to abridge rights without "the test of adversarial review by the legislature, the courts, and a free press...

...Neighbor, mow thine own lawn...

...This is an indictment of AI Qaeda from Michael Ignatieff's The Lesser Evil...

...A strongly held faith that commitment to good principles will save us from bad practices stands behind Ignatieff's arguments...

...Huntington cites sociological data to warn us of threats that have crossed our borders—not fundamentalists and terrorists, but multiculturalists and deconstructionists...

...At some point—when we 'have to destroy the village in order to save it'—we may conclude that we have slipped from the lesser evil to the greater...

...We have discovered that we also destroyed lives, tortured prisoners and humiliated our enemy—though our "cause has not been advanced at all...

...A terrorist emergency, the author contends, could well require the suspension of liberties, the detaining of suspects without legal counsel, killing of the enemy preventively, and even the use of torture...

...But it is astounding how much his description could fit the United States itself...

...President Abraham Lincoln, who worried that Americans were violating their core principles...

...Herman Melville, who lamented a Republic with "liberty on its brow" and "empire in its eyes...

...Almost a decade later, his greatest concerns are the failure of some ethnic groups to assimilate this country's national identity, and the refusal of many intellectuals to celebrate it...

...and Henry Adams, who saw the wisdom of authority defeated by the will to power as history moved from State Street to Wall Street...

...enough to cause panic and fear, and as long as these gratifications are evident, it need not matter that your cause has not been advanced at all...

...It has not always been this way, particularly in matters of work...

...Mencken, who growled about the country not being so much the land of the free as the home of the bigoted and intolerant...

...27.00...

...and Hispanics, who have mingled in an America that affirms opportunity but have stopped short of becoming full-fledged citizens by learning its language and accepting its culture...

...Then we were shaken by what had been done to us...

...Yet I believe that they would be wrong to try to tame or destroy it entirely...

...enough to humiliate the other side...

...We must choose the lesser evil "even if the price proves higher than we anticipateci...

...The reports of the tortures at Abu Ghraib Prison have prompted, in many respects, more soul-searching than the horrors of 9/11 three-and-a-half years earlier...

...Reviewed by John Patrick Diggins Professor of history, Graduate Center of the City University of New York...

...Among Mexican Americans, according to Huntington, the school dropout rate is 30 per cent, and Hispanics have made the most serious and persistent demands for bilingual education...

...As for religion and patriotism, it is one thing to profess belief in God and country, quite another to obey the Commandments and practice civic virtue by helping to pay the costs of government instead of simply reaping its benefits...

...Ignatieff, a Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, was an early defender of the war in Iraq...

...408 pp...

...Alexis de Tocqueville even perceived that religion would not dare to stand in the way of democracy and its desires: "The main concern of religions is to purify, govern and restrain the overly fervent and exclusive taste for comfort that men experience in times of equality...

...He does not go as far as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who cites the "ticking bomb case" as an instance when brutal extraction of information might save lives...

...author, "John Adams" April," T.S...

...But not indefinitely so...

...Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington would agree that America is morally special...

...In his view the group's actions have had nothing to do with the true faith of Islam...

...Prisoner abuse and torture runs through American history, from the Andersonville camp during the Civil War, to the old police paddy wagons, to the sadistic guards at Abu Ghraib...

...In his provocative 1996 work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington wisely foresaw that with the end of the Cold War new struggles would pit Western traditions against Islamic and other Eastern cultures...

...Huntington is happy to report that well over 90 per cent of Americans believe in God, find self-esteem at their jobs, and take pride in patriotism...

...Admitting errors is an easy business for intellectuals, but it took politicians more than a decade to do so in the case of Vietnam...