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HARI-KARI OF THE ANGLO ELITE
The Rise and Fall of
Anglo-America.
By Eric P. Kaufmann. Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 2004. viii +
374 pp. Graphs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth).
Who We Are: The Challenges of America's National Identity.
By Samuel Huntington. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2005. xvii -I-
428 pp. Graphs, tables, notes, index. $27.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).
Brian Gratton
Arizona State University
That an ethnic elite might
willfully "deconstruct the nation they governed" may be "without precedent
in human history" (Huntington, p. 143). Recent books by Eric Kaufmann
and Samuel Huntington trace the extraordinary path of the Anglo-American
elite as it moved from xenophobia toward multiculturalism. Sharing affection
for the force of ideas in history, they fear the consequences of the ideological
route the elite traveled but differ about how disaster might be averted.
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