![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFrom the May/June 2004 issue of Foreign Policy, Samuel Huntington's reply to letters critical of his article "The Hispanic Challenge," which as Scott Martens among others argues [1, 2, 3] is ahistorical besides being incorrect:
It would be remarkable if, without Québec's ideology and experience of la survivance, Mexico's construction on the ruins of a populous Mesoamerican civilization, or the location of Brazil in an area of a world that lent itself perfectly to plantation slavery, the United States resembled any of those societies. If America wasn't a minority-religion and -language enclave, or built on the mass exploitation of native American works, or built entirely on mass slavery, just how closely would its development echo that of these three societies despite the language and cultural differences?
As I point out in the article, if America had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics, it would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.
It would be remarkable if, without Québec's ideology and experience of la survivance, Mexico's construction on the ruins of a populous Mesoamerican civilization, or the location of Brazil in an area of a world that lent itself perfectly to plantation slavery, the United States resembled any of those societies. If America wasn't a minority-religion and -language enclave, or built on the mass exploitation of native American works, or built entirely on mass slavery, just how closely would its development echo that of these three societies despite the language and cultural differences?
