Multiculturalist intellectuals attacked both cultural and creedal bases of American identity

Evidence

In the late twentieth century both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. They have denounced, in the words of one of their reports, the “systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives” in education and “the dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective.” The multiculturalists are, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., said, “very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 846

Categorization

• QUESTION: Huntington frames this as an intellectual assault; how would one weigh its actual influence on American identity versus economic and demographic factors he downplays?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 846