Politics & Power Quote by Samuel P. Huntington

Huntington is doing what he often did best: taking a patriotic slogan that flatters Americans and turning it into a warning label. “A nation of immigrants” is granted as “a partial truth,” but the pivot is the point. The real target isn’t immigration itself; it’s the way a comforting narrative can become a moral shortcut, a substitute for arguing about borders, assimilation, culture, and political cohesion. By calling the phrase “often assumed” to be “the total truth,” he’s sketching a critique of what you might call identity-by-mantra: repeat the line and you never have to specify who “we” are, what binds “us,” or what obligations newcomers and institutions share.

The subtext is that national identity requires more than an origin story. Huntington is nudging readers toward the uncomfortable claim that the United States has a dominant cultural inheritance - historically Anglo-Protestant in his larger work - that doesn’t dissolve just because immigration is real and recurring. “Partial truth” functions rhetorically like a concession in a debate: it signals fairness while clearing space to argue that the missing part of the picture is the decisive one.

Context matters. Huntington wrote in an era of intensified post-1965 immigration, rising Latino political visibility, and post-Cold War anxiety about what, if anything, replaced anti-communism as civic glue. His line is less descriptive than strategic: it challenges elite multicultural pieties and invites a fight over whether America is defined primarily by a creed, a culture, or a constantly refreshed demographic fact.