The Great Experiment
Hello, I hope all is great on your end.
My book talk from the Forward Tour in NYC is now available on YouTube and I’m glad to say people have been loving it. Some of my favorite comments: “Came for the Forward talk, stayed for the stand up comedy” and “I’m YangGang and I’m refreshed and energized!” You can check it out here.
This week on the podcast I interviewed Johns Hopkins professor and writer for the Atlantic Yascha Mounk on his new book: “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.” If you’ve been keeping up with me you know that I’ve been very focused on the imminent failures and challenges facing American democracy. So has Yascha.
“The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by creating a reasonable compact, in civil Society,” George Washington wrote in 1790. Mounk takes this experiment as applied to increasingly diverse societies, more diverse than Washington could likely have imagined.
Does diversity make democracy more difficult? Mounk posits that it does for a couple reasons. “First, clashes between different identity groups have historically been one of the major drivers of human conflict. For many societies, diversity has turned out to be a stumbling block rather than a strength. And second, democratic institutions can do as much to exacerbate as to alleviate the challenge of diversity. In many cases, rule by the majority has served to enflame violence between ethnic or religious rivals . . . “ Mounk assumes a level of difficulty that I think Americans are now waking up to after years of taking stability for granted. Humans are tribal. Democratic failure can lead to anarchy, domination, and/or fragmentation.
Mounk observes that the first challenge is to overcome negativity about both whether diverse democracy can work and whether we are making progress. “Refusing to see significant progress in the past half century, [pessimists] naturally have little hope for the next half century. In their minds, ‘whites’ and ‘people of color’ will always face each other as implacable enemies . . . if the great experiment is to succeed, we need to develop a more optimistic vision.”
Mounk proposes a new metaphor for a public park, where different groups can come and congregate both themselves and interact with others. This is distinct from the ‘melting pot’ in which people assimilate or the ‘salad bowl’ in which groups remain separate elements. He recommends investing in patriotism, both civic and cultural. He regards mutual cultural influence as a positive thing in terms of music, food and art, and eschews cultural purism (i.e. he thinks the concerns of ‘cultural appropriation’ are commonly misplaced and unconstructive). Emphasizing what we share is worth investing in.
Mounk in particular argues that the fixation on demography as destiny is a recipe for conflict; i.e. that a Democratic voting majority based on people of color is a foreordained conclusion based on the increasing diversity of the country is neither necessarily accurate nor a path to success. Rather, the goal should be that politics don’t morph into proxies for fixed groups. He cites the different experiences and mindsets of different groups as examples – e.g., mixed race individuals identifying as white, Latinos who are conservative on immigration, etc.
I felt this critique was very important; how many breathless articles have we seen about shifting demographics and their political implications? If the media stopped treating ethnic groups as monolithic voting blocks with uniform attitudes it would be an immeasurable improvement. If Democrats started competing hard for rural whites and Republicans started appealing to voters of color we’d all be better off and democracy would be far more secure and resilient.
We should not be defined by the color of our skin, politically or otherwise.
Mounk writes, “An overwhelming focus on the importance of ethnic identity and the irreconcilable conflicts between whites and ‘people of color’ is quickly becoming part of the ruling ideology of the American elite. One of the most pressing questions of the next few decades is whether this elite will succeed in imposing its view of race on the rest of the population - or whether ordinary Americans drawn from every demographic group are able to counter with a more inspiring vision of our collective future.”
Indeed, this may be the question of our time. It also sounds like a mission statement for the Forward Party to me. Let’s do it.
Check out the Forward Tour video on YouTube and the podcast convo with Yascha Mounk here.
