Diverse Democracies: Hardship, optimistic side, ideas to sustain in future
Yascha Mounk on the Great Expirement of Today
America has always been a diverse country, but today is the first time in history that we are creating a diverse democracy where all groups in it are equal, according to Yascha Mounk, a political scientist, professor and author.
On April 18 the Sarah and Daniel Opperman Auditorium, Park Library, was full of students and faculty who came to listen to Mounk's lecture on the threats that diverse democracies face and ideas of how to sustain democracy. It was a part of the Dr. Harold Abel Endowed Lecture Series in the Study of Dictatorship, Democracy and Genocide in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
Mounk talked about the hardship of sustaining diverse societies, reasons why we should be optimistic about the future of democracy and ideas needed to sustain diverse democracy.
“I think today we're engaged in a second kind of great experiment, because our attempt to build ethnically and religiously diverse democracies with actually all of the members equal in a meaningful way, is also historically unprecedented,” Mounk said.
Diverse democracy and its challenge
The United States is a democratic country, often referred to as a “melting pot” because of its diversity, Mounk said.
“America has always been a diverse country, but it’s also been a diverse country in which one racial register sat at the top of the social hierarchy and other groups were excluded or marginalized,” he said.
But there's still work to do, if everyone is truly to get a seat at the table.
“They have to figure out how they can reinvent themselves, how they can shift their notion of who truly belongs, how they can build rules and institutions that are capable of sustaining that new diversity,” Mounk said. “That’s one part of the great experiment.”
The hardship with building a diverse democracy is humans' capability of easily hating each other, Mounk said. It isn’t necessary that wars or genocides are caused by one country against another, because people within their societies are capable of civil wars and different forms of ethnic cleansing, he said.
“It does appear when you look at human history and the darkest chapters in it, ... the one thing that is particularly likely to motivate humans to do terrible things to each other is they believe not only that you're a part of the different group, but that your parents and identity are part of the group that does not share my religion, ethnicity,” Mounk said.
The bright side
Now that the society recognized the “most terrible injustice that we’ve experience in the history of humanity,” it started the first step into the “recognition of the real difficulties of building diverse democracies,” Mounk said.
“We can look back (and) at the current state of our society and the process of our diverse democracies,” Mounk said. “We’re doing vastly better than so many societies in history. We're doing vastly better than America did 100 years ago.”
Another phenomenon that inspires optimism, according to Mounk, is the progress immigrants are making today.
Historically the first generation of immigrants did not have a high income, but then the next one would have been doing much better, Mounk said. In comparison, if an immigrant and a citizen were at the same socioeconomic level, the possibility of the immigrant's children go to the school and doing economically better was higher than a domestic citizen in the next generation.
“Immigrants to the United States today from Kenya, from Vietnam, from Mexico, from El Salvador and other places, (are) rising the socioeconomic ladder at about the same speed as Italian immigrants and Irish immigrants did a century ago,” Mounk said.
Minority groups, Black Americans and Latino Americans also give hope because they believe the country will be even stronger in 50 years from now Mounk said.
“Very importantly, when you ask questions to Americans about, ‘Do you believe in the American dream? Do you think that your family is going to be doing better after 50 years from now than today?’ … African Americans, as well as the Latinos and other minority groups, are actually more likely to give an optimistic answer than white Americans,” Mounk said.
Ideas, rules and institutions necessary for diverse democracy
As our society exists of different groups, it is important to protect those groups and respect them, Mounk said. Fundamentally diverse democracies protect the rights and liberties of individuals, rather than letting government agencies hunt down minorities or put different forms of social pressure on them, he said.
This also leads to the integration of different groups into the diverse democracy. Instead of a previously mentioned metaphor, “melting pot,” Mounk offers the idea of a “public park.”
“Because people (are) coming here from all over the world, all kinds of different cultures, ... the resulting culture's going to bear a little bit of influence from all of them,” Mounk said.
Instead of “melting” cultures, the “public park” allows the society to stay free, have freedom of a personal choice yet still create a community, according to Mounk.
“Just as in the public park, we hope that some people will stay on top and other people are chatting with each other in a function of democracy,” Mounk said. “It's fine for some people to just stay within their communities, but we also need us connected, as we will see people who actually create a new overall culture and common conversations.”
American society is diverse and consists of different groups, so it is important to have something that would give Americans a feeling of solidarity he said.
Thus, another idea for a diverse democracy Mounk mentioned in his speech was inclusive patriotism. Patriotism forms solidarity, Mounk said, and there is a need in American society for patriotism based on something inclusive.
Just as civic or constitutional patriotism might work because of the similar political values shared, philosophically constitutional patriotism doesn’t fit, Mounk said. In that case, cultural patriotism is an idea.
“Culture is one that has grown organically over time, that keeps changing … that today in a very natural way reflect the contributions of members of all kinds of different groups … that is forward, rather than some idealized culture in the past, that is already incredibly diverse,” Mounk said. “I think we should have a patriotism that (is) civic in part, but also isn’t afraid to embrace a form of cultural patriotism.”
The future of American democracy
Mounk said in the future, and specifically in the 2024 American elections, society needs to stand up for basic democratic institutions.
“That means rejecting political candidates that refuse to honor the outcome of elections,” Mounk said. “It means rejecting political candidates that don’t believe in the basic principles of the American founding. It includes rejecting candidates who (are) tempted to go for victory … (while) they’re willing to disregard basic individual rights.”
Grace VanDeMark is a CMU faculty member in the School of Politics, Society, Justice and Public Service. She said she has been reading Mounk for a long time and was excited to listen to his lecture and invite her students.
For the future of the democracy VanDeMark said is important to find ways to hear the voices that are silent and find a bridge between two extremes.
“We need to find ways to hear all those voices,” VanDeMark said. “That means that people have to be willing to listen to changing ideas.”
Kyle Cook, a sophomore, and senior Andrew Tallman attended the lecture because they are interested in politics.
Cook said one of the threats for the future of the democracy is the tyranny of the elite. American society today should be weary about it and should be checking on the government, he said.
“The democracy is a continuing project,” Tallman said. “It only functions when people care about it.”
After the lecture, the attendees had an opportunity to purchase Mounk’s book “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.”
To learn more about Mounk or get his book, visit Mounk’s website.
