When Yascha Mounk went on a German television program to speak concerning the rise of authoritarianism in Western democracies, he never expected a seemingly innocuous remark to cause such a stir.
“We’re embarking on a historically unique experiment — that of turning a monoethnic and monocultural democracy right into a multiethnic one,” Mounk said.
“I believe it can work,” he continued, betraying some doubt in his mind. “But after all it also causes all types of disruptions.”
The commentary made Mounk an quick goal of extremists on each side of the Atlantic Ocean. “Who agreed to this experiment?” one far-right German website raged. The Day by day Stormer, an American neo-Nazi website, attacked Mounk’s Jewish heritage with an allusion to Auschwitz.
That have inspired Mounk’s recent book, “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure,” which warns that countries like america are usually not as stable or resistant to violent conflict as they seem.
“The history of diverse societies is grim,” Mounk writes. Surveying the turbulent history of the world’s democracies, he frets that they’ve “worryingly little experience” with being truly inclusive. Politicians like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban, he says, could be only the vanguard of a backlash against ethnic and spiritual diversity that would end democracy as we understand it.
This can be a book that Mounk, a public mental and political scientist on the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, is uniquely suited to write down. Born in Munich to the descendants of Polish Holocaust survivors, educated on the University of Cambridge and Harvard, naturalized as an American citizen, he describes himself as a “Jew with an unplaceable accent” — a self-deprecating nod to his lifelong experience of feeling like a cultural outsider wherever he goes.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
It’s within the title of your book. So tell us, why do diverse democracies crumble?
It’s tempting to think that it shouldn’t be hard to construct a various democracy. You understand, how hard is it to be tolerant? How hard is it to not hate your neighbor for irrational reasons? However the more I considered and researched the subject, the more I spotted that this is absolutely something very difficult.
A part of the rationale for that’s human psychology. We’ve got a deeply ingrained instinct to form groups after which discriminate against anybody who doesn’t belong.
We all know from history that a lot of essentially the most brutal crimes and conflicts that humanity has endured were motivated in good part by ethnic, religious, racial and sometimes national distinctions. From the Holocaust to Rwanda, yow will discover examples from virtually any century of recorded history.
As a small-D democrat, I’d like to think that democratic institutions can assist to resolve those conflicts, and in certain ways, they will. But in a single essential respect, democracy actually makes managing diversity harder.
Democracy is all the time a seek for majorities. And so, if I’m used to being in the bulk, but now you may have more kids than I do, or if there are more immigrants coming in that appear like you relatively than me, there’s this natural fear that I would suddenly lose a few of my power. And we will see this in the shape of the demographic panic that’s motivating so many on the far right in america and plenty of other democracies today.
And why do you call it a “great experiment”?
Because there is no such thing as a precedent for highly ethnically and religiously diverse democracies that truly treat all of their members as equals.
There are various examples of stable, relatively homogeneous democracies, like West Germany after World War II. There are various examples of democracies which were diverse from their founding, like america, which used to present special status to at least one group and oppress the opposite — at times horrifically.
As a student of the rise of populism and the crisis of democracy, I’ve been struck over the past couple of many years by the best way through which people from Donald Trump to Viktor Orban to Narendra Modi to Marine Le Pen exploit the fears that the good experiment has inspired.
One reason for his or her success just isn’t only that they’ve a strong narrative, but in addition that the mainstream and the left have did not counter that pessimism and have as a substitute responded with pessimism of their very own, which I believe is deeply counterproductive.
Are you able to expand on that slightly?
Let’s take the condition of immigrants in Western Europe and North America.
The bulk still come from countries which are much poorer and have much lower educational opportunities. This permits the far right to spin a narrative that immigrants don’t learn the language, aren’t focused on integrating into the host society and won’t ever be economically productive.
The left normally rejects that attribution of blame. However it then goes on to echo a lot of its essential findings, saying that immigrants are excluded from the mainstream of society, that they are surely much poorer, that they don’t experience socioeconomic mobility. The one difference is that the left blames those troubles on discrimination or racism and other types of structural injustice.
Undoubtedly, immigrants — and particularly nonwhite immigrants — experience serious types of discrimination and racism. But once I began writing the book, I checked out one of the best empirical evidence we’ve on how immigrants are faring. It seems that the primary generation often does struggle to some extent, but their children and grandchildren rise within the socioeconomic ranks in a short time.
You’re anxious about American democracy falling apart. Tell us why.
I sometimes joke that I’m a democracy hipster: I began arguing that democracy was at risk in 2014 and 2015, before it was cool. I used to be seeing the rise of authoritarian populist candidates and parties in lots of countries all over the world. In the event that they weren’t in power yet, they were inside arm’s reach of it.
Probably the most dangerous thing about them is the anti-pluralism, the claim that they alone represent the people. That drives them to pay attention power in their very own hands and refuse to just accept electoral defeats.
So in that sense, there’s nothing especially surprising concerning the way that Trump conducted himself in office, or for that matter, how he has refused to just accept his defeat as legitimate. For him, it’s a conceptual impossibility that the vast majority of his compatriots might even have chosen President Biden.
When Trump first won election in 2016, I don’t think he recognized the extent to which various institutions reined in his power. If he’s re-elected in 2024, he can be far more determined to pay attention power in his own hands from Day 1. A second Trump presidency can be far more dangerous than the primary one was.
What concerning the second a part of the book title, which is how democracies endure? How does america transcend the historical pattern that you are worried about?
That may be a very difficult task. Our country today stays deeply shaped by the intense types of injustice which have warped it for hundreds of years. It will be naïve to think we will fully overcome that legacy in a matter of years.
But people sometimes forget that, as recently as 1980, a transparent majority of Americans thought that interracial marriage of any kind was immoral. Today, that number is all the way down to the one digits.
More broadly, probably the most dangerous ideas in American politics is the concept that demography is destiny. It’s deeply pernicious. It fuels right-wing extremism and left-wing identity politics, despite the indisputable fact that easy demographic categories — white people versus people of color — now not represent the complex reality of the country.
So, probably the most essential tasks of each political parties is to advance the racial depolarization of the American electorate. The country can be significantly better off if Republicans truly tried to construct a multiracial, working-class coalition and if the Democrats didn’t hand over on most of the predominantly white states.
I don’t wish to live in a rustic through which I can walk down the road, take a look at the colour of anyone’s skin and know with a high degree of certainty whom they’re voting for.
What to read tonight
My colleague Maya King reports from Georgia on two predominantly Black cities that embody the state’s increasing diversity and leftward shift — and that will soon be represented in Congress by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Republican candidates in several states are attempting to oust conservative governors by harnessing the anti-establishment energy of the Trump base. But in races for governor, Reid Epstein reports, it’s hard to beat the establishment.
Anxious about American politics? You possibly can blame Tiktaalik, a 375-million-year-old fish that has grow to be the topic of memes asking why — just why — it needed to flop its 4 whispery limbs onto land and send humanity down its current path.
Viewfinder
A farewell to a secretary of state
On Politics commonly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Kenny Holston told us about capturing the image above:
Since December, I’ve covered three funeral services for The Times: for former Senator Bob Dole, former Senator Harry Reid and, this week, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Covering a funeral service can often be difficult. My goal during Albright’s service was to capture scenes that might depict the depth of what those in attendance could be feeling while providing clear news coverage for Times readers.
Among the many family, friends and former colleagues at Albright’s service were three presidents — Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — in addition to Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. It’s rare to have the chance to capture images like this. I did my best to compose a picture that I felt spoke to the importance of the life Albright lived.
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.
— Blake
Is there anything you think that we’re missing? Anything you would like to see more of? We’d love to listen to from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
