Ladislav Charouz, St Antony's College -
On October 18th, 2022, the European Studies Centre’s Visiting Fellow Professor Yascha Mounk delivered a presentation on his new book The Great Experiment - Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. The event was chaired by Dr. Hartmut Mayer of Saint Peter’s College and was very well attended.
Mounk began the presentation with the origin story of his book. In an interview for a German newspaper, he gave three reasons why populism was on the rise: the stagnation of living standards, the growing influence of the internet and social media, and what he termed “the great experiment”: the way in which political decisions over the previous decades have diversified Western demographics. To Mounk’s great surprise, “the great experiment” was seized by far-right conspiracists. Of course, Mounk meant to use the term very differently and he felt called to reclaim the word in discourse. The question, more specifically, became how the “experiment” of managing the new trends of diversity in the West can succeed in a democracy.
The first part of Mounk’s presentation examined why we should treat the difficulty of making this experiment succeed seriously. Firstly, human beings are capable of great altruism towards people they see as members of their own group, but they can also show great cruelty towards those outside it. Secondly, this “instinct for groupishness” is triggered by a relatively consistent set of factors, such as ethnicity, religion, language, and race, with increasing diversity exacerbating this human tendency. Finally, democratic institutions are not inherently well-equipped to deal with increasing diversity. Since democracies function on a majoritarian basis, the growth of a minority group can stoke fears in the majority population of a loss of power. Thus, democratic mechanisms can, in fact, exacerbate backlashes against diversity.
Nevertheless, liberals can fell optimistic about their progress and their eventual success in making the “great experiment” work. In the second part of his presentation, Mounk claimed that societies have “overlearned the lesson” of democratic fragility and cultural backlash, becoming overly cynical after a period of unbounded optimism. Reading past the headlines, it is clear that society has made significant progress. The Western European conception of who is a “true” member of a society has changed dramatically. It is no longer common to think of belonging in terms of ethnicity and parentage, but rather in terms of acquired characteristics like language, values, and citizenship. In the USA, 95% of the population in 1960 believed that interracial marriage was immoral but, today, merely 5% believe it is immoral. The proportion of interracial babies has also increased dramatically.
Furthermore, conventional statistics obscure how much progress has been made by immigrants in terms of socioeconomics. When adjusted for how long immigrants have lived in their host countries, the bleak picture of social progress becomes much brighter. Indeed, the children and grandchildren of immigrants are much likelier to climb the social ladder than the children and grandchildren of non-immigrants. Thus, both the right and the left are mistaken in their pessimism about the possibility of social progress for immigrant communities. While structural injustices and discrimination should not be ignored, immigrants are still destined to be an underclass in a prosperous Western society.
In the third part of his presentation, Mounk proposed the best norms, values, and ideals to enrich democracy in a diverse environment. Despite trends in scholarship suggesting otherwise, liberalism is inherently correct, and abandoning liberal values would have disastrous social consequences. Liberal society must, however, guarantee freedom from a double threat. The first threat is the state itself, which can become especially restrictive if a majority within a diverse society decides to exercise this power against a minority. The second threat is the enforcement of norms within communities; people within certain groups might face pressure to conform to codes of conduct against their will. Liberal societies should respect the importance of groups while also guaranteeing individual freedoms.
Mounk also argued that we need clarity on the ultimate goal of integration. Rejecting the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” analogies as either too homogenising or too atomising, he introduced the idea of integration through the metaphor of a “public park.” People can visit the park in their own groups – i.e., stay within their own communities – or visit the park to meet new people. In an ideal liberal society, people should be free to choose either mode of cohabitation.
Finally, in defense of inclusive patriotism, Mounk pointed to the example of Ukrainian resistance fighters as proof that nationalism can be a moral good under the right circumstances. Thus, liberals should not shy away from attempting to domesticate the concept. Of course, the question involves the type of patriotism liberalism should embrace. Ethnic nationalism is problematic for obvious reasons, but civic constitutional patriotism is also problematic because, philosophically, it would distinguish one country from itself as the other, which is incompatible with democratic constitutions. A promising avenue for patriotism, then, is culture. Liberalism must find a way to embrace a patriotic love of cities, landscapes, and cultural practices in a way that integrates their real-world diversity.
In the Q&A session, Mayer pushed Mounk to elaborate on how to negotiate the limits of tolerance with democracy. Though Mounk voiced some scepticism, he stated that we should be inclusive as far as we possibly can without undermining the basis of our political system. Ultimately, an inclusive society cannot include people who use force to exclude others.
Attendees also asked questions about the welfare state. Mounk accepted that the underlying logic of diversity undermines popular support for a welfare state, providing the example of American support for public goods that plummeted after de-segregation. However, he argued that the strength of this effect depends on the circumstances and suggested that the way to overcome this problem was to reconceptualise members that constitute the inclusive group.
With regard to the weaponisation of immigration in partisan media, Mounk argued that liberals must not change the subject to the economy. Rather, they must show people that they take their cultural concerns seriously. Similarly, they should not bluntly dismiss concerns about “free-riding” in the welfare state. The problem with British and American academia is that, due to the campus system, they have a culture of their own, which provides dangerous openings for criticisms from the right. If people begin to perceive universities as a dismissive space of conservative thought, the prospects for their continued existence and political relevance will shrink.
The next event at the European Studies Centre will be the launch of the new book Foreign States in Domestic Markets on 25th October 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment