What can stop a diverse democracy from tearing itself apart?

Lee Drutman reviewed Yascha Mounk’s new book, The Great Experiment, for the Washington Post.

For the many social scientists who have been studying diversity and democracy for decades, the claim that we are undertaking a “disorienting transformation” that is “without precedent” may seem odd. Similarly, the claim that thriving multiethnic democracy is a contradiction in terms may come as news to citizens of places like Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Ghana and Botswana — often-cited examples of successful diverse democracies. Meanwhile, other countries that are much more ethnically homogenous, from China to Hungary to Haiti, are not exactly thriving democracies. The United States has long been one of the most diverse countries in the world. Until recently, few would have placed it at risk.

So what explains the variation in democratic stability among diverse societies? A top-line finding from considerable scholarship is that ethnic diversity is not destabilizing by itself. Rather, it challenges democracy when it hardens into a winner-take-all struggle for power between two sides. In a classic study, Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler concluded that “highly fractionalized societies are no more prone to war than highly homogeneous ones. The danger of civil war arises when the society is polarized into two groups.”

This warning seems particularly relevant to the United States. As American partisan politics has sorted by geography, culture, ethnicity and race over the last several decades, the two parties have embraced clashing visions for American national identity, taking politics into a radically racialized new hyper-polarized stage, in which yesterday’s extremism can pass for today’s talking points. In such a widening gyre, Mounk’s calm mix of storytelling, political theory and social psychology exegesis, peppered with some charming insights, has a comforting seriousness.