How Democracies Die
The recent book How Democracies Die by Levitsky and Ziblatt tells a story about how human nature often works against our best interests.
Even when there are no barriers to racial heterogeneity people tend to congregate with other people similar to themselves. For instance, new immigrants often choose a place to live where there are other immigrants. They do this for financial reasons and also because they like neighbors who speak the same language, eat the same style of food, share the same cultural myths and ideas. It is just easier to be around people who are like you in terms of heritage and sometimes color. We are all to some extent tribal.
According to Levitsky and Ziblatt no democracy has been formed and persists that is multicultural. To quote the book:
One of Trump's main campaign issues was building a wall to keep people from Mexico from crossing into our country illegally. His stated reason for doing this was to protect us from the rapists and criminals that Hispanics are, in his opinion. His real reason for promoting the wall was because it is a symbol of keeping America white. By keeping out people from Mexico, Central America and South America with a wall and from the Middle East and Africa with travel bans he hopes to acquire the support of those groups who want a white America such as the white supremacists and those who want a 'traditional' America, the America they grew up in which was mostly western European. This is doomed to failure.
We are all going to have to get used to the fact that we will have a larger and larger population of non-Caucasian people in America. Human beings move about. When there was no human beings in the Americas the inhabitants of Siberia packed up their bags, boats and animals and came across the land bridge in spite of the dangers. They found a whole new world and populated it all the way down to the southern tip of South America. Now, with boats, GPS, airplanes, cars, trucks, bicycles, people will come to where they think they can find a better life. Look at the risks the refugees from the Middle East and Northern African are running by floating across the Mediterranean in flimsy rafts and boats in order to come to a civilized world where they might find a better life. They come to America for the same reason, maybe not in as big of numbers but they will persist. And we have a beacon guiding them, the Statue of Liberty.
The Statue of Liberty is more of a symbol of the American ideal than almost any other of our institutions except, perhaps, the Constitution and the rule of law. The Statue was a gift from the French to symbolize freedom from oppression. Our country was founded by people escaping oppression and the statue continues to draw others escaping current day oppression. Should we take it down? Would we feel good about refusing to do what our ancestors did, accept the poor, and tired who are looking for a better life?
Accepting newcomers was never easy. Each incoming group was looked down on and discriminated against until we got to know them. And now we need to get to know our neighbors right there in America again because, if the election of Donald Trump taught me anything, it was that I did not know my neighbors well enough. Knowing one's neighbors and understanding them may be the solution to the current risk of failure of our democratic republic.
The last chapter of the book How Democracies Die suggests ways to save our democracy. To summarize, it recommends coming together again, across both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, as adversaries but not enemies. We need to put democracy ahead of ideals. No one gets everything they want in life. We can't destroy the structure of our government in the process of getting our own way. We must practice, as Levitsky and Ziblatt tell us, tolerance and forbearance again, the two characteristics that were present in our congress for centuries. Intermittently these unspoken rules were set aside especially in the 30 years leading up to the civil war. More recently, when Mitch McConnell and the Republicans refused to consider the nomination of Merritt Garland to the Supreme Court, they broke one of the longest standing unwritten rules of civil political behavior and by doing so, began to tear apart the guardrails that keep our fragile democracy from running off the road. They stopped practicing restraint and adopted an attitude of hard-ball politics. This act set themselves up to have even greater rule changes by spiteful Democrats when the opportunity presents itself: and it will. We need to stop this 'snowballing' of intolerant and spiteful politics and return to rational dialogue and compromise.
Building a wall around our country is a symbol of isolation. We must stop isolating ourselves inside our Party, inside our continent, inside our country. We must live with people who are not like us if we are all to survive on this shrinking planet. We can't go backwards. "Make America Great Again" is a policy of going backwards but time does travel in that direction. It travels forward into a world where everything will be mixed up together making it a more interesting and richer place for us all. If we want to stay free, we must accept change and make our democracy work to accommodate that change.
Even when there are no barriers to racial heterogeneity people tend to congregate with other people similar to themselves. For instance, new immigrants often choose a place to live where there are other immigrants. They do this for financial reasons and also because they like neighbors who speak the same language, eat the same style of food, share the same cultural myths and ideas. It is just easier to be around people who are like you in terms of heritage and sometimes color. We are all to some extent tribal.
According to Levitsky and Ziblatt no democracy has been formed and persists that is multicultural. To quote the book:
As our colleague Danielle Allen writes:In our Declaration of Independence we say that 'all men are created equal' and have the right to pursue happiness in our country. Our laws exclude discrimination on the basis of color, gender, sexual preference and religious affiliation. We have a multicultural democracy and the question now is whether we can maintain it.
The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economics that empower all have been achieved.This is America's great challenge. We cannot retreat from it.
One of Trump's main campaign issues was building a wall to keep people from Mexico from crossing into our country illegally. His stated reason for doing this was to protect us from the rapists and criminals that Hispanics are, in his opinion. His real reason for promoting the wall was because it is a symbol of keeping America white. By keeping out people from Mexico, Central America and South America with a wall and from the Middle East and Africa with travel bans he hopes to acquire the support of those groups who want a white America such as the white supremacists and those who want a 'traditional' America, the America they grew up in which was mostly western European. This is doomed to failure.
We are all going to have to get used to the fact that we will have a larger and larger population of non-Caucasian people in America. Human beings move about. When there was no human beings in the Americas the inhabitants of Siberia packed up their bags, boats and animals and came across the land bridge in spite of the dangers. They found a whole new world and populated it all the way down to the southern tip of South America. Now, with boats, GPS, airplanes, cars, trucks, bicycles, people will come to where they think they can find a better life. Look at the risks the refugees from the Middle East and Northern African are running by floating across the Mediterranean in flimsy rafts and boats in order to come to a civilized world where they might find a better life. They come to America for the same reason, maybe not in as big of numbers but they will persist. And we have a beacon guiding them, the Statue of Liberty.
The Statue of Liberty is more of a symbol of the American ideal than almost any other of our institutions except, perhaps, the Constitution and the rule of law. The Statue was a gift from the French to symbolize freedom from oppression. Our country was founded by people escaping oppression and the statue continues to draw others escaping current day oppression. Should we take it down? Would we feel good about refusing to do what our ancestors did, accept the poor, and tired who are looking for a better life?
Accepting newcomers was never easy. Each incoming group was looked down on and discriminated against until we got to know them. And now we need to get to know our neighbors right there in America again because, if the election of Donald Trump taught me anything, it was that I did not know my neighbors well enough. Knowing one's neighbors and understanding them may be the solution to the current risk of failure of our democratic republic.
The last chapter of the book How Democracies Die suggests ways to save our democracy. To summarize, it recommends coming together again, across both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, as adversaries but not enemies. We need to put democracy ahead of ideals. No one gets everything they want in life. We can't destroy the structure of our government in the process of getting our own way. We must practice, as Levitsky and Ziblatt tell us, tolerance and forbearance again, the two characteristics that were present in our congress for centuries. Intermittently these unspoken rules were set aside especially in the 30 years leading up to the civil war. More recently, when Mitch McConnell and the Republicans refused to consider the nomination of Merritt Garland to the Supreme Court, they broke one of the longest standing unwritten rules of civil political behavior and by doing so, began to tear apart the guardrails that keep our fragile democracy from running off the road. They stopped practicing restraint and adopted an attitude of hard-ball politics. This act set themselves up to have even greater rule changes by spiteful Democrats when the opportunity presents itself: and it will. We need to stop this 'snowballing' of intolerant and spiteful politics and return to rational dialogue and compromise.
Building a wall around our country is a symbol of isolation. We must stop isolating ourselves inside our Party, inside our continent, inside our country. We must live with people who are not like us if we are all to survive on this shrinking planet. We can't go backwards. "Make America Great Again" is a policy of going backwards but time does travel in that direction. It travels forward into a world where everything will be mixed up together making it a more interesting and richer place for us all. If we want to stay free, we must accept change and make our democracy work to accommodate that change.
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