The 10th Justice

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: As our colleague Danielle Allen writes: 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 e...

Who knows what the future holds? An epidemic of ebola or some other uniformly fatal disease could kill half the world's population, or an astroid could hit earth and destroy most of the living things here. But assuming neither of those happen and that everyone continues on as they are at present, the population of the earth will continue to increase. What is the likelihood that everyone will stay in the country they were born into? Unlikely, is the answer. The world will eventually be one race, a mixture of black, white, red, yellow, and brown. When I was 14 years old, in 1960, and the civil rights movement was raging, I thought what an easy problem to solve: start a pro-miscegination league. Once everyone was intermarried who could be prejudiced? When Obama (half black, half white) was president, America was reaching out to the countries of the world to solve the problem of increasing population. He did not open the borders of America to unlimited immigration, in fact, Obama dep...