[“The Great Experiment” flatters liberal readers that by
expressing their distaste for cancel culture, they have become diverse
democracy’s most gallant defenders. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

YASCHA MOUNK’S MISGUIDED WAR ON WOKENESS  
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Ian Beacock
July 13, 2022
The New Republic
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_ “The Great Experiment” flatters liberal readers that by
expressing their distaste for cancel culture, they have become diverse
democracy’s most gallant defenders. _

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_The Great Experiment
Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure_
Yascha Mounk
Penguin Press
ISBN 9780593296813

In May, shortly after a white supremacist gunman killed 10 people at a
grocery store in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, the
conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan published a piece on his Substack
outlining the “sinister symmetry” between the motivations of the
attacker and “woke” left orthodoxies on race. According to
Sullivan, “critical race theory” is like white supremacy: Both see
people first and foremost as members of a racial group and reject
“the possibility of color-blind citizenship.” In other words, the
deranged fear of intentional white genocide and the work of calling
attention to the subtle salience of race in everyday life “need each
other,” Sullivan wrote. “And, in their racialized heart, they are
morally exactly the same.”

The notion that America’s democratic culture is threatened by the
twin “illiberalisms” of right and left, specifically on issues of
race, has become regnant among leading centrists. When they write
their columns about the excesses of cancel culture, writers like
Sullivan (and George Packer and Bari Weiss and Thomas Chatterton
Williams and Steven Pinker) understand themselves as classical
liberals, defending freethinking rationality against the mobs of
establishment wokeness as much as the seething violence of the radical
right.

Yascha Mounk, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and outspoken
founder of the online magazine Persuasion, enters this conversation as
a political scientist with a track record of prescient interest in
democratic failure. In summer 2016, Mounk and co-author Roberto Foa
warned that voters across Europe and North America were becoming less
committed to democratic values and institutions. This work on
“democratic deconsolidation” set Mounk up for a larger public
profile after Trump’s election: He wrote a book about authoritarian
populism and hosted The Good Fight, a Slate podcast for the smartest
of the Resistance set. Especially since establishing Persuasion in
2020, Mounk has become a persistent and prominent critic of cancel
culture and identity politics.

The core contribution of his new book is to combine these two
interests, to show how the left’s desire “to make racial identity
the all-encompassing dividing line of American life” really
threatens democracy itself. Mounk writes that human tendencies to
“groupishness” and conflict make multiethnic democracy both hard
and historically improbable. Having never achieved this before, we are
nonetheless trying to build societies in which citizens from diverse
ethnic and cultural backgrounds are truly equal. The Great Experiment
is his bid to remind us that diverse democracy is worth doing but that
it might fail, especially if centrist moderates fail to protect it.
And his sense from observing “the discourse” is that the
mainstream left is, in its own way, just as pessimistic about this
enterprise as the far right, even if its leaders don’t quite realize
it.

Mounk is right that the stakes are high and that the future of this
project is uncertain. It’s unfortunate, then, that The Great
Experiment offers so little meaningful guidance or new insight. Pious
and relentlessly superficial, this is a book motivated by feelings
more than facts, grounded in single anecdotes, and positioned against
a blurry sense of the discourse rather than specific claims or critics
or events. This doesn’t make for a very persuasive intellectual
intervention, though it’s a killer psychological one. Mounk flatters
his liberal readers that it’s now unfashionable and even brave to
believe publicly in multicultural democracy—and that by expressing
their distaste for cancel culture or “woke” politics, they have
become diverse democracy’s most gallant defenders. But is it? And
are they?

From the perspective of those who have wielded power for a rather long
time, multiethnic democracy must indeed look like a great experiment,
thrust upon Western nations only in the late twentieth century as the
unplanned consequence of immigration and economic growth, a challenge
to be overcome by societies that were, until recently, relatively
homogeneous. This is how Mounk lays out the issue. (It is also, one
feels obliged to note, the framework favored by the radical right.)
But it’s not really true. Since the eighteenth century, marginalized
groups have been fighting for full citizenship in modern democracies,
and thus the ability to lead meaningful lives free from violence and
discrimination. From religion to sexuality to race, it is Mounk’s
question that has driven democracy’s tumultuous modern history: Is
it possible to build equitable democracies in heterogeneous societies?
The experiment has been underway for centuries.

Diversity is a good thing, Mounk solemnly assures us, and we should
beware xenophobic populists. (Ethnic cleansing, he clarifies, is “a
future to be feared, not desired.”) But we also shouldn’t be under
any illusions: Humans are hardwired to form groups and tend to treat
outsiders badly. Through most of human history, diversity has been
“a stumbling block rather than a strength,” as well as a force
that “significantly increases the danger of violent conflict.”
Diverse democracy, then, runs entirely against the grain of how humans
work, how we use power, and how history has unfolded. Heterogeneous
societies typically “come apart,” Mounk contends, producing states
that are hopelessly anarchic, warped by domination, or so fragmented
by the devolution of power to minorities that there’s no center left
to hold.

So history and human nature conspire to make diverse democracy a tough
sell. But we’re also making two political mistakes, Mounk argues,
that will make it basically impossible to achieve. First, American
political discourse has given up its liberal individualist sheen in
favor of group-based identitarianism—what he frames as an
“overwhelming focus” on ethnicity and “the irreconcilable
conflicts between whites and people of color.” Debating  everything
in terms of “ascriptive identities” like race or religion, Mounk
warns, elevates “the kinds of groups that have torn diverse
societies apart in many parts of the world.” At the same time, the
way we talk about multiculturalism and equality has become much too
negative. It’s depressing, Mounk advises, when politicians and
elites focus relentlessly on what’s going wrong for minorities or
imply that zero meaningful progress has been made. The Great
Experiment faults both political extremes for these mistakes, but
it’s clear who is being lectured. Listening to the “self-declared
defenders” of multiethnic democracy, he explains, chiding the left,
“it can be difficult to remember why anybody should hope for it to
succeed in the first place.”

Between poisonous white supremacy on the one hand and downbeat talk
about historical and structural racism on the other, Mounk thinks we
need a more positive, optimistic take on what diverse democracy can
achieve, a reminder of our purpose and destination. Most of the book
is spent describing (and redescribing and redescribing) this
democratic North Star. Presented as an edgy and even daring
recommitment, it is banal to the extreme. This “attractive vision”
is a free society “in which compatriots from many different ethnic
and religious backgrounds … embark on a meaningfully shared life
without giving up on what makes each of them unique.”

We should be pursuing, he writes, an effectively color-blind liberal
democracy in which racial and religious distinctions matter less than
they do now, because the underlying injustices have been fixed.
Multicultural democracies should offer citizens a sort of dual
liberty: freedom from state authorities as well as the suffocating
social coercion and “restrictive norms” of the groups into which
they are born. This would be a world without ethnic nationalism or
“love of country.” Instead, good patriotism would be fueled by a
hazy “love of culture,” which could help “a white Christian
living in rural Tennessee to feel special concern for a Hispanic
atheist living in Los Angeles—and vice versa.”

Mounk’s road map to this future state is underwhelming. He
recommends “reinforcing positive trends and avoiding bad mistakes”
to establish what he describes as the four key pillars of any diverse
democracy: secure prosperity, universal solidarity, effective and
inclusive institutions, and a culture of mutual respect. Beneath these
themes hangs an odd and uneven smattering of policy ideas, from
eliminating unpaid internships to barring the Ivy Leagues from using
race in admissions decisions, from expanding automatic voter
registration to opposing restrictive local building regulations.

Perhaps his most original proposal is that we ditch traditional
metaphors for democratic multiculturalism (“melting pot” and
“salad bowl”) in favor of something new. At considerable length,
he suggests that we conceive of diverse democracies as public parks:
“bustling yet peaceful and heterogeneous without being
fragmented,” sites that allow all citizens to “do their own
thing” or mix with strangers as they see fit, spaces that are
“open to everyone.” His enthusiasm for this image notwithstanding,
inspired by a fine day spent playing soccer in Brooklyn’s Prospect
Park, it’s not obvious why this model is so helpful to think with.
For there’s nothing naturally inclusive or liberal about public
recreation spaces. In the United States, after all, they spent much of
the twentieth century famously segregated and not, in fact, open to
everyone.

When Mounk concludes, courageously in his telling, that “the future
of the park we share can look brighter than its present,” or that
“the costs of failure are far too high to settle for a lesser
destination,” it’s hard to disagree. Yet if syrupy bromides and a
wobbly metaphor are all that moderate centrists have to offer at such
a perilous time for diverse democracy—a moment, if we’re to
believe Mounk, that true liberals alone can address—well, we might
really be in trouble.

Let’s set aside, as Mounk often does in this book, the threat posed
by right-wing populists to diverse democracy, and consider the left.
It’s not hard to see how an emphasis on racial or sexual identity
runs against the grain of classical liberalism, which conceives of
human beings as free-floating individuals with dignity and rights
hinging on sameness. There’s a worthwhile debate to be had here.
That debate might involve asking, as Mounk doesn’t in The Great
Experiment, what models of diverse democracy might exist between
American identity politics on the one hand and, say, color-blind
French universalism.

Though he’s loath to commit to anything so specific, it’s
France—where it’s been illegal since 1978 to collect statistics on
racial or religious identity, and where the establishment repudiation
of “wokeism” has been particularly robust—that appears to be
closest to what Mounk seeks. In practice, however, the French approach
leaves much to be desired: Being officially unthinkable has not made
racism any less present in France (just tougher to see and address),
nor has it stopped the rise of xenophobic illiberal populists like
Marine Le Pen, who have lifted themselves to the cusp of national
power. It is arguably the worst of both worlds.

If not France, should Americans look to Canada, where multiculturalism
has been an article of faith and source of national pride since the
1960s, and where explicit anti-immigration sentiment has found little
purchase? Or is New Zealand, another settler-colonial state that’s
now at the forefront of Indigenous reconciliation, an example of how
to allow recognition and justice for oppressed groups while
maintaining a shared national identity and a robust liberal democracy?
This is not the kind of book that will tell you.

At any rate, this debate isn’t possible to conduct in good faith
without being honest about the core disagreements and the alternate
visions. The fatal flaw of Mounk’s book, as well as the source of
its fundamental unseriousness, is that it relies on an ungenerous and
false depiction of what left-wing politicians, activists, and
intellectuals hope the future will look like. Woke leftists say they
are champions of both diversity and democracy, Mounk explains, but
what they really want is much more sinister: a “dystopian” future
in which no progress on racial justice is ever made, in which “power
may have shifted” to minorities “but some of the worst problems”
would persist, and in which we “are condemned, whatever we do, to
remain forever defined by racism and exclusion.” Left-leaning
citizens, he believes, want basically illiberal multicultural
societies

"in which most people will still eye anyone who has a different
religion or skin color suspiciously; in which members of different
identity groups have little contact with one another in their daily
lives; in which we all choose to emphasize the differences that divide
us rather than the commonalities that could unite us; and in which the
basic lines of political and cultural battle still fall between
Christian and Muslim, native and immigrant, or black and white."

The Great Experiment invites readers to smugly believe that leftists
actively desire an unpleasant and misanthropic future in which
progress and solidarity have become well-nigh impossible, sacrificed
to the satisfaction of woke righteousness and cancel culture.

This vision does indeed sound dystopian, so severe and unappealing
that you might fairly wonder if it were invented for the sake of
argument. One might also wonder: Who exactly holds these dire views?
Which voices on the left are hoping for reduced intercultural contact
or a society in which citizens share little in common or believe that
we are “incapable of building on the progress” of the past
century? This is difficult to say, for Mounk isn’t in the habit of
naming names. The “pessimistic” view against which The Great
Experiment is positioned is rarely attributed to specific thinkers or
activists. It is nevertheless held, he explains, by “many people”
and “growing parts of the left,” often advanced by “some of the
loudest voices in the debate.”

Does he mean The 1619 Project, perhaps? Or columns and books by
writers like Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates? Or even an
overwrought op-ed from a student at a small liberal arts college?
Apparently not, for none of these are ever mentioned by Mounk. Rather,
he takes issue with a 2001 anthropological work on female
circumcision; a one-woman Broadway show; and the ideas of Chandran
Kukathas, an Australian political theorist. It’s hard not to think
that Mounk has written a book that is shaped a little too much by
Twitter; that he is reacting to his online sense of which voices
“dominate the discourse” rather than engaging with a real debate.

More seriously, however, there’s an unhelpful slippage at the heart
of Mounk’s depiction of the woke left. The raison d’être of this
book is to respond courageously to pessimism about democracy’s
future and resist a diversity discourse that denies the potential for
any progress. But Mounk has actually manufactured that pessimism for
himself, by conflating the left’s criticism of past and present with
its alleged fatalism about the future. Through this sleight of hand,
Mounk argues that when woke leftists “blame the injustices of the
system” for racial inequality or violence, this is also an
indication that they “seem to think that the future is unlikely to
get much better.” It is the position of many on the left, we are
told, that Western nations have “always been characterized by
enormous injustices and are unlikely to experience significant
improvements,” even though the two claims are not necessarily or
even obviously linked.   

It’s true that debates around race, gender, religion, and sexuality
in modern American life have been highly critical of the individuals
and systems responsible for so much suffering and domination. But this
doesn’t logically imply the belief that such problems are forever
intractable, nor has Mounk shown that this connection is borne out in
the thinking of real thinkers and activists. He just observes that
forceful criticism and pessimistic fatalism go “hand-in-hand.”
This basic error, I think, is why it feels like Mounk is tilting at
windmills throughout this book—and why it’s difficult to imagine
many leftists disagreeing with the broadest strokes of his
“unfashionably optimistic” vision for diverse democracy.

More than anything, this book is a bid by Mounk to give his fellow
liberals an emotional lift; to help them feel that their discomfort
with “wokeness” is heroic and that they are being good democrats
by rejecting identity politics. Many political or polemical books do
this kind of psychological work, and of course those who feel
aggrieved when others indicate their pronouns, or are shocked to find
that they cannot criticize a model’s body on Twitter without being
told that this is disgusting behavior or write yet another piece about
cancel culture only to hear from the Internet that they have lost
their sense of proportion and are fomenting a moral panic—they will
read The Great Experiment and feel quite vindicated, their inflated
irritations glazed with newfound democratic heroism.

The dangerous moment is when that spine-straightening impulse slips
beyond sanctimony into the conviction that only you are interested in
building a better world; that others want something deliberately
darker. Because Mounk’s view (“a future of diverse democracy in
which citizens who stem from different ethnic or religious groups feel
that they have a lot in common”) is righteous and pugilistic and
also utterly blasé, it will feed the impression among liberals that
only they still want nice things; that the left has given up, not only
on the means with which they are familiar, but on the end itself—a
flourishing, peaceful, and cooperative multicultural democracy. This
is not true. But if liberals like Mounk behave as though it were, it
will indeed be difficult to make our diverse democracies endure.

Ian Beacock is a frequent contributor to _The New Republic._ He lives
in Vancouver, where he’s working on a book about democratic
emotions.

 

* Liberalism
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* anti-racism
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* Cancel culture
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