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Conversations with Coleman
Democracy and Diversity with Yascha Mounk (S3 Ep.16)
01:30:42
My guest today is Yascha Mounk. Yascha is a political scientist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. He's also the founder of "Persuasion", which is a great online magazine I really recommend you all read. He is also the host of "The Good Fight" podcast. Yascha has a new book out called "The Great Experiment", which is what we'll be discussing in today's episode. We talk about group psychology and tribalism, their origin, and human nature. We discuss the difference between nations that are built around specific ethnic groups on the one hand and nations that are built around abstract ideas on the other, the challenges faced by multi-ethnic democracies, the threats to diverse democracies from the right and from the left, and why diverse democracies can be less stable than diverse autocracies. We talk about colorblindness, white identity politics and wokeness, whether increased contact between racial groups is the antidote to racism, and whether diversity is an inheren...
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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can get access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Yasha Monk. Yasha is a political scientist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. He's also the founder of Persuasion, which is a great online magazine. I really recommend you all read and he's the host of the Good Fight podcast. Yasha has a new book out called the Great Experiment, which is what we're talking about today. We discuss group psychology and tribalism and their origin in human nature. We talk about the difference between nations that are built around specific ethnic groups on the one hand, and nations that are built around abstract ideas on the other. We discuss the challenges faced by multi ethnic democracies. We discuss the threats to diverse democracies from the right and from the left. We talk about why diverse democracies can be less stable than diverse autocracies. We talk about colorblindness, white identity politics, and wokeness. We talk about whether increased contact between racial groups is the antidote to racism. We discuss whether diversity is an inherent good or a contingent good. We talk about the idea that demography is destiny. We talk about the fluidity of racial identity and how one's identity can change in response to social incentives. We talk about what it would look like to have a colorblind legal regime in America. We discuss immigration and cultural assimilation and much more. So without further ado, Yasha Monk okay, Yasha Monk, thanks so much for coming on my show.
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Hey, my pleasure.
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Comin so this is one of those shows where I get to talk to someone who I'm actually friends with outside of the podcast. And that's always fun and I always like to tell the listeners when that's the case. So you know, it's good to get you on in this capacity. And we've talked about a lot of these topics casually in different settings. And we're here to talk about your book today, which is excellent, I can honestly say, even if I didn't know you and weren't your friend. I would find it highly compelling. It's called the Great Experiment and touches topics I touch a lot on this podcast and that I and my listeners care a lot about. But before we get to it, can you give a little quick biography of who you are, how you came to care about an issue, how we live together in diverse democracies?
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I will. But before that, thank you so much for your generous intro. And it's one of the pleasures of my life to be friends with you. But in a way, we're coming full circle because the first time I met you was when I had you on my podcast a long time ago.
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Yes, it was. I remember that at the time you.
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Were, what, 21 or something?
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Something like that, yeah.
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And I have to say, I mean, no, listening to this podcast is going to be surprised by this. But it's not just that Coleman is, you know, one of the really important voices today. It's the Polish he had and has as a young person. But as a policy and as a 21 year old, you know, I had the luck of teaching a lot of great universities, and I've had a bunch of really smart students who like, you know, but they want to prove to the world how smart, knowledgeable they are. There's a particular kind of way that people are going to grow up to be important voices are when they're 21, where they're trying to show it to you. And the thing that blew me away about Coleman, other than all of his insights and all of that, was that he had none of that. He just spoke like a seasoned 50 year old who's thought about it all and is not trying to impress and is just telling you how he sees the world. And it honestly was one of the most impressive things I've seen. So it's an honor to be on your podcast. Coleman's looking a little embarrassed. Before he.
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You can't see it, but I'm turning red.
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Look. So I come from a family that's been at the receiving end of intergroup conflict for many, many generations. I mean, my family comes from parts of the world, but today, Ukraine, it wasn't really Ukraine when there, but, you know, Lviv and Colombia and other places, but now in Ukraine. You know, for generations, we suffered pogroms. My grandparents lost their parents and many of their siblings in the Holocaust. They actually were communists. So my grandparents, when they were teenagers, decided to leave Judaism and convert in a way to this new religion because of its promises to build a more Equitable world one in which group identity wouldn't matter in that kind of way in which we would overcome all of those divisions which separated people from each other. And then after World War II they helped to build up the communist government in Poland. But in 1968 that government turned on the remaining Jews in the country and in a big anti Semitic state sponsored pogrom, it threw nearly all of them out. There's about 50,000 Jews left in Poland in 1967. By 1970 there was about 500 left. And so my parents were not particularly political, who were about 20 years old at the time, found themselves thrown out of their own country and going into exile, emigrating in a forced way. And so then I ended up growing up in Germany, in a peaceful country, in an affluent country, in a country for which I'm grateful in many ways, but in a slightly odd position of being Jewish. I'm not religious, I don't keep many of the rituals that mentioning that fact was enough when I was growing up to kind of put me, make me very exotic, make some people treat me with anti Semitism, but make a lot of people treat me with this kind of slightly creepy philo Semitism where they're trying to prove to me how sorry we have about countries past and you know, how wonderful I am just because I'm a Jew. And so certainly when I think about the topic of the book of how to build these deeply ethnically and religiously diverse democracies, the awareness of how often that project has gone wrong, how often intergroup conflict has led to wars and civil wars and forms of genocide and forms of ethnic cleansing is personal to me.
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So there's this basic fundamental trait that almost all humans everywhere have had, probably will have, which is that we identify with a group and we get all sorts of cognitive and psychological pleasures from preferring our in group and being judgmental towards out groups. This is the psychology that allows for us to enjoy things like sports, right? It's like if we were wired differently, sports would not be so fun. So this can be leveraged in various ways, it can be leveraged for war and, and all kinds of things. But basically, as I see it, your book starts from that basic assumption about human nature and then the more recent problem of nation states that incorporate more than one group. So is that, am I right that that's pretty much how you see it? And can you describe what is new about this problem? And what's old? Right? The tribalism is old. What's new?
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So sports is a great way in. I Mean, I remember when I was a kid, I loved Bayern Munich. I still do. We were growing up. I was growing up in Munich, in the center of town. And when my mom would see groups of fans, it really freaked her out. She would make us change the side of the road, because to her, the idea of groups was dangerous. The idea of groups of people chanting in unison was what reminded her of the worst horrors of the 20th century. And so I sort of grew up, in a way, with the aspiration to overcome groups, to say we should all be good cosmopolitans who care equally about everybody in the world. But the more I looked at both how some of the worst elements in our politics are exploiting groups over the last decades, and the more I read about social psychology, the more I recognized that's just not a realistic vision of how the world is ever going to work. Look, I teach. I'm lucky enough to teach college at Johns Hopkins. Great university, incredibly diverse campus. I and my students think of themselves as some of the most tolerant people in the world. And in some ways they are. In some ways they're not. But if I ask them whether a hot dog is a sandwich and haven't debate that question for 10 minutes, which they really enjoy, and then they play a game against each other, it turns out that the people who believe that a hot dog is a sandwich start to discriminate against the people who believe that a hot dog is not a sandwich. So this ability to form these groups along seemingly silly lines and for the members to then start discriminating against those who don't belong to those groups is just really deep and really ingrained. And it's led to some of the worst crimes in history. And so what's new about this moment is not to have diverse societies. That's often been the case in the history of the world. It's not really to have a democracy in a diverse country. The United States has had that since its founding. It is to build diverse democracies. Deeply, ethnically and religiously diverse democracies would actually treat all of the members as true equals. And for that, there's no precedent. So there's some democracies like Germany, where I grew up, which, at the time of a successful founding, after World War II, had become deeply homogeneous because of all these historical events we've been talking about. And those countries, like the United States, which, at the founding gave rights and privileges to one group and oppressed and excluded in extreme ways many other groups. And so at the moment, what we're trying to do is to take a deeply ethnic and religiously diverse country like the United States, but also an increasingly ethnically and religiously diverse country like Germany, like France, like Australia and all those other places, and say we're going to try and govern ourselves together while not having this kind of hierarchy, while treating each other as equals. And for that, there's no successful precedent.
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So one thing that has irked me and irked me, especially in 2020 during the George Floyd protests and riots and so forth, was when people from relatively homogenous European countries would look at America and say, what the hell is wrong with you guys? What is up with your cops killing black people unarmed and the level of rampant racism in your society? We have everything figured out over here, at least compared to you guys. And, and what irked me about this was not that I think America has no problems to solve and no persisting inequalities and no problem with the cops. There's huge problems with the cops. What bothered me about it is that I feel many societies have, quote, unquote, solved this problem by carefully negotiating so that they don't actually have to deal with it to begin with. Which is to say, if you form a country around a specific ethnic group, right, like Sweden is for Swedes, Finland is for Finns. These are not just countries, they're actually names of ethnicities built into the country. And then you put borders around that ethnicity and integrate very other few ethnicities over, you know, whatever, several hundred years, well, then it's pretty easy to maintain racial harmony because you're just. You're using, as they say, good fences to make good neighbors. Whereas America and Canada, to an extent, because it was initially a nation of immigrants, has always had a totally different set of challenges. So that's one thing that irked me. But your book got me to consider that the challenge America has been facing is increasingly the challenge that developed world faces. And so can you talk a little bit about that?
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Yeah, yeah. So let me talk about the difference between the two cases, but then also some of the similarities, because I think you're exactly right. But there's. I mean, look, I grew up in Europe and I find the sort of European anti Americanism to be just very easy and tired. Right. It often relies on cliches. There's lots of things to criticize about America, but there's also lots of things to criticize about Europe. And Europeans can sometimes be very quick to judge America on its flaws without being commensurately aware of its own flaws. And it is one of the strange ironies of the summer of 2020 that there was these big, in many ways, well intentioned, in many ways moving anti racist movements all across Europe focused on a problem an ocean away, when European societies have their own problems of racism and discrimination, but somehow went at the forefront of those debates. And so actually you could often see an element of smug moral superiority that is unearned in the way that these protests took place in Europe, saying these Americans, although they are terrible, but of course we are much better, right? So having studied the history of these diverse societies and some of the ways in which they go wrong, there's three main modes of failure. There's fragmentation, there's anarchy and there's domination. But Europe and America have historically had slightly different forms of domination. So in Europe it's what I call a form of soft domination. You know, how did Germany solve domestic a challenge of making diverse democracies work after World War II? Well, very easily. It wasn't a very diverse society. Because of a holocaust and because of ethnic cleansing and because of expulsions because of all those processes, the society was just really homogeneous. And so, yes, the rules from the beginning were inclusive, but the reality wasn't inclusive because there wasn't anybody to include. And once immigrants started to come in, they often were treated as non citizens or second class citizens. They are not giving a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of informal prejudices and so on and so forth. The United States has a different set of problems, which is that of the long lasting legacy of heart domination. Which is to say that of course, for centuries people in the United States were enslaved. And for much longer after that they were discriminated against in Jim Crow and other forms. And that continues to structure our society today in some important ways. I think there's a lot of simplistic talk about structural racism and so on, but the fact that of course today's reality in the United States continues to be shaped by that past is obvious. And so when you think of something like relations between whites and African Americans or whites and black people in Europe as well, I think there's an interesting distinction. I don't know whether you share a perception, Coleman, but in the United States there is some deep racism that exists. It's frankly a minority position now. But because of all of that history, there are a good number of whites who really do have strongly racist views against African Americans. And it's a hatred that goes deep and it's a hatred of something that's in an odd way familiar. But I also think that A lot of Americans and white Americans have an understanding of complexities of class. In black America, for example, they're actually relatively good, not always as good as they might be, but relatively good at reading the difference between a black person who's grown up in a really deprived neighborhood and a black person who's going to a fancy college. I think you have a different kind of form of racism. So that sort of hatred of a known isn't really there because there have been so few black people historically, at least in countries like Germany and Italy and so on. Some countries like France, there's been more black people for a long time. But I also know from my friends who are immigrants from Africa to Germany and Italy and those places that actually in some ways I feel more comfortable in the United States because either middle class in, in America, people sort of recognize who they are as middle class. And even though they face certain disadvantages, they also are sort of treated normally as belonging in other ways. Whereas in Europe they're always exotic and they're always treated with a sort of generalized set of prejudices and so on, of, oh, they probably barely speak the language and are probably uneducated and so on and so forth because, you know, Europeans are just much less familiar with the black middle class, for example. And so I think that you can understand a lot about the societies today by looking at those different historical trajectories. I haven't yet answered part of your question, which is what makes this moment different in those countries. And I actually think in some ways we're getting more similar, which is to say that Germany in 1950 was very, very homogeneous. Even when I grew up there in the 90s, it still really felt like a very homogeneous society. But actually today there's about as many foreign born people in Germany as there are in the United States. And there's some European countries where the number of foreign born people is now higher than it is in the United States. Even a country like Switzerland, which you think of as quite sort of sleepy and so on. Right. And so some of the fundamental challenge of how do you deal with a coexistence of all of these different ethnic and religious groups is now the same in Europe as it is in the United States, despite those different histories.
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Yeah. So one big difference, one big consequence of slavery in Jim Crow is simply the memory of slavery and Jim Crow, the historical memory of slavery and Jim Crow, the fact that the, you know, some 90% of black people in America, including myself, are the only group in the country that didn't Come here by choice. And we know that. And so there is always this primordial grievance that can be pointed to, and therefore a primordial guilt that can be felt until the end of time, until the end of America by black people and white people who've been here for a long time, respectively, and European countries, many of whom had many, many slaves, had the strange to say good luck, and I'm not even sure it really is good luck, but kept their slaves overseas. And so when they dissolved their empires and when slavery was abolished in the 19th century, they didn't have the problem America had, which is the guy who was a slave yesterday is now living next to the man that enslaved him. And his kids are living near the kids of the slave masters. And the race that was enslaved has to live with the race that was just enslaving them. And the resentments, the. Just like the fertile ground for resentment and guilt and, you know, ethnic entrepreneur politicians to whip up grievances till the end of time. That gasoline is there in America till the end of time in a way that it's not in Europe and it's not. It's not the same. The psychology of immigrants is not the same. They're coming by choice. Whatever discrimination they face is implicitly balanced against the sum total of what they're leaving at home and the opportunities they had there. There's a baseline level of gratitude, usually, because why else would you come to a place? And that makes our challenge really difficult. And this gets into something else. So, you know, we've basically alluded to the threat from the right, which is essentially white racism, nativism, maybe populism, depending on how one defines that term. And my understanding from looking at polls and other data is roughly 10% of Americans will agree with straight up racist views about black people. Like, I don't want my child marrying a black person. Right? That's like 1 in 10, which is, I suppose, on your. Depending on your worldview, is either surprisingly high or surprisingly low. And there could be some hiding of views, but I just, I sort of take that at face value. So that's the threat from the right is that sentiment and politicians that weaponize it. And then the threat from the left, and you talk about this in your book, is to me, narratives like the 1619 Project, right, which essentially use that gasoline of resentment and whips it up through some outright falsehoods, such as that white people basically played no role in the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow, or that the country was founded in part to preserve Slavery. So can you talk about what is the threat from the Left to diverse democracies?
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So I think the main threat is actually the deep embrace of what a really thoughtful scholar who actually came to regret coining the term and came to dissociate herself from it, calls strategic essentialism. And so the idea here is that a lot of people on the left for a long time are really skeptical and critical of these identity categories. They thought, hey, the way that Marxists used to talk about the proletariat and all of that, that actually doesn't really make sense. It simplified these categories. Things are much more complicated than that. These are not natural kinds. And so we should actually disaggregate groups in these ways. But then a set of people started to worry. Well, hang on a second. If we do that, it makes it harder to fight against oppression. And perhaps it's fine for sort of the white worker in the streets of Paris, but it's not fine, for example, for the voiceless people in India. That was Spivak's argument. And so even though we recognize that categories like people of color are really artificial, but they kind of don't really describe the world very accurately, we should embrace him in a strategic manner. We should speak as fove, as essentialist account of identity were correct in order to be able to organize political protests along those lines and sort of fight back against injustice. Now, in a way, I get the point of that, right? If you live in a society that's discriminating against people on the basis of those artificial identity groups, at some point you got to say, well, we might think these identity groups are artificial, but nevertheless, we should organize as the people who are affected by this in order to fight back. But the problem is that the strategic element and strategic essentialism very quickly fell away. And so the way that a lot of the left talks about these things today, there's lip service to the strategic element. You still see that even in some of the more extreme reaches of quote, unquote, woke discourse. You see this sort of like, well, of course, identity is all socially constructed. That's sort of like the lip service to the element of it being a strategic essentialism. But then, for all intents and purposes, they actually treat it in a deeply essentialist manner, and they think that it's an analog, it good to structure society, to structure the main media institutions, to structure the main educational institutions in such a way as to encourage Americans to find themselves by these identity categories. And for me, the clearest example of that is the thing that Most elite private schools in the country now do that Dalton and Horace Mann do in New York City, that Sidwell Friends does in Washington D.C. of taking kids who might be 10 years old or 80 years old or 6 years old and putting these into different so called affinity groups. So the teacher comes in and he says, you're African American, you're Asian American, you're Latino, you're white. You go off into your separate groups and then the hope is that you will learn to have political consciousness and to fight back against the injustices you suffer as various categories of people of color. And one of the problems is that what you do with white people, you can do what people did when I was a kid in Germany, where those Catholic and Protestant religion classes and I sort of didn't fit in. So it was like me and the two kids who were children of Turkish immigrants sort of sitting around, you know, reading teen magazines and learning about sex or something. But that doesn't really seem fair, right? You can't say, hey, the white kids get to have a fun time while like everybody else is being lectured at.
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I remember one time I was on a meditation retreat and they had a big meditation hall for everyone to meditate in together. But once a day they would also have a separate people of color meditation hall. And there weren't that many people of color. It was probably 70 or 80% white or something. And it was like me as a black person and like a Chinese woman and like an Indian guy. And I'm supposed to sit there thinking, oh, it's so much easier to achieve enlightenment now that I'm around my own people. It's like, it was such a ridiculous.
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And actually you, the Chinese woman and an Indian person are like exactly the same because you're people of color. Right? Right. Perhaps we'll talk about that more later. I've really come to be skeptical of those labels. And I've really come to be skeptical as a result of the idea that America is ever going to be majority minority. I think it's actually deep conceptual confusion that has led people to that conclusion. But to finish this point about the kids. So, you know, the idea, I guess, is that you then take the white kids and you lecture them on everything that white people have done wrong in this country. Now one of the things that people are concerned about is that they might feel uncomfortable. Like, look, I'm not so worried about kids feeling uncomfortable. They can live, it's fine. What I am worried about is that this is completely naive about how the dynamics of in group Favoritism and out group discrimination work. Because the thing that's really clear is that you can draw groups in different kinds of ways. And that really depends on the context. But once you tell people you're a member of a group, humans will favor the members of that group over outsiders. There are some good studies which show that. But actually, if you give white people lectures about white privilege, they end up performing worse on the implicit association test afterwards in a more racially discriminatory manner than they do before. Now, I have some skepticism about the implicit association test, but I think it shows the key mechanism here. So just the idea that we're going to build a diverse democracy in which we have more solidarity with each other, in which we're more able to treat each other fairly, which we're more able to sustain our democratic institutions, even as some people are trying to rile up hatred between different groups by taking these kids and telling them the most important thing about you is that you're Asian American. The most important thing about you is that you're Latino or white or black is just deeply wrong headed to me. And I really worry about the kind of society that might build and structure.
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So is one of your worries. I'm channeling something I remember Jordan Peterson said once, which was, if you tell me I have to play identity politics and I'm an average white guy, say it's not obvious to me that the answer is to lose the power struggle.
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Right?
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If you're going to tell me I have to enter this identity based power struggle, it might turn out that I prefer to be on the winning end of that. Is one of your worries that if we tell white people from a very young age, your whiteness is a core part of your identity, don't ignore your whiteness. Screw race blindness. A lot of them won't go the Robin d' Angelo route. A lot of them, like most humans in most times and places, will want to feel pride in that identity and will be driven to another option.
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I think that's exactly it. So look, I think it's naive to think you can ever completely overcome groups and it's perfectly fine to encourage respect among different groups, right? I think the sort of slightly old fashioned, you know, everybody bring a dish from your culture and we're going to celebrate it. All of that is fine, right? I'm not saying that we sort of. And in fact in the book, I argue against the metaphor of a melting pot as the right way for America to go. I think we have to recognize we're always going to be with strong groups, and that's perfectly fine. But precisely because caring about your religion, caring about your cultural origin, caring about your ethnic group comes quite naturally to human beings. We need institutions that push against that a little bit. We need institutions that also build bridging identities that encourage us to see what we have in common rather than what separates us. And so the idea of these affinity groups is that you take these eight year old kids and you tell them, hey, embrace your whiteness. You have to recognize that you're white because it gives you all these privileges and so on. And then we're going to give you a political lecture and you're going to learn how unjust your privileges are and you're going to struggle in a good deangeloan anti racist way against the privileges that white people have in this country. I think that's deeply naive about what's going to happen. Exactly what you said, which is what's going to happen is that a lot of them are going to say, oh, I guess, apparently my identity is white, and that means that I should be friends with white kids and I should hang out with white kids and I should defend our interests against those of the others. So perhaps you might be able to create one or two DeAngelos type anti racists. You're also going to create a lot of just straight up racists. And what's the alternative? The alternative is that you tell people to be aware of the prejudices and the challenges they might face. You tell people to say, hey, we live in a society in which we try to treat everybody equally, but historically we haven't done that. And some of your classmates might still be experiencing those kinds of forms of discrimination today. And be aware of that and make sure that you look out for them. But you know what? The most important thing about you is not that you're Asian American or Latino or white or black. The most important thing is that we're Americans. The most important thing is that you're a member of this elementary school or this middle school. The most important thing is that you're on a sports team together and you want to win the championship. So there's these other kinds of forms of groupishness that you can encourage, which actually help within the context to bridge some of the most pernicious divides that we've had in American history. That brings us back to sports. One of the things that has historically been useful about sports is that you can say, hey, you really care about the Yankees or the Red Sox, and you might dislike the other team, but the people who support those teams actually are diverse within themselves. And it makes it possible for us to connect with each other across some of those other boundaries because we have this common pride in the hometown team that works very well in schools as well. There's lots of studies would show that intergroup contact with reduces prejudices. When you're told that you're equal within that context, you don't have to say that you're equal in every context, but within that context you're treated as equals. You're encouraged to get along and you're sharing a goal. That's why this classic things like put different kids from different groups on a sports team together and have them fight for a championship together are going to be much better at reducing privileges than those kind of imposed affinity groups.
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B
So I want to linger on what you just said and I'm going to ask you to restate it and underscore it because I think it's really important. This is called the intergroup contact hypothesis, which is, simply put, the idea that people become less racist, less discriminatory, more open minded to each other when they just meet each other and that a large amount of bigotry in the world is a consequence of having no contact with the people who you're bigoted against. So there's a version of this idea that you say is wrong and a version that you say is right or there's a crucial nuance. What is that nuance? I think it's very important.
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A
Yeah. So this comes from a Harvard psychologist called Gordon Alpert, who during World War II was helping some group of refugees at a local charity. And he never quite says which group it is. He says, I had prejudices against these people. And then I started to work with them and I realized that many of my prejudices were irrational, but actually very good people and my fears I had about them were wrong headed. And he said, hey, hang on a second, is this something which can be generalized? Is it always the case or often the case once you have contact with a group that you have these negative opinions about, your views of them improve? And this was the beginning of probably the biggest research program in social psychology in the last 75 years, thousands of studies, and they did mostly confirm this hunch. So one early influential study looked at housing projects in Boston and there were some integrated ones and some segregated ones. And it turns out that when you had neighbors, if you're white and you had a neighbor who's black, you were more likely to have positive views of black people than if you were white and you lived in a segregated housing block and everybody around you was white, and you never really had that kind of neighborly relation with somebody who's black. But there's also an important caveat which became clear through this research, and this is that there have to be particular conditions for that intergroup contact to work. So it doesn't work if I'm the boss and you're the employee. So we're never in a state of equality within the particular context in which we're interacting. That doesn't actually reduce conflict or prejudice in the same kind of way.
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Right, because slaves and their masters had plenty of social contact.
- [32:37]
A
Exactly. But they obviously did not have a contest as equals. It's important that he share a goal. So if I'm on a team of Irish people and we're playing every year against the Italians in the same league, that doesn't help. That might actually make things worse because we're like, our Irish team's got to beat that terrible Italian team. If you have mixed within the team and on the team is Irish and Italians, then that actually helps to go against prejudice because you're sharing this important goal together. We have all of this insight from really the richest, most detailed research program in Psychology in 75 Years about how to set up groups which encourage the overcoming of the prejudices. And it basically tells us to do the opposite of these affinity groups. Because what these affinity groups tell you is the most important thing is not that you're equal, it's that you're different. Some of you have these privileges over others, and so you should think of yourself as being in conflict. It encourages people to share stories of conflict and to share stories of how you don't get along. So in a systematic way, it does the opposite of what the research suggests works. And, you know, what works is sort of boring. It's the sports team. It is sitting kids down and say, be respectful of each other. Be aware of each other's differences. But actually you share a set of interests is to give them common tasks. There's a great pedagogical approach called the jigsaw puzzle approach, where every student has a piece of information, and it's only when all of them are part of solving this puzzle together that you can actually manage to do it. So it's context in which you're encouraging people who, outside of that context may be unequal, some may suffer more disadvantage than others, there may be conflict, but in that context, you're encouraging them to see each other as Equals and to cooperate on a goal and to have shared interests. That's when you can actually fight against these kinds of prejudices.
- [34:34]
B
All right, so I want to talk a little bit about diversity. This is something I think people pay lip service to but don't think deeply about. So basically, everyone except people on probably the far right will say the words, diversity is our greatest strength. But I'm not sure the behavior of the typical person actually matches that belief. So, for example, has anyone ever gone to Abyssinian Church in Harlem, heard the choir, and thought, wow, this is an amazing environment. One of the best churches I've ever been to. Only problem with it is that there's no diversity. Everyone here is black. It's like, no. No one's ever had that thought, I think. And there are many spaces like that where it's actually not clear that diversity, racial and ethnic diversity would make this better. It's not clear it would make it worse either. It just seems irrelevant. It seems neutral. It seems orthogonal to everything that this space is about, which to me would suggest that diversity, racial diversity is a contingent good. When it's good, it's good for reasons that have to do with specific consequences that have. It makes, you know, like, I want the police force, I want the NYPD to be racially diverse. Because when I imagine the NYPD being 100% white, but policing city in a crime where crime is 60 or 70% black, the optics of that, the NYPD would be seen as having very little legitimacy, and it would make it tougher for them to do their jobs and tougher for them to keep all of us safe. So that's a way in which.
- [36:19]
A
And it would probably make it easier for us officers to dehumanize black people and other kinds of things, right?
- [36:24]
B
Yeah, all sorts of things of that nature. And easier for black people to mistrust the cops and all of it. So that's an area where it's clear to me that racial diversity is a good because of these other consequences. So how do you think about diversity as an inherent good?
- [36:42]
A
Well, a couple of thoughts. One is that one of the points I make is, look, I am exercised by a problem we have, which is that we have these deeply ethnically and religiously diverse democracies. But there's lots of people who are scared by that idea, who reject that idea. We have all kinds of practical problems that this clearly is giving rise to, and we got to make it work because we know what historically the price of failure has been. Right. If you somehow decided, as some People want to make Germany or France less diverse now than it has become. What this means is the most extreme forms of violence and injustice. Right? So there just isn't an alternative to making it work because of a way in which we societies have transformed over the last decades. Now, my book is not a book that's saying that those democracies in general are better than others. Those societies that continue to be relatively homogeneous, Japan and Bulgaria, wherever else, they can legitimately make the sovereign decisions about what kind of society they want. Now, they don't allow any kind of immigration. That has some real disadvantages. Both of those countries are depopulating, and that's an economic challenge. But you know what? If they prefer to depopulate rather than to let a lot of immigrants in and to become a more diverse democracy, that's perfectly fine, right? My book is not an argument at the level of Japan would be better if it was more diverse, Right? So that's the first point, that the reason to work out how to deal with our deeply ethnic and religiously diverse democracies is that they are deeply ethnically and religiously diverse. And we want to sustain a democracy and we want to treat people fairly, and we don't want to deteriorate into the worst forms of violence, not some abstract preference for diversity. The second thing I'll say is that there's different kinds of goods, right? There is something. I spent a little bit of time in Japan just before the pandemic, and there's something really interesting about a society that has such fake social norms, such a deeply shared culture, in part because it is quite homogeneous. If you had lots of immigration to Japan, some of the good things that come from those fake norms from that shared culture would undoubtedly go away. But I think other good things would also come from that. And certainly when I think of the cities I like the most and the countries I love the most, I do deeply appreciate the diversity they have. And now, as you're saying, it may not be that you need to have a white person in the choir in Harlem, but one of the things I love about New York City is that choir exists. But you can also go to a really Russian neighborhood in Brighton beach, and you can also go to a really Latino neighborhood in East Harlem, and you can also go to a really Chinese neighborhood in Flushing. And I personally love that. Now, I don't think that's objectively better or worse or whatever, but certainly when I think of the reasons that attracted me to the United States and many of the things I love about New York City I love about other parts of America. Its ability to sustain that kind of diversity is one of the things that appeals to me.
- [39:45]
B
So one point you make in the book, which I think is really important to consider, is that democracy raises the stakes for intergroup conflict and that in some ways that makes democracy more fragile when there's diversity than an autocratic state. Why is that?
- [40:05]
A
Yeah. So look, if you're in a monarchy or in an empire, you don't have any power and I don't have any power. Right. And so we both kind of have to trust the monarch. But that makes some things easier because if you suddenly have more kids than I do, or there's more immigrants who come in who are part of your group rather than my group, it doesn't actually affect my political standing. There's no political standard to begin with. I had to have trust in the monarch. And there's no real reason why I should fear that monarch is going to start treating me differently just because the relative size of our groups has changed. In a democracy, that's different. Democracy is always a search for majorities. And if I used to be in the majority, but suddenly demographic change means that your group is growing relative to mine, perhaps you will suddenly be in a majority. That gives me reason to be afraid. That gives me reason to say, hey, suddenly I'll be in the minority and then I'm not going to be able to win the election and the laws are going to change and perhaps going to be treated really badly. And you can see that mechanism at play in the politics of lots and lots of different countries. And you can see it being exploited by the far right in terms of their fears of the demographic transformation that the United States and other countries are going through.
- [41:14]
B
So let's talk about this in the context of the US There has been predictions that the United States will be less than 50% white in our lifetime. And there has been fear mongering about this on the far right, and there's been a kind of celebration of this on the left along with an assumption that as more non white people come into the country and as the demography changes, Democrats will essentially win every election until the end of time without having to change any or having to quote, unquote, pander to the independence right. So I guess the first question is, is this assumption sound and what are its actual implications?
- [42:00]
A
Yeah, it's amazing, right? I mean, we live in a moment in which liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans don't agree on anything. And the one thing they agree on is this really ambitious set of predictions about the future of a social world that first of all, America is going to become majority and minority, but in some meaningful sense, this really heterogeneous group of non white people is going to sort of stick together and become the majority and that'll actually mean something in the culture. And then secondly, that as a result, you can predict the policy of 2040 or 2050 and see that it's going to give us big advantage to Democrats because at the moment, white voters tend to favor the Republican Party and non white voters tend to favor the Democratic Party. And as the share of non white voters grows, it's just going to keep giving assistance to the Democratic Party. Now, unfortunately, this one damn thing that we can all agree on is wrong. And it's actually really dangerous. It's a very dangerous belief in the book. I say it's the most dangerous idea in American politics. So here's why. Let's start with just the political level. If you'd looked at demographic voting patterns in the 1960s, you would have said Irish Americans are one of the most reliable voting blocks for Democrats and their size is really going to matter to Democrats prospects. Well, today Irish Americans are one of the most reliable voting blocks for Republicans. So we know from the history of the last decades that people shift their allegiances.
- [43:28]
B
For that matter, if you're talking about 1930, you would have said black people are one of the most reliably Republican voter bases, 90% Republican. And that'll never change. And as black people increase in numbers, the Republican. So you could multiply examples ad infinitum on this point.
- [43:44]
A
Absolutely. And we have a contemporary one which is that Donald Trump was competitive in the 2020 elections almost exclusively because he significantly increased the share of the vote among African Americans, among Asian Americans, and particularly among Latinos. And Joe Biden is legitimately elected 46 President of the United States almost exclusively because he significantly increased his share of a vote among white people relative to Hillary Clinton in 2016. So we're already seeing that these demographic predictions turn out to be wrong. And so the assumption that they're right really damages our political system because they lead to things like Michael Anton, senior advisor in Trump Whitehouse, writing this really influential essay in fall of 2016 saying that, I quote, the ceaseless importation of third world foreigners is going to make it impossible for the Republican Party to win and destroy the republic. And it also drives Democrats into thinking that it's smart for them to play identity politics of a particular kind to just Mobilize what they see as their base, which is all non white voters, even though actually much of that base is not particularly socially progressive and disagrees with many of their views. And so I think that's really dangerous. But I would go further than that, actually. I no longer believe that when the United States Census Bureau says that America is going to be majority minority, that is true. Now, if you apply the criterion that they use, it probably will happen. If you count every person who has one drop of non white blood, or every person who has some kind of ancestral connection to a Spanish or Portuguese speaking country, by the way, including Spain and Portugal, as part of this homogeneous block of people of color, then yes, by something like 2045, we don't know the exact year that is going to be true of a majority of Americans. But to think that this actually is a meaningful sociological category, that this describes how people think of themselves today, let alone what they're going to think of themselves in 30 years, is just what Karen and Barbara feels called racecraft. It's a form of witchcraft. It's a form of magical thinking. Why? Because we have a hugely growing number of mixed race people in this country. You said earlier that there's about 10% of Americans who are hard racist. That seems about right to me. But it used to be a lot more within my lifetime. And nearly within your lifetime a majority of Americans thought that it is immoral for a white person and a black person to marry. Now that is down to the single digits. And we see that there's a real transformation in how people act. Because it used to be about 1 in 33 newborns who were mixed race, and now it's about 1 in 7 or 1 in 6. That's number one. Number two, Asian Americans, where do they fit into the American story? Really complicated question, right? Earn very well. So the median Asian woman now earns more than a median white man in the United States. They have huge educational success. They are in some ways treated as part of a coalition of people of color. In other ways, they are not treated that way. In fact, when it comes to things like college admissions, they are disfavored. And so the idea that they'll naturally line up on the side of Latinos or African Americans in this kind of supposed conflict is more than questionable. You have, I think, a growing conflict within black America, which really people aren't thinking and talking about very much yet, between descendants of slaves and between more recent immigrants from Kenya and Nigeria and other African countries, which tends to be H1B immigration so it tends to be immigrants who are high skill, who are doctors and engineers and lawyers and so on. And I think there's actually interesting cultural divisions within those groups. And then you have Hispanics, the biggest groups of supposedly non white people, a majority of whom actually think of themselves as white rather than as people of color. There's this really weird Pew study which I had very mixed feelings about recently, where Hispanic respondents were asked to place themselves on a chart of 10 hands, sort of from the whitest hand to the darkest hand, and say, where do you fall? The modal answer, the most common answer, was the second most white hat. So that shows you that Latinos don't think of themselves naturally as non white or as people of color. And so you look at all of this and you think, why should we talk about America as though somebody who might have French aristocratic family on one side and Indian Brahmin family ancestors who were at apex of one of the most oppressive social hierarchies in the history of the world on the other side, and their parents are well earning professionals and they grew up in D.C. or New York. I'm sure they will have made some real experiences with discrimination and racism, and I don't want to underplay that. But to think that they're naturally part of the same objective category as somebody who has ancestors, all of whom were brought to this country in chains and enslaved for centuries and treated terribly under Jim Crow, is just racecraft. It's a really, really weird way of thinking about how this country works. And by the way, it's not how we should want the country to work. It's a dystopia rather than a utopia. The idea that this country is going to be better if Democrats win every election, but there's 47% of white people who feel deeply aggrieved and who, by the way, have a lot of guns, is misguided. The idea that America is going to be better if I can walk down the street in New York in 10 or 20 years and know with near absolute certainty who you voted for by looking at the color of your skin is deeply wrong headed. And so the market is not destiny. America likely will never be majority minority in a meaningful sense. And in fact, we should try to avoid an outcome in which we can describe America as being characterized fundamentally by this clash between a monolithic group of white people and a monolithic group of people of color.
- [49:54]
B
So there was a lot there and it was really important. One thread I want to pull on that is I think there's a sentence in your book that's something like there's nothing inevitable about how people identify. Nothing inevitable about how people identify. That is a crucially important insight and it's something almost nobody in the mainstream conversation ever thinks about. So I'll give one one example. There's two studies I know of that look at the percentage of black Americans who from the Reconstruction era to the early 1900s at some point passed for white, which is to say they were light skinned enough to potentially be perceived as white and at some point in their life chose to identify as white on the census in order to enjoy the privileges of not being a black person in the Jim Crow south essentially. And the number is huge. I mean the percentage of black people that at some point did this, I can't remember what it was, but it was large. Virtually zero black people do that anymore. If you have any amount of black, if one of your parents are black, almost everyone I know would identify as black today in that circumstance, or mixed race at the most, but usually just black. Which I think is a testament to the progress we've made. However, the deeper point is that the way people identify is an interaction between their actual heritage and what this, what the social incentives are, right? If there's a massive regime of race based affirmative action, let's say legally, and also a wider culture of seeing people of one race as higher status in some way, if it's in any way advantageous. Human beings are extremely sensitive and perceptive to anything that will give you a social advantage. And so as the incentives to identify one way or the other change, people's identification will change in response to that. A lot of people have a lot of choice in how they identify. And so this simplistic idea that whatever the trend line is now is just going to be what it's going to be in 30 years, it's not just a little bit wrong, it's way off. And that's something I think about quite a lot is like a mixed race person. If we set up society so that at every checkpoint from applying to college to applying for a job and so forth, there is explicitly or not a leg up given to people of color, then that creates a massive incentive for a person on the margin who could identify either way, which is going to be a lot of people, one Asian parent, one, say, one white parent, you have a lot of choice in how you identify. And it's quite possible that people will identify as being of color insofar as they have anything they can lean on to evidence that and you can't simply extrapolate. And you gave this really insane example from Brazil of this woman that was roughly the color of Barack Obama, but phenotypically sort of ambiguous, as many people in Latin America are, who had to essentially prove her blackness bonafides formally and then got rejected and then had to appeal and then ended up being investigated for racial fraud. And it was this supposedly enlightened program that whose end result was basically having a regime of racial classification as strict as what we had in Jim Crow, where it's like we're looking at who your grandparents are to see if you have one black grandparent and you're an octoroon. And like all of this stuff is so dysfunctional and very little actually to do with correcting for disadvantage. I mean, that's, to me, my biggest problem, I think with race, the use of race in social policy, is that race is not the best proxy for anything that we care about. If we care about disadvantage, we care about the fact that some kids grow up in horrible poverty where they don't know anyone who's gone to college and they're being put head to head with a kid like me, both of whose parents went to college, who had a mother that was drilling me in math tables when I was three, grew up in a beautiful, safe neighborhood, a diverse and wealthy suburb, and was able to travel as a kid. I'm going head to head with someone coming from poverty. We care about somehow allocating whatever resources we have more in that kid's direction than in mine. Race is not the best proxy for that. Class is clearly the best proxy for that. And we have information about people's incomes. And so this is one of my most fundamental objections to the use of race in social policy. Which brings me to the question, do you think a key element of having functional diverse societies is going to be having a race neutral state, which is to say a legal regime federally and at the state and local level that simply never uses racial categories for any reason, such as exist in France or do you think there is a role for these categories to be played in a healthy, diverse democracy?
- [55:25]
A
So let me do two things. The first is to distinguish between race blindness and racism blindness, because those two things are often run together in the discourse in ways that I think are really confused and obfuscated. So a lot of the critics of race blindness will say something like, but people are discriminated against on the color of the basis of their skin. They suffer disadvantages because of American history. And how can you not want to look at that how can you want to ignore those really important and evident social facts? And that is plausible. But it's plausible in part because we're failing to distinguish between our willingness to describe facts of discrimination and injustice and to open our eyes to them, on one hand, which we should obviously have, and a set of rules about whether how we treat somebody should depend on their race on the other side. So we should not be racism blind. We should open our eyes to the racism that does exist in our society and in every other society in the world, because that allows us to struggle against those forms of racism as we 100% should. I am 100% a convinced anti racist. I just don't want Robin DiAngelo to define what anti racism means. Race blindness, I think, is, wherever you ultimately come down, a very powerful ideal. And that is to say, the way that the state treats people, but also in many ways, the way that you and I interact, that we treat each other privately shouldn't depend on the color of your skin. Right. Shouldn't depend on which ethnic group our ancestors are part of. And in fact, some of the things that I'm most worried about in the discourse reject race blindness to such an extent that it intrudes into the most personal sphere of things. Of the many things that I dislike about Robin Diangelo's work, the thing that I find to be most disqualifying is when she said that an interpersonal interaction among a white person and a person of color. And this is why I try to avoid using this category. I find it unhelpful. But I'll use it for this, for the sake of this argument. If a white person interrupts a person of color, they're bringing the whole machinery of white supremacy to bear on them in order to silence them and shut them up. And I have to say that just indicates that Robin DiAngelo never appears to have had a single friend in her life. Because for me, part of a friendship is that, Colin, you interrupt me a bunch of times and I interrupt you a bunch of times, we're having a respectful conversation, we're trying to figure out what we're thinking about the world together. That's what mutual respect is. And to think that if at some point while you're saying something, I get excited and I jump in and I say, well, yes, but this or whatever, that's the only way to interpret that, is me trying to silence you, rather than us talking together and thinking together about the world as friends, is just a deeply pernicious way of thinking about Things. Now, with that proviso, let me say this. I dislike the way in which many I love the American Constitution, but I dislike the way in which sometimes moral questions in America get negotiated through constitutional and legal discourse. So the question of whether or not we should have capital punishment is a really complicated moral question. It doesn't seem to me to turn on whether or not it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. That's the phrase in the Constitution. I get that for legal reasons, that's a way to think about this. But morally, whether or not we should have capital punishment doesn't depend on whether we should describe it as cruel and unusual punishment. It's just a weird way of thinking about the issue. On this particular issue, I actually think that the Supreme Court has got the right set of answers in terms of framework it set out for how to negotiate this. And this is the framework on which everybody from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Antonin Scalia have agreed. The starting point is the 14th amendment. The starting point is the Equal Protection Clause. And this says that in virtually every context, it is going to be deeply pernicious for the State to treat people differently on the basis of the race or the color of their skin, as well as some other protected characteristics. We want to build a society because of our awareness of how terribly wrong it has gone in the past when the State did make how it treats people depend on the color of the skin, in which the State basically does not do that. Point number one. Point number two, there are always clashes of rights, and there's always clashes between certain rights and what's called compelling state interest. And that is a normal feature of the law. It's true for every right that we have as citizens. And so there may be some cases in which the State has a compelling interest in making distinctions between citizens on the basis of those kinds of ascriptive characteristics. And that gives the State a prima facie reason to engage in those kinds of distinctions. But third, and importantly, because we recognize the importance of the underlying principle that the State should do that as rarely as possible, there's a very high bar on this. And in particular, the bar is there cannot be a race neutral alternative which works in the context, and that the remedy that the State uses, the mechanism it uses to serve a compelling state interest, is as narrowly tailored as possible. So this, to me, seems like the right way of puzzling through these questions. Now, historically, different parts of the Supreme Court have come up with very, very different answers as to whether, for example, affirmative action constitutes a compelling state interest and whether it is a narrowly tailored remedy. Right. What I will say is that we've now gone into the opposite territory where a lot of politicians, a lot of activists say the default should be to make every policy race sensitive and race conscious. And that has led to some really big moral and political mistakes. To me, one of the most shocking is a few months ago, at the height of the Omicron wave, we were already starting to have really effective treatments in the forms of pills, Pavlovics, which significantly reduce the risk of dying from COVID But they were not yet available in sufficiently large number to administer them to all patients who might otherwise have an interest in taking it. And so the State of New York said, you can prescribe as a doctor this drug to people if they have strong pre existing conditions, if they have diabetes or obese or other kinds of things which raise the risk of they're going to have an adverse outcome or they are non white. This included Asian Americans who actually have lower mortality rates from COVID 19 than whites. Now that is the kind of thing which is not narrowly tailored. There's no inherent state interest in that broad category. And it is incredibly politically alienating. I mean, what better way of getting Donald Trump elected than to present him on a platter with the argument that if you're going to vote for Democrats, they're going to kill your grandparents. I mean, it is a form of political malpractice that is just deeply pernicious. And so I'm not going to say never under any circumstance. But I agree with you that the more you give people incentive to define themselves by these ethnic categories, the more you're going to reduce our ability to sustain a diverse democracy in which we actually have solidarity with each other, in which we actually care about each other's fate, in which all of our political battles aren't between those kinds of ethnic groups and the way in which we've just made those forms of ethnic discrimination. The default policy option is politically very concerning and morally wrong.
- [62:54]
B
So I think I would go a little farther than you in my assessment of the status quo around race neutral laws. So a few months ago I finished reading this book called the Colorblind Constitution by Andrew Cole, which is a few decades old, but it reviews the history of the the making of the 14th Amendment, the 13th and 14th Amendment, and even segregation cases prior to the Civil War. And then the history of the colorblind aspiration, the aspiration towards a colorblind state down through Brown v. Board and in the 60s and early 70s. And it's a great book. And so a few important things stood out to me. One was among the versions of the 14th Amendment that were on the table. One was inspired by Wendell Phillips, the president of the American Anti Slavery Society, and went much further than the version that ended up getting passed in its explicit rejection of all possible uses of race in law. So there's a radical version endorsed by. By Wendell Phillips and the other, quote, radical abolitionists. And there was a much more conservative version of the law. And the radical version was really a hair away from being passed until a few politicians panicked that they would lose their local races because they'd be called nigger lovers, essentially. And that's why the version of the 14th Amendment that we have came to pass, which ended up being just loose enough to allow, you know, 50 year or to allow 80 years worth of judges to interpret it as allowing Jim Crow segregation. And had people had a little more bravery, there could have been a clear signal that Jim Crow laws were just not constitutional that far back. No, you know, I'm not about to hop in a time machine and redo things because if it turned out terribly and there was a second Civil War, who knows? There's a position to take where slow change is in general better than quick change. And I could see that being reasonable. But when I think of the status quo, which is that we give judges discretion to decide which uses of race are reasonable and aren't, rather than saying, actually, judges don't even get the discretion. We don't even trust the Supreme Court to use this concept wisely, that would be more my opinion, because when I see what judges have done over the past 150 years of history, a long time, they thought segregation was a really benign and good use of race. And then when they decided that was wrong, they thought affirmative action and all these other sorts of what I would call racial discrimination are positive goods. Laws which have continue to be very divisive to this day, continue to be subpar relative to other possible strategies for canceling disadvantage. And, you know, like, it's so vulnerable to the whims of culture and the whims of the moment. And we almost. We so often end up looking back and saying, what were we thinking? And it seems like the bar also, the bar is supposedly so high for when we can use race, you know, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was one example of this is like we look back on it with shame, as we should, but people living through it at the time felt that the alternative was perhaps the imminent destruction of the entire country, and along with perhaps the death of maybe every woman and child. So we can say that they're wrong, but also see that their use of race there was passing a certain bar of urgency that I don't think many other uses of race have. So that's why I would be tempted to favor really not even letting judges decide when to use it.
- [67:11]
A
I see where you're coming from. And certainly when you look around the world, there are many examples of similar kinds of ethnic preferences which become a very deep source of political conflict. And you see that in India and Indonesia, in all kinds of other places. So the potential for two kinds of mistakes is high. The first is that something which seemed like a good idea at the time for various complicated reasons to do with a discourse of the moment come to look just like big moral mistakes 30 or 40 years down the line. And the second is the one that you sort of stated in your original question about this, which is the downstream empirical consequences. If you're giving people really strong incentive to identify in a certain kind of way, how will that help to structure lines of social conflict in future? I think there are some lines of social conflict today in the United States between different ethnic groups. But for the health of our democracy and for the health of overcoming the injustices that some groups still suffer, we should think about how to make those less relevant over time, not just to blind ourselves to them, but to actually make them less relevant in reality. And it might look as though certain forms of ethnic or racial preferences other way towards that. But it's very easy to imagine a world in which, with a hindsight of 25 or 50 years, that turns out to be wrong. And one of the things here is every action partners has a reaction, right? And so the more rigid ethnic schemes of preference become, and the more groups explicitly fight for more generous ethnic allotment, the more likely it is that you then also get a white politics which explicitly enters the fray of that fight and explicitly fights for its own place. And then you could imagine one of the modes of failure of diverse societies which are described in the great experiment in the book, which is Lebanon, where essentially society and all of the opportunities within it are rigidly split between different groups. And in order to access a certain kind of opportunity, you've got to access it as a member of the Shia group, as a member of the Sunni group, as a member of the Maronite group. And it's not at all clear to me that given the considerable power that white people still have in the United states that actually will help, even let alone all the other undesirable features of that society that will actually help to push towards what people are calling equity or some kind of equality in terms of socioeconomic outcomes. And there's another point here which is about where the alternatives are. One of the things I talk about is in terms of a welfare state, it's not only the case that policies which explicitly favor some ethnic groups are deeply unpopular. It's also the case that policies which mostly help one kind of ethnic group can be very popular as long as the justification for them is on race neutral grounds. And so I think a lot of people tend to think that there's this choice between doing things which help to address the compounded disadvantage with many African Americans face because of the history of slavery and so on, and maintaining a set of race neutral laws. But that's not necessarily the case. Because if you're passing a law which says people who suffer a certain kind of really compounded disadvantage, who have parents who are poor in a certain kind of way, who live in neighborhoods but lack opportunity, are going to be able to access certain forms of state assistance, it might be that 60% of the people who benefit from the scheme are black, but there's also going to be some white people and some Latino people, some Asian American people who are going to benefit from will help to reduce the disparity in socioeconomic outcomes, because it disproportionately is going to help black people in this example. But the criterion is actually neutral. It's precisely because certain groups face more disadvantage, that a neutral set of laws, which is much more politically palatable and popular, is also disproportionately going to help those groups. And so I do agree that in many contexts there are actually very good race neutral alternatives. And when you take seriously that criterion, with the Supreme Court stated, but it has to be narrowly tailored, and it's only legitimate if there's no alternative that doesn't use race as a criterion most of the time in most policy areas, you're going to end up with race neutral solutions.
- [71:36]
B
So pivoting a little bit. Many people throughout American history have said they want America to be a melting pot. Others have said they want it to be a kind of salad bowl. And maybe you can describe what both of those metaphors are for you land somewhere else. So can you describe both of those and describe what your metaphor for American diversity is?
- [72:01]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So this is just a question about how should we think about the goal of an immigrant society? How should we think about the goal of a diverse society. In terms of how much commonality we'll be able to sustain or we should hope for. And one historical answer has been that of a melting pot. Which actually, when you read the play which coined the term. Can be a very noble moral ideal. It can be ideal that in the New World we will all overcome the very deep enmities. We might have had in our places of origin. In order to see each other as true compatriots. In order to overcome the blood feuds, the pogroms, the terrible injustices which once set us apart. But it's also true with Wizard. Metaphor has been often been used in ways which demand too much homogeneity. Which basically say, hey, in the resulting culture. It might bear the influence of all of these different groups. We're all going to be identical to each other. And the fact that you might have Italian or Puerto Rican or Vietnamese heritage. Is not going to shape you in any kind of important way. And that, I think, both ask too much of people. Most people don't want to give up their heritage to such an extent. And I think it's a slightly impoverished image of what America could be. I love the fact in New York City that every neighborhood is not as the other. But there's neighborhoods that are formed by the cultural heritage of a majority group in that neighborhood. I think that's one of the things that enriches the country. Now, the alternative to that that has become very popular in academic circles. And basically is sort of trotted out in all kinds of commissions and reforms and reports and so on. Is the salad bowl or the mosaic. And that starts to envisage what the British philosopher, Lord Parrot. Calls an association of associations or a group of groups. So America just becomes these different groups which are existing next to each other. Which don't really interact very much. Which don't really allow much scope for individuals within them to make connections with each other. Or to leave their own group to strike out on their own. And that, I think, is really sad as a vision for what America would be like. I think it's going to be oppressive to those who happen not to like the groups they're born into. Not to want to live according to the moral or religious ideals of the parents. Who want to be able to make friendships with business partnerships. Perhaps start romantic relationships with members of other groups. And I think it is going to be really politically destabilizing. Because it'll make it much harder for us to sustain the kind of common solidarity we need to keep the peace, to sustain a welfare state and all the other kinds of things. So we need to succeed as a country. And so I try to suggest what an alternative might look like. And to me, something like the public park can help to show the sort of double freedom that we need to have in a functioning, diverse democracy. Which is to say that after recording this great conversation, you and I could go to a park and say, we just want to keep having this conversation, not talk to anybody else and stay among ourselves. And that's a perfectly legitimate choice we can make. But we could also go there and start chatting with other people and make new friendships and make new connections with other people as well. And stepping away from it into the role of your observer. We can say that a park in which every group remains hermetically sealed away from each other and will never interact seems much sadder, much less appealing, than a park in which some groups, some people choose to form those new connections in which there's a sort of vibrancy of building new connective tissue. And that, to me, seems like the right way of thinking about American society. I think it's great for Bezamish. I've had many Amish decide that they want to minimize their connection with the outside world. And their conception of life is to stay within the Amish community, away from the corrupting influences of the outside world. And there's no problem with that at all. If every community was like the Amish, if all of us just stayed completely within whatever ancestral group we are part of, and we didn't have conversations beyond those boundaries, that would, I think, be really bad and dangerous for society. And so the kind of diverse democracy we should build is one which people can be true to their own group, but in which they're also able to leave the group if they want, in which they can celebrate the cultural heritage, but in which they also form connection with people who are from different groups.
- [76:10]
B
I have a really big park right outside my apartment, and a few times a year, the Hasidic Jews come in some kind of field trip to my neighborhood and, like, just be in the park. I don't know how that fits into your metaphor, but it's somehow mixing your metaphors. Okay, so last topic I want to talk about is patriotism. You have this really cool distinction between civic patriotism and cultural patriotism. Can you talk about what that is?
- [76:44]
A
Yeah, well, let me start explaining why I talk about patriotism at all. Because, look, as a German Jew, patriotism does not come naturally to me. I understand how complicated it can be, how exclusionary it can be. And I certainly understand how some of the worst crimes in the history of humankind perpetrated by people who exploited the worst forms of nationalism. But I'm also a great fan of George Orwell. And I was very struck that after going to fight for the Spanish Republic against the fascists and doing all of those things in the middle of World War II, he sat down to write an essay in defense of patriotism. And the argument he made was that if British intellectuals had succeeded in the endeavor of ridding Britons of patriotism, BSS men might now be patrolling the streets of London. We would not have been able to sustain the solidarity, the courage to get through the Blitz and make sure that the Nazis can't conquer our country. And that's something I'm thinking about today in Ukraine. There's millions of people in Ukraine who have volunteered to serve the country at great risk for themselves in the army to withstand Vladimir Putin's attack on the country.
- [77:53]
B
So that too, and in some way, if there were no patriotism in Ukraine, then Putin's fantasy of walking in and being cheered in theory, would have come true. It's like he was betting that there was no Ukrainian patriotism and he was wrong.
- [78:09]
A
Exactly. He was saying, they're just like us, they're not a real country, so they're not going to defend themselves. It's not going to be patriotic. But it turns out that he's wrong about that. Ukraine is a real country and Ukrainians feel the strong form of patriotism. So for me, patriotism is a sort of half domesticated beast. It can always go wrong. It always remains a little bit dangerous when it is used by those kinds of people. But if we leave it to its own devices and then the worst kinds of people come in and stoke it and provoke it and try and turn it into this potent political weapon that's really dangerous. So what we should do is try and cultivate it, to try to domesticate it, to try to put it to use for good rather than for ill. Now, there's three ways of doing that or three ways that people have historically thought about what patriotism and nationalism should be. The first is an ethnic national right is to say that what really defines German is that you have grandparents and great grandparents and great, great grandparents who already lived in the country, that, you know, you may not go to church every day, but or even at all, that you come from a Christian family, but there's a sort of shared set of heritage that I obviously reject. Because I think it makes it much easier to justify wars of aggression. Even if I'm an ethnic patriot and you're an ethnic patriot, if I think there's something special about my ethnicity, it might give me the illusion of a justification for invading your country. It's also actually, at this point, empirically without roots, which is to say that even countries, like many Western European countries that have historically had that kind of ethnic conception of nationalism now recognize in the great majority of our citizens that you can be a full member of those societies without sharing ethnic heritage. That if you speak the language, if you live in that country, if you make contributions to that country, you can be a true Frenchman, a true Italian, a true Swede, a true German, even if your ancestors don't come from that country. So ethnic nationalism, reject, put to one side. So then sort of a few philosophers and intellectuals sort of historically made the argument for patriotism, would usually say, well, I know the answer. The answer is civic patriotism. It's constitutional patriotism. And that speaks to me deeply, I was proud when I became an American citizen to swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I think actually in Russia, some of the brave people have been protesting against this war in the last months are true patriots because we're saying, not in our name, not in the name of the values of our country, as I understand them. So to me, civic patriotism is something that we should always hold onto. But I don't think it's enough because most people just don't care that much about politics. When we say that they love the country, we're not thinking about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They don't know what's in the 8th amendment. So it just isn't realistic to say that this is empirically the basis of why people love their country. And there's also kind of philosophical problem with it, which is that patriotism always has to be the love of something particular, the love of something special, right? But actually, the constitutions of Germany and Australia and New Zealand and so on aren't that different to each other, right? And so there's a kind of weirdness here. Let's put it this way, right? Like if Austria adopted root and branch, the U.S. constitution tomorrow. And I said, well, that's nice. You're not going to become an Austrian patriot. So somehow, because your love of America comes from something else. And so that's why I'm arguing in the great experiment for a third conception of patriotism, which is everyday cultural patriotism. It's A love of country that's rooted in the love that most people have for the cities and the landscapes of a country and its sights and sounds and smells in its cultural script and the kind of way in which we're interacting and the way in which the norms of our society are governing that interaction. Even if we might have some criticisms of those norms in the celebrities and TikTok stars and the silly aspects of a culture, too. And that culture, to me today is rooted in the past, but not about the past. It's not about celebrating lederhosen or the costumes from the Mayflower or something like that. It is a dynamic, ever changing future directed in a very natural way. Diverse culture. That is the culture most Americans today are growing up. That is the culture most Americans have this emotional connection to. And I think it's actually a stronger glue, a stronger kit than most of us recognize. And as somebody who's an immigrant to the United States, I'm struck by the extent to which, despite the huge diversity culturally, ethnically and politically in this country, it does have a shared, everyday culture of that kind. And most people do love the country, and they do love that culture. And that is a strength which we should recognize and which we should celebrate.
- [82:55]
B
Yeah. So that really resonated with me. And actually I wrote down a list of things that I associate with American culture and that make me feel warm and fuzzy inside and things that I would want to pass on to my children and that I associate with. With the country. And though I may have learned to really appreciate the Constitution and the framers of the Constitution as really good political scientists and social psychologists, what really makes me feel patriotic in my gut are these kinds of things. Like, I mean, I associate Christmas even though I didn't grow up Christian. I do associate Christmas with American culture, July 4th. I associate going to movies, like buying popcorn and going to see the movies on a big screen, like a blockbuster film with your family. I associate watching the super bowl, watching sports in general, especially baseball, basketball, or football, and maybe participating in those sports as a kid. I associate the general notion that we are a free country. Like, I would hear kids would say this all the time. It's like, oh, I can do whatever I want. It's a free country. Right. And they're saying it as a joke when they're doing something like, a little shitty, probably. But there is this background knowledge that it's like, this is a free country. And you have a statistic in your book that's like less than one in five people in the world is living in a country where they can freely criticize the government to their heart's content with no potential consequences, really. So there's that. There's somehow I associate Halloween with American culture. I associate sitcoms, like growing up watching sitcoms and having references to sitcoms, whether that be Seinfeld, Friends or the Office. I associate Spanglish with American culture. You know, my mother was Puerto Rican. And like having a mix of Spanish and English. I associate a basic multi genre knowledge of the most famous songs of the past, like 40 years, 50 years. And so that was the list that immediately came to mind of things that make me feel patriotic. And I think it's also one of the reasons I just don't. I really don't resonate with people who hate America, with Americans who hate America. Because everything I described in some is a really attractive lifestyle. Not just to the people born in it, but to people who risk everything and leave everything behind to come here. And so it was useful for me to hear you make that distinction between a narrow patriotism based on a piece of parchment that has served us pretty well, but is we're constantly refining anyway and other nations have copied, and a general culture which itself is always changing, but which has formed a pretty stable and attractive environment for people to come up in.
- [86:03]
A
Yeah, a couple of words. No. 1 is that American exceptionalism, that everything is wonderful about America and it's the best country in the world and so on. I deeply love this country, but I'm not an American exceptionalist in that kind of way. I think often that leads you to lazy thinking and being simplistic and not wanting to see the flaws in your own country and so on. But a lot of the time the people who hate America are just inverse exceptionalists. Our country is the worst in the world. And I can appreciate the traditional culture of every other country and being so culturally open. But when I look at the slightly less fancy, slightly less educated people in my own country, I think there's just evil people. And rather than America being at the root of everything good in the world, it's actually at the root of everything bad in the world. So there's a weird way in which love can flip into hate and hate can flip into love, but without a little bit of perspective. Simplistic. I really love George Orwell. And when he talks about cultural patriotism in that essay, in his own kind of way, he puts it really interestingly. He says even in the first few minutes of being back in England, dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling of breathing a different air. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener. The advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns with the mild, knobby faces, the bad teeth and gentle manners are different from a European crowd. Now, one of the blew me away is that the stereotype that English people have bad teeth apparently already existed in the 1940s, which surprised me. I thought this was something about relative dental care in Britain and the United States today. But it turns out, for whatever reason.
- [87:41]
B
The advertising thing also surprised me because I've heard British people say the moment they come to America and turn on the TV and see our ads, they. They're like, oh my God, this is so obnoxious and heavy handed. And you're advertising medicine with the side effects on times five speed.
- [87:57]
A
Yeah. And so partially there's like the context between Britain versus Europe versus Britain and the United States, and partially that some of this might change over time. Culture is not fixed, it's ever changing. And that's a positive thing. But the thing that most strikes me is so Oral is talking about why he loves his country. And he says people have bad teeth. That doesn't mean that he doesn't see flaws in his country. It doesn't mean he wants to say our country is superior to others because people have bad teeth. You can love a country while appreciating its good sides and being perfectly aware of its bad sides, but you love it because it's yours. You love it because you have a relationship with it, because you feel responsible for it, because you want to struggle against bad sides and double down on its good sides. When you love your romantic partner, you can love your wife without thinking that she's objectively the best human being in the world, and certainly without thinking that other people are bad or other people are worse. You just love this particular person because of who they are, because of the relationship you have with them. And I think that is a good way of thinking about patriotism. I love America. There's many wonderful things about it. The one thing I would add to your beautiful list is Thanksgiving, which to me is a very American holiday which celebrates family, but also celebrates openness. Because the spirit is that if somebody is in the city and they don't have anywhere to go, you invite them into your home, have them be part of that. That to me is a really beautiful allusion to America's kind of openness. And America also has bad things, but are also part of a culture you can love your country and what makes it particular without being uncritical, without being unthoughtful, because you have a commitment to making this country work and making its best version of itself.
- [89:41]
B
All right, the book is called the Great Experiment. I highly recommend you all get this book. It's really excellent and hopefully this conversation was a good introduction into the major themes. But there's a lot that we didn't cover and so go out and grab that and then follow Yasha Monk Give them your Twitter handle, if you will, if you have a website so my audience can get more of your work.
- [90:02]
A
So the Twitter handle is Yashamunk. Y A S C H A M O U n K I also run an online magazine called Persuasion. Would be delighted if you sign up for it. And as part of that I do a weekly podcast with wonderful guests like Coleman called the Good Fight. Thanks Jasa Coleman this is wonderful.
- [90:26]
B
If you appreciate the work I do, the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website, ColemanHughes.org and to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you'll never miss my new content. As always, thanks for your support.