{"id":46333,"date":"2019-02-05T01:00:25","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T06:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=46333"},"modified":"2019-01-05T08:45:52","modified_gmt":"2019-01-05T13:45:52","slug":"qotd-democracy-and-diversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/02\/05\/qotd-democracy-and-diversity\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Democracy and diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whether ethnic diversity is compatible with democratic republican government is open to question, though it is considered impolite, or worse, to raise that question. Democracy requires a demos<\/em>. Truly free, democratic, and stable multiethnic societies are rare, as the Europeans are learning again. There\u2019s Switzerland, sure, but a core principle of the Swiss solution is separation: the country\u2019s four ethnicities are mostly concentrated in their own cantons. Switzerland is a highly decentralized confederacy, where most political issues get decided at the canton level, which minimizes ethnic and regional tensions. The federal government in Bern is practically invisible; most Swiss can\u2019t name their country\u2019s president. This is not a model easily replicated.<\/p>\n

The history of the United States does not convincingly prove that ethnic diversity is part and parcel with democracy. Ask a random man in the street of any blue-state city what the purpose of America is, and he\u2019s likely to tell you that it\u2019s immigration\u2014though the word appears nowhere in the founding documents. The U.S. was, from its beginnings, multiethnic, multiracial, multi-religious, and multilingual. But until recently, this background condition was not seen as the font of our national strength. Rather, for most of our history, it was a problem to be overcome through nation-building and assimilation, which America excelled at. By the early 1960s, United States had come close to creating its own unique national ethnicity, albeit one that starkly excluded African-Americans. But even this exception seemed to be moving rapidly toward resolution before the country gave up on nation-building in the late 1960s. One can make a strong case that the early Civil Rights movement was a product of the mid-century high-water mark of American nationalism. Listen to Martin Luther King\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech; it\u2019s striking how classically nationalist it is, from its evocation of the country\u2019s geographical features to the reaffirmation of its basic creed of freedom, equality, and individual rights, to its Old Testament rhetoric rooted in John Winthrop\u2019s Puritanism.<\/p>\n

E.M. Oblomov, “The Case for National Realism: Diversity is the hallmark of empires, not democracies”, City Journal<\/em><\/a>, 2019-01-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whether ethnic diversity is compatible with democratic republican government is open to question, though it is considered impolite, or worse, to raise that question. Democracy requires a demos. Truly free, democratic, and stable multiethnic societies are rare, as the Europeans are learning again. There\u2019s Switzerland, sure, but a core principle of the Swiss solution is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,84,7,41,13],"tags":[311,766,99,528],"class_list":["post-46333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-1960s","tag-democracy","tag-racism","tag-switzerland"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-c3j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46334,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46333\/revisions\/46334"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}