Some democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time.
This vision of progress juxtaposes oddly with the first part of the book, which describes how previous attempts at diverse democracy all apparently devolved into petty and violent wreckage ... For the many social scientists who have been studying diversity and democracy for decades, the claim that we are undertaking a 'disorienting transformation' that is 'without precedent' may seem odd ... In such a widening gyre, Mounk’s calm mix of storytelling, political theory and social psychology exegesis, peppered with some charming insights, has a comforting seriousness...Yet for a book that is supposedly about 'diverse democracies,' the actual institutions of democracy — elections, political parties and above all, power — are surprisingly peripheral ... In his more noble theorizing, Mounk grasps the key point that our best hope involves getting past the simplistic majority-minority dichotomy that dominates so much of the discourse. We should embrace complexity and avoid essentialism. But the big question remains: How?
The Great Experiment promises to show us 'how to make diverse democracies work', but contains very few actual policy proposals. For the most part it’s a mishmash of general principles, political truisms and syrupy platitudes, delivered in a register somewhere between a TED talk and an undergraduate dissertation. Mounk draws on social psychology to tell us what we already know ... These underwhelming insights are interspersed with snippets of recent world history...to remind us of what is at stake. Mounk also delves further into the past, sometimes to bizarre effect ... This brings us to the central paradox at the heart of The Great Experiment. Mounk is broadly in favour of diversity and has no quarrel with it; he knows that, notwithstanding the gains made by populist politicians in many western nations in recent years, the status quo is not under imminent threat and, despite some friction here and there, the social fabric is bearing up. But in order to position his book as an urgent and relevant intervention, he has to play up the scale of demographic change and its potential impact on social cohesion in the longer run ... In fairness, he does make some good observations along the way. He stresses the importance of protecting members of tight-knit religious communities from coercion within their group, and advocates cultivating a progressive civic patriotism in order to undercut the appeal of ethnic nationalism ... The defining feature of The Great Experiment is its vagueness ... Who is this book for? Why does it exist? A first-year politics student or Blue Labour thinktanker might conceivably find some use for it, but it has little to offer the informed reader.
... [an] academic treatise that may actually have influence in the arena of practical politics ... passionate and personal ... accessible ... Mounk comes to a more inspiring and unexpected conclusion: He makes the case for optimism.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
