Part of the reason for that is human psychology. We have a deeply ingrained instinct to form groups and then discriminate against anybody who does not belong.
We know from history that many of the most brutal crimes and conflicts that humanity has endured were motivated in good part by ethnic, religious, racial and sometimes national distinctions. From the Holocaust to Rwanda, you can find examples from virtually any century of recorded history.
As a small-D democrat, I would love to think that democratic institutions can help to resolve those conflicts, and in certain ways, they can. But in one important respect, democracy actually makes managing diversity harder.
Democracy is always a search for majorities. And so, if I am used to being in the majority, but now you have more kids than I do, or if there are more immigrants coming in that look like you rather than me, there’s this natural fear that I might suddenly lose some of my power. And we can see this in the form of the demographic panic that is motivating so many on the far right in the United States and many other democracies today.
And why do you call it a “great experiment”?
Because there is no precedent for highly ethnically and religiously diverse democracies that actually treat all of their members as equals.
There are many examples of stable, relatively homogeneous democracies, like West Germany after World War II. There are many examples of democracies that have been diverse from their founding, like the United States, which used to give special status to one group and oppress the other — at times horrifically.
As a student of the rise of populism and the crisis of democracy, I’ve been struck over the last couple of decades by the way in which people from Donald Trump to Viktor Orban to Narendra Modi to Marine Le Pen exploit the fears that the great experiment has inspired.