The Great Experiment
Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
One of Barack Obama's Recommended Reads for Summer
“[A] brave and necessary book . . . Anyone interested in the future of liberal democracy, in the US or anywhere else, should read this book.” —Anne Applebaum
“A convincing, humane, and hopeful guide to the present and future by one of our foremost democratic thinkers.” —George Packer
“A rare thing: [an] academic treatise . . . that may actually have influence in the arena of practical politics. . . . Passionate and personal.” —Joe Klein, New York Times Book Review
From one of our sharpest political thinkers, a brilliant big-picture vision of how to bridge the bitter divides within diverse democracies
Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time. Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk explains why we need to create a world in which our ascriptive identities come to matter less—not because we ignore global injustices, but because we have succeeded in addressing them.
The Great Experiment is that rare book that offers both a profound understanding of an urgent problem and genuine hope for our human capacity to solve it. As Mounk contends, it is up to us and the institutions we build whether we come to see each other as strangers or compatriots. Giving up on the prospect of diverse democracies is simply not an option—and that is why we must strive to realize a more ambitious vision for the future of our societies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Accommodating migrants and racial and religious minorities in democratic countries is a difficult but necessary project, according to this hopeful meditation on a multicultural world. Political scientist Mounk (The People vs. Democracy) explores the ingrained "groupishness" that separates people into arbitrary warring camps—in one study he cites, schoolboys who preferred modernist painter Paul Klee discriminated against those who liked artist Wassily Kandinsky—and notes that democracies often handle diversity badly, either through the domination of minorities by a majority, or by fragmentation into hostile tribes. But he opposes voices on the right who argue that only monocultural nation states are stable, as well as those on the left who champion the overthrow of majority cultures by militant minority identity politics. Instead, he advocates a multicultural patriotism that welcomes and integrates minorities and migrants, using the metaphor of a public park, in which distinctive groups can harmoniously connect. Writing with insight, nuance, and sympathy to all sides, Mounk stakes out moderate positions—for instance, he argues that borders secure from illegal crossings can reconcile citizens to large-scale migration—that will please neither of the extremes in the culture wars over demographic change. This perceptive account stakes out a firm middle ground.
