This post focuses on the difficulties that democracies are have in dealing with racial, cultural or ethnic diversity. Inherent in the human condition or mind are traits that can make social harmony and tolerance of diversity difficult. People and interests, typically demagogues or authoritarians, that want to divide societies to serve their own social, economic or ideological interests and goals know how to play on these human traits.
A global surge in refugees in recent years has elicited powerful emotional backlash responses in various democracies. Anti-immigrant backlash typically includes what many people had thought to be long dead social responses such as chauvinism (jingoism), ultranationalism which tends to be associated with a resurgence of authoritarianism, and prejudice and discrimination against out-groups. These social traits are not always anomalies. They were prominent features of American society when major waves of immigration occurred. Traditionally diverse countries such as India and the US are experiencing serious problems associated with diversity and how different groups are either manifesting their diversity or in how other groups that perceive threat are responding. Stopping immigration was a major factor in how the 2016 elections turned out. Anti-immigration sentiment was accompanied by explicit denigration of immigrants with bigoted and sometimes outright racist rhetoric and border tactics.
That innate human trait raises the question of the long-term viability of diverse democracies. One can argue that dealing with diversity is a much more difficult and anti-democratically dangerous problem than most people probably believe. Global responses to recent waves of immigrants have tended toward anti-immigrant sentiment more than immigrant acceptance and support. That sentiment can be enhanced by political demagoguery as has happened in the US.
Recent anti-immigrant backlash arose with a refugee crisis in Europe in 2015. Anti-immigration and nationalist-populist parties in both Europe and the US gained in prominence, e.g., as exemplified by Brexit in the UK and MAGA in the US. Countries including Sweden and Denmark have experienced an immigration backlash that forced them to face a new cultural diversity somewhat akin to what exists in the US. New immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries are testing long-standing, self-proclaimed national tolerance, openness and acceptance of different cultures and value systems. The previously fringe Swedish Democrats, a party with historical racist roots, have mounted an all-out assault on Muslim immigrants as unwelcome, destructive, crime-ridden moochers. SD popularity and representation grew and in 2018 they were Sweden's 3rd largest party. The SD party has negotiated with the other large parties (Christian Democrats, The Moderate Party) in the EU as part of the ECR (right wing, euroskeptic, anti-immigration coalition).
Denmark's response was also surprising. Although it is among Europe's most secular societies, the Muslim influx backlash included instituting Christian literacy laws that include such topics as how to celebrate Christmas properly. Also, Denmark recently announced a new policy goal of accepting zero new asylum seekers. Other laws intended to "preserve Denmark's national culture" and to facilitate "assimilation" included forced hand-shaking, despite knowledge that some Muslims are required to abstain from touching members of the opposite sex, including handshakes. Toddlers were separated from parents at young ages for about 25 hrs. a week to receive "cultural education."[1]
Denmark apparently seriously believes in the social melting pot concept, by coercion if necessary. Maybe that is best for democracy in view of the human condition. America seems to have abandoned the melting pot and replaced it with celebration of diversity with racial, cultural or ethnic group distinctness. That mindset change has left at least some Americans feeling betrayed and angry. Those bad feelings arise because a significant number of Americans, maybe a majority, have repudiated melting pot values that melting pot believers adopted and lived by. These days, one does not hear much or anything about the American melting pot.
The nativist and discriminatory social responses that some countries are in the midst of suggests that a backlash may be inevitable when democracies are experiencing either (i) a wave of increasing diversity or multi-ethnicity, or (ii) the rise of a demagogue playing on existing diversity to foment social division, distrust and intolerance. Waves of immigration sparks backlash. So can waves of demagoguery. If anti-immigrant or more broadly diversity backlash is not inevitable, how can it be circumvented or significantly reduced?
Maybe due in large part to a myopic sense of American exceptionalism and/or limited or no contact with members outside mainstream White culture, many Americans don't appreciate the unusual degree of heterogeneity in cultures, religions (and lack thereof), languages, ethnic groups and subgroups here. Our representative democracy is supposed to navigate and manage this social milieu, while trying to keep intergroup/intercultural conflict, distrust, intolerance and prejudice to a minimum. That is preferably done within the confines of democratic political norms that used to prevail. Those political norms have been obliterated since 2017. A significant minority of American society has become cruder, crueler and more disinformed, and that intolerant mindset often spills over onto immigrants.
Race compared to ethnicity
Some Americans respond by contemplating leaving the US for Canada where things aren't quite so polarized or threatening. Canada, which has some diversity, is not close to the densely populated and increasingly urbanized and heterogeneous society in the US. But despite, or because of, that relative homogeneity, even Canada had had problems with separatism (the question of French Québec) and a dirty record on indigenous First Nations, e.g., as evidenced by ongoing revelations of mass graves of unknown native American children that went to their "boarding schools" as recently as the 1970s.
Other democracies are experiencing significant social turmoil related to frictions arising from internal or imported diversity. That includes Hungary and India.[2]
Acknowledgment: The idea for this post and most of its content came from PD in extended comments here in a different post. He also described some the biological and evolutionary basis for social discord that arise in democracies from frictions grounded in various kinds of diversity. That will be the topic of a second post.
Questions:
1. Given that demagoguery is usually legal in democracies and demagogues and authoritarians exist in all populations, are racially, culturally or ethnically diverse democracies viable in the long run, or can they withstand the human traits that try to tear them down?
2. It is reasonable to at least argue that (1) America has mostly abandoned the melting pot concept in favor of preservation and celebration of diversity, and (2) if so, that is a rational basis for some Americans to feel some degree of betrayal and/or anger?
Footnotes:
COPENHAGEN — When Rokhaia Naassan gives birth in the coming days, she and her baby boy will enter a new category in the eyes of Danish law. Because she lives in a low-income immigrant neighborhood described by the government as a “ghetto,” Rokhaia will be what the Danish newspapers call a “ghetto parent” and he will be a “ghetto child.”
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.
2. India bills itself as "the worlds largest and most diverse democracy," with 23 official languages, a vestigial caste/jati system. Its Hindu-Muslim religious diversity has a history of tremendous religious conflict that culminated in the India-Pakistan partition. It also has a history of extreme urban-rural cultural contrasts that persist to the present. Although the pace of development and modernization quickened and brought increasingly cosmopolitan liberal values, India experienced a rapid rise of a frankly bigoted Hindu nationalism under BJP strongman, PM Nerendra Modi? (His affiliations include RSS, the group from which Gandhi's assassin came; the assassination being motivated by Gandhi's wish to have one India that embraced both Hindus and Muslims, while the RSS conflate "Hindu-ness" or Hindutva with India as a nation-state). The Indian resurgence of Hindu nationalism seems to fit a certain pattern of reactions to globalization and cosmopolitanism that get accentuated whenever there is a sense of accelerating culture clash.
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