In Favor of Large, Diverse Democracies

The demonstrations in Minneapolis, Mamdani’s victory in New York City, and Bad Bunny’s success at the Super Bowl all suggest that there is strong popular support for large, diverse democracies. At the same time, there is also support for the opposite model: homogeneous ethnocracies that do not tolerate pluralism. This is one of the defining struggles of our time.

In Portugal, for example, a pro-European candidate recently defeated a far-right opponent by a large margin in the second round of the presidential election. Although support for far-right candidates has increased in many countries, their surge can also be interpreted as a desperate attempt by conservative forces that are running out of ideas on how to resist fairer and more inclusive democracies. Moreover, this rise is often exaggerated, as reported in two recent articles.

It is almost as if the First World War never truly ended. The collapse of empires led to the creation of unstable nation-states, often accompanied by ethnic cleansing and forced population movements. The West Bank in the Middle East is a recent example. Even today, there remains a tension between building more integrated societies and fragmenting existing states along ethnic lines. In some regions, such as the Balkans, these two tendencies coexist.

Attempts to create “pure” nations typically end in disaster and failure. After so many efforts at ethnic cleansing, it is now difficult to find any territory that is truly homogeneous in cultural or ethnic terms. Berlin, once the capital of the Third Reich, is today one of the most diverse cities in Europe.

The fight for universalism is also a fight against deeply rooted racial prejudice. As Paul Krugman noted, the war on immigrants—besides being a moral and civil liberties nightmare—will make native-born Americans poorer and will cost lives. A disproportionate number of immigrants work as nurses and doctors, and their absence would have devastating consequences. In both the United States and Europe, many elderly people who initially express reservations about immigrants eventually admit, often reluctantly, that immigrants save their lives every day.

There has always been an intellectual tradition that endorses racism and homogeneous communities even with economic arguments, and it is well represented among Trump’s supporters. As Quinn Slobodian describes them, Hayek’s “bastards” believe that if international trade and capital mobility function properly, immigration will be unnecessary. For post-neoliberal national-populists, culturally and ethnically homogeneous populations are seen as a prerequisite for well-functioning markets, alongside strict protection of property rights.

The three “hards”—hard money, hard borders, and hardwired culture—are central to this national-populist drift of neoliberalism. As Slobodian explains, this ideology promotes exclusion, segregation, and privatized communities. Fortunately, it is not a philosophy that is widely shared.