There's No Turning Back from Pluralism in America

America’s diverse population and divided culture are here to stay, challenging both left and right to rethink their visions for the nation’s future

When I read about pluralism, or multiculturalism, it is often debated as a normative matter. That is, is it a good thing or not?

In reality, it’s a factual matter. Empirically, pluralism is an actually existing reality in the United States, and will be for the foreseeable future.

There are officially 48 million foreign-born people in the United States. I estimate that there are 80-100 million people who are descended from post-1965 immigration.

Even if Donald Trump successfully deported every illegal immigrant in the country, which isn’t going to happen, there would still be tens of millions of foreign-born people and their descendants living here.

The impact of this has transformed the majority of the communities in the country. For example, the city of Indianapolis, once a byword for being an overwhelmingly white flyover city, is today majority minority.

These new populations are highly diverse, consisting of a vast panoply of different national, ethnic, and religious groups.

White America itself has also fractured socially, culturally, and politically into at least two major groups, red and blue.

Few people have truly taken the measure of the implications of these changes.

The left, champions of growing diversity, assumed that its own leadership would form a permanent ruling class as the social and demographic base of the right was degraded or diluted.

That may happen, but it sure hasn’t yet. They failed to recognize that a deeply diverse and pluralistic country is ill-suited to the kind of top down, one size fits all policy agenda they pursue. At least not in a democracy.

Through a combination of incompetence and politicization, they also accelerated the decline in trust in the institutions that are the very source of their power.

We saw this during Covid, when, despite possibly the strongest full spectrum institutional push I’ve seen in my lifetime, they were unable to fully impose their will on the country. Many other left wing programs are also facing headwinds. They just aren’t popular.

A diverse, democratic country without a clearly demographically dominant group is not fertile soil for the kind of programs the left hopes to impose. But they seem to remain fully committed to the cause, unwilling to acknowledge that anyone, anywhere can legitimately take a different path from what they want.

The right too has its delusions. They fail to accept that the America of even just 40-50 years ago is gone. It can never be restored. They think that if we just deport enough illegals, reduce immigration, and change some policy levers, America will slowly return to itself.

That’s not going to happen. We’ve already seen this before. Some in the early 20th century bemoaned the decline of Anglo-America. The country actually did all but halt immigration. Assimilation was forced at some level. And yet, the identity of the country still fundamentally changed: from Anglo to pan-European, from Protestant to Judeo-Christian, from settlers and the frontier to a “nation of immigrants,” to a less ethnic and more creedal conception of the country. This postwar America is actually the America that the bulk of today’s conservatives identity with.

There was certainly an evolution and continuity, but the Anglo purist probably didn’t see it that way. The new America was also very successful, which the Anglo purist might have thought impossible (though not without its problems, as we’ve especially come to see as WASP values withered away).

Just as there was no preserving the old Anglo-America, there’s no preserving the postwar version either. What the America of the future will be is yet to be determined, but it won’t be a restoration of 1980s America.

Too many conservatives don’t fully understand the demographic change that has already taken place in the country. They think that they speak in the name of a 1980s level demographic supermajority representing the real America. But that’s not the case. They are perhaps still a plurality, but keep in mind that the under 18 population in the US is already majority minority. Minority status is overstated because of the application of a “one drop rule” in measuring it. But without a doubt there’s been demographic change on a scale Boomers, who came of age at the point of the lowest foreign born population in national history, cannot comprehend.

Similarly, many American evangelicals still seem to think they are a moral majority. In fact, America is only 20-30% evangelical, and a wide swath of evangelical moral prescriptions are as unpopular as some of those on the left.

In this environment, the rise of belief in things like Christian nationalism is a bit strange. That might be understandable at the American founding, with a population that was 98% Protestant. But there’s never been a less propitious time for something like it than today.

People of all stripes in America need to take the measure of our new reality and adjust accordingly. Some thoughts for both the left and right.

1. Become more comfortable with difference. You are going to be living in a more diverse environment whether you want to be or not. MAGA voters are not simply going to disappear. Nor are the vast majority of immigrants. Best to make peace with that, and enjoy the positive aspects.

2. Adopt a more live and let live attitude. We have to accept that other people are going to make different choices from us, and that our environment is not going to reflect all of our preferences. People should be highly resistant to being dictated to by other groups, while not trying to dictate in return.

Recently, I saw some people on X complaining about a tall, 90-foot statue of a Hindu god in suburban Houston. Well, millions of Hindus live in America, and it’s still a free country. They can build a statue if they want to. Likewise, it was also a perfectly valid choice for Christian churches to go to the mat to meet during Covid when pot shops, liquor stores, and strip clubs were allowed to stay open.

Nassim Taleb has written about the dictatorship of the small, intolerant minority. He says, “It suffices for an intransigent minority – a certain type of intransigent minority – to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.”

If you look at most of his examples, however, what you see is that they are minority groups that are intransigent about their own behavior and practices: Orthodox Jews who will only eat kosher food or people with peanut allergies who can’t eat peanuts.

A large number of items in our grocery stores are kosher not because Orthodox Jews tried to get a law passed to require it, because they personally will only eat kosher. As Taleb notes, there’s a cost equation here. For many products, the cost of getting them certified kosher is minimal. But for meat, it’s more costly, which is why it’s much rarer to see kosher meat outside of areas with large Jewish populations.

The world is complex, and the exact right position to adopt varies from case to case. But a model based on a rock solid commitment to maintaining and living by your own core beliefs while adopting a prudential view that takes demographic and political reality into account when dealing with others is a good general approach. The reality is that nobody today is going to get to live in a world that’s run entirely in accordance with their own principles.

3. Adopt a prudentially parochial mindset. Here’s the reality: in light the last several decades of immigration policy, the concept of the public interest is effectively dead in America. The idea of public interest requires that people be willing to, at least on occasion, subordinate their own personal or group interest to that of the public as a whole. But we haven’t been willing to ask immigrants to even just obey the law. Instead, many millions of people - a much larger group than is generally acknowledged - came into the country illegally in the pursuit of self-interest. They continue breaking laws regularly in order to stay and operate here. And our bipartisan elites have basically adopted the position that they should rewarded for that, and the laws changed to accommodate their own pursuit self.

If they don’t have to follow the law, why should anybody else? If they are validated in the pursuit of purely personal interest trumping even the law, why shouldn’t everyone else do the same?

Bernie Sanders was right when he described open borders as a Koch brothers idea. Our immigration policies created a system in which the enlightened self-interest described by Tocqueville has been replaced by a hyper-libertarian view of naked self-interest as producing socially optimal outcomes. We could have immigration co-existing with a public interest mindset, but not the way we’ve done it.

I made a similar point in my book. In the old America, with a dominant Protestant majority, that majority had an obligation to the mainstream institutions of society. Minority groups could focus on their own institutions and interests precisely because they were minorities, with a different relationship to mainstream society and institutions (sometimes involving discrimination).

Well, guess what? Today, white Protestants are a minority too. So they can, and should adopt the same approach to institutions that other minorities do.

Sacrificing personal interest for the public good makes us all better off - if that’s what we collectively do. But when only some people are expected to do so, it’s unfair and irrational. Hence, fewer and fewer people are willing to do it as we’ve become a truly pluralistic society. This resembles what I described as the Prisoners’ Dilemma of institutions.

The prudentially parochial mindset recognizes the kind of society we live in today, and takes care to steward personal and community interest. At the same time, it also looks for opportunities where sacrifice for the collective is wise and can make a difference. There are places where this is still the prudent thing to do. We should take advantage of those. There may also be times where make a decision to sacrifice for the public good even when it doesn’t fully make rational sense. That’s a perfectly valid choice, but we should at least be aware of what we are doing.

Prudential parochialism is part of living and let living. It allows others to make their own choices about how to live, even when we disagree strongly with them. And to let those people live with the outcomes of that, for good or ill (though generally hoping for good). Many of us would say that we are willing to suffer for our beliefs. But how many of us are willing to let other people suffer for theirs?

If we use prudential parochialism as lens, I think we see it happening in lots of forms. It’s a driver of various forms of enclavism, for example, which is everywhere. The political “big sort.” NIMBYism. Localism. People seeking thick community type areas around churches or synagogues. The rise of affinity group communities like Serenbe, Georgia; Kiryas Joel in New York; Epic City near Dallas; and Ridge Runner in Tennessee. These are all in part reactions to our new reality.

4. Don’t live by hate and resentment. As James Davison Hunter has noted, much of modern American society is animated by Nietzschean ressentiment. It’s very easy to let a sense of loss over changes in your community or the election of a candidate you don’t like lead to burning anger and hatred.

As Hunter notes, few of us are immune. But we can at least try to resist. In most cases, we shouldn’t wish ill on those who make different choices than we do. We shouldn’t glory in some place controlled by our political opponents falling on hard times. We can support reduced immigration and enforcement of our laws without hating the actual people, most of whom are actually great at the individual level. We don’t have to become controlled by the social media algorithm into experiencing daily paroxysms of rage.

Don’t allow your sense of compassion let you be manipulated into serving someone else’s self-interest. As the Didache put it, “Let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give.” You should ask those who demand that you make sacrifices what specific sacrifices they are demanding a long list of other people and groups make. But still, it’s far better to live by love than hate.

You may disagree with my approach, but how are you responding to a society with today’s and tomorrow’s level of pluralism? As I said, few people seem to truly understand the scale and scope of changes in America, and thought through the implications. Within the past five years, for example, local leaders in Indianapolis were still bemoaning the city being too white and lacking diversity. I doubt that most of them are even aware that the city is majority minority today. They are still trapped in old paradigms. And so are most of us.

And are your solutions realistic? It’s just like talking about how we need strong institutions and institutional trust. I’d agree. But how do we get that? Are proposals for restoring that realistic? If you follow them, what will happen to those institutions - and to your family? It’s easy to imagine a future in which all this pluralism comes together and functions marvelously. This might happen. It happened before. But do you have a realistic plan to get there? People today reject the old forced assimilation paradigm. The public also rejected DEI based approaches, which are deeply unfair and unpopular. (Affirmative action can’t even win at the ballot box in California). What would actually work?

We have to stare at reality straight in the face. We have to understand and address the truth, the facts. And then try to create the most personally and socially beneficial path forward in light of them.

I’d love to hear your perspectives on American pluralism and how to engage with it.

Cover image: Jackson Heights, Queens by Jim Henderson, CC BY-SA 4.0