2022-04-28 LIVE from NYPL Making Diverse Democracies Endure: Yascha Mounk with Jane Coaston >> Aidan Flax-Clark: Hello, everybody, how are you? I'm going to ask each of you individually. Does everyone have time? My name is Aidan Flax-Clark and I'm part of the team that brings you Live from NYPL. So, I want to say hello to everyone who's watching in the room, everyone who's watching in line -- in line online, wherever you're watching, thank you so much for being here. There are so many things that you can choose to do with your time. So, I'm very grateful that you chose to be here with us. And we're here to learn about a very timely and urgent, and I hope you won't mind me saying, incredibly well-written book, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. The author, of course, is Yascha Mounk and Yascha will be speaking tonight with Jane Coaston, the host of The New York Times podcast, The Argument. You can find Yascha and Jane's Full bios in the programs that you have here or if you're watching online, on the event listing. They have many, many very impressive affiliations and accomplishments. The Great Experiment is available for purchase. If you're in the room, you can purchase it over there. If you're watching online, you can purchase it through the event listing. I understand a couple of people had trouble purchasing it before. But whatever that was, it's sorted out. So, you can buy it over there. And I really encourage you to do so. Whether you buy it here or online, proceeds go to benefit the New York Public Library and you will get a very excellent book, so everybody wins. If you can't buy it, you can also, of course, check it out from us. And I'm sure that everyone in this room has a library card. I'm also going to ask all of you individually about this. I'm kind of just making sure because I enjoy shaming people about not having library cards. I have so few joys in life, you know. Anyway, it's available to read on our app, SimplyE, or you can check it out in paper, however you like, please do. Live from NYPL has a ton of great events coming up in the days and weeks ahead. Later in this month, we're going to talk about the story behind the seminal work of investigative journalism, Hiroshima, by John Hersey with Lesley Blume, journalist Janine Giovanni and New Yorker editor Erin Overbey. We're also going to have a conversation about civics and the crisis in American democracy in honor of the late Judge Robert Katzmann. And we're going to have an evening all about bugs, bug lectures, bug music, bug poetry, and all things go well, edible bugs. And before that next week, you can come join us to learn about the construction of this beautiful renovated library with the people who designed it and learn all about the amazing things they did because this building is incredibly different from what it used to be. I'm sure some of you know who used to come to the old Manhattan Library. To register and learn more all about it, go to nypl.org/live. Among his many affiliations, Yascha is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, where he's also an associate professor of the practice of International Affairs. And we're extremely fortunate to present tonight's conversation in partnership with the SNF Agora Institute. SNF Agora Institute is an academic center and a public forum at Johns Hopkins University that is dedicated to improving and expanding civic engagement and informed inclusive dialogue as the cornerstone of global democracy. You can learn all about the institute and its range of programs at snfagora.jhu.edu. And there you can also sign up for their Global Democracy Champions Summit, which is coming up on May 11th and is virtual. Live from NYPL is made possible by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos, and Adam Bartos, and of course by all of you, our wonderful supporters and friends. So, thank you so much for your support and again, for being here. I'm going to bring Yascha and Jane up in a second. If you're in this room and you want to ask them questions at the end, you notice you have some note cards here. Please start writing anytime and people will come around to collect them. And if you're watching online, you can put your question in the chat or you can email publicprograms@nypl.org and we'll make sure that all of the questions get to them and they'll answer as many as they can at the end. OK. Let's welcome Jane Coaston and Yascha Mounk. >> Jane Coaston: Hello, and welcome to the 2022 NFL Draft. I was trying to think of something that Yascha could not talk about and I think that is it. >> Yascha Mounk: I know nothing about American football. >> Jane Coaston: You have so much to learn young Padawan. But that actually -- that gets me started because you start out a chapter in this book, which is fantastic, and you talk a little bit about sports or more accurately sports culture. You talk about how your mother hated crowds and hated the crowds of soccer fans that she experienced because they reminded her so much of awful experiences of her youth. Can you talk a little bit about -- because so much of this book is about how we have diverse societies full of groups, people are cool, groups are bad. How do we make groups less bad? But can you talk a little bit about how that -- the idea of sports and teams, how that inspired or got you to start thinking about how groups interact and how they can do so better? >> Yascha Mounk: Yeah, thanks. So, look, I mean, you know, my family has a complicated and tragic history. My grandparents were born in Lviv, which is obviously [inaudible] of today's Ukraine. You know, much of their family perished in the holocaust. They became communists as teenagers and thought that would help them build up better societies. But they also experienced a lot of the horrors of totalitarianism. They tried to build up what they thought would be a more just government in Poland after the war and in the end the government turned on them. And my parents who were, you know, 19 or 20 at the time ended up being thrown out of their own country alongside their parents, you know, which was their formative political experience growing up in this country and having the government turn on them in this kind of extreme way. And the way that my mother, in particular, made sense of all of this, I think, was to think that, quite plausibly in some ways, that groupishness caused all of this. That this human tendency to form these groups and then to favor their members and often treat the members of those groups very well and altruistically, but also to discriminate in sometimes horrible ways and sometimes extremely violent ways against the people who are not members of those groups. That's what helped to explain a lot of the worst parts of the 20th century a lot of the tragic events that they themselves, the parents, my grandparents, and their great grandparents before them had experienced. And so, you know, when I was growing up in Munich as a German Jew, which was a complicated proposition in and of itself, you know, I was a big soccer fan. I loved Bayern Munich. So I don't know anything about American football. I know a little bit about soccer, at least. You know, we would live in the center of town and see these football fans, right? And my mom was made really nervous by that. She didn't see hometown love or pride, she didn't see a love of a football team, she didn't see sort of a harmless way of celebrating my team versus your team. She in some weird way saw all of the horrors of the 20th century. And so I grew up with that mistrust of groups. But I'm perhaps going to lightly disagree with the premise of your question. I mean, I think I realized that groups are inescapable. And there's also many very good things about groups. >> Jane Coaston: Mm-hmm. >> Yascha Mounk: And so my attitude about groups is ambivalent because they do have this tremendous potential for bad. There's tremendous potential for motivating evil. But they also can help to give our life meaning. They also can help to push us to incredible achievements. They can motivate some of the most wonderful things that human beings have achieved. So I think the question of how to build diverse democracy is in many ways the question of how do we encourage the good sides of groups but also keep their potential for disaster in check. >> Jane Coaston: Well, I think that that leads to my next question which is the book you go through three of the most important ways in which diverse societies fail. And I'm so fascinated be each of these because they are so both context-dependent but they also exist across time and across society. You talk about anarchy, domination, both hard and soft domination, thinking about hard domination, like slavery but soft domination, other forms of oppression, and fragmentation, which I found particularly interesting. Can you tell me a little bit -- when you're talking about anarchy, what do you mean by that and the types of anarchy that we've seen through society? >> Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So, I'm a political theorist. I studied a lot of the history of political thought and when political theorists think about anarchy, they think about Thomas Hobbes, right? They think about what supposedly makes people in the state of nature end up in this deep conflict? What makes the state of nature in this famous phrase, what you may have heard, nasty, brutish, and short, right? Life is terrible. And his idea was -- but you have a kind of form of anarchy where, you know, I'm going about my life and I'm a peaceful person but I know that I'm really vulnerable as a human being. And you're going around your life sort of in some other corner of the field that we're both inhabiting or whatever and you may be a peaceful person but we don't have a power to keep us both in check. And so even though we're both good people, we might end up in conflict because I might say, look, I [inaudible] got a stick to defend myself in case Jane decides to attack me, who knows. But you'll see me getting the stick and saying, well, he looks like he's about to attack me. I better get a bigger stick and so you end up in conflict, right? So, his idea was you get anarchy in the kind of form in which it's a war of all against all. Now, actually, that's not what human societies tend to look like even in places where you don't have an effective state. Because what you get instead is groups that probably rise through families and small communities and tribes of certain forms, but actually structure life in minute ways that often enclose people in an extreme, what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called "cage of norm". So that's actually really, really detailed rules for what you're allowed to do, who you're allowed to marry, how you can live. But, there's lots of those groups and between those groups you have anarchy. So, I think Hobbes is half wrong but also half right. And so as a result, you're not able to sustain a state, not able to sustain a welfare state, not able to sustain schools or roads or public health systems that work very well. And you can still see that today in modulated form in some places like Afghanistan and Somalia and other places where there never was a strong enough state to provide us with some of the basic amenities of life. And so that's one of the modes of failure of diverse societies because it is characterized by this clash between these different groups who can't cooperate on building a state together. >> Jane Coaston: And you talk about domination, hard forms of domination, soft forms of domination, also minority domination, which we saw under apartheid South Africa. Can you talk a little bit about that? >> Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So, you know, one of the ways to solve the problems of structured anarchy in a way is for one group to win power, to win control and then they might be able to build a state. And that has some real advantages. Those places often are more affluent because you are able to set rules that work. You are able to avoid certain forms of intergroup conflict. You are able to build roads and all of those things but that has historically often come at a price with these terrible forms of domination. And, as Jane said, the most obvious form of hard domination is slavery in the United States, right? One of the most extreme forms imaginable of saying, look, one group is going to be in control and the other groups or at least some groups, are going to be subjugated and exploited in extreme ways. And so one of the things that continues to define society like United States today and make it harder to build diverse democracies that actually treat their members as equals, is the long term impact on that because that, of course, continues to structure society in all kinds of complicated ways. So, that's the example that we know best in America, hard domination, explicit domination. But there's also forms of soft domination. In Germany, for example, where I grew up where the country's democracy was actually extremely homogeneous at the time of its successful founding, after World War II because of the Holocaust and genocide and expulsions and all the horrors of the first half of 20th century, society was relatively homogeneous. And so people said, look, we're going to treat all citizens equally, right? Everybody's dignity is preserved and, you know, we have all these wonderful rules. But in reality, that wasn't the case because there was no need for it. And when immigrants started to come in over the course of many decades and suddenly a country like Germany, which now has about the same number of people born outside the country as United States does, that we have become an immigrant society, but the repertoire for it isn't there. And so as a result, there's all of these different soft ways in which native Germans, if you want to call it that, prefer to have privileges over immigrants or over citizens than the newcomers. And then the third case of domination is that of minority domination, which you can often see in societies in which a minority says, look, if we abide by democratic institutions, we're going to be out voted and out ruled and so we're going to try and impose our domination by force. And you can see that in Syria, you can see that in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Obviously, you could see that under apartheid in South Africa, which was in many ways, the most pernicious form of it because it imposed a very extreme form of domination while pretending to have a democracy and actually having a kind of democracy within the ruling minority group, while of course, completely excluding for most democratic institutions the majority of Black citizens. >> Jane Coaston: And then you talk about fragmentation. And you talk about that in post-colonial Africa and post-colonial Asia. But I was particularly interested because you talk about how power-sharing agreements across governments in which you are -- if you're in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, you say, like, OK, everyone will be represented at these numbers. But then you talk about how power sharing can actually make fragmentation worse. Can you talk a little bit about that? >> Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So there's a really interesting, influential, and thoughtful political science called Arend Lijphart, who, you know, looked at a country like the Netherlands and thought, you know, at the time, it was deeply polarized between Catholics and Protestants and liberals and they would have their own newspapers and hospitals and so on. And yet it was a good working democracy and he said, why is that? According to our theories it should be failing. I think the answer is obvious. It's a rich country in the middle of Europe, you know, surrounded by lots of other democracies parts of the European Union, et cetera. But his answer was, it's the power sharing agreement. It's because a lot of the most important decisions are devolved to the communities. And so it matters less who's in the national government because a lot of your life is structured at the sub-national level. And there's always different groups having influence in the government. And so if you lose the election, doesn't matter so much. And so he said, is there an example of this outside of Europe? Said Lebanon. Lebanon is a great example of where this works because in 1943 they adopted a new constitution where when they decided -- I may be getting the details wrong, but I think the president is always going to be a Sunni and the prime minister is always going to be a Shia and the speaker of the parliament is always going to be a Maronite Christian. And all of the most important laws about divorce and marriage and education and all of those kinds of things that devolve to the level of those communities. Well, there's a couple of things that went wrong with that. For one, a couple of years after Lijphart published his most influential book on this, civil war broke up in Lebanon. So the idea that this would keep the peace just turned out to be empirically wrong. But as importantly, it set up a society that I think has failed in deep ways because there is no shared Lebanese identity because my friends in Lebanon who got married across those communities could not get the wedding accepted by the state because there's no provision for inter-communal marriage of that source in Lebanese society. There's a problem because people don't have democratic agency over the rules by which we're bound because the rules aren't made by a parliament, they're made by the sort of Shia senior leaders or Sunni senior leaders or the Maronite senior leaders and there's no democratic mechanism for actually wanting to liberalize divorce law to make sure that it's more equitable for women or whatever the complaints in the particular context might be. And so I think this fragmentation, all of these three modes of failure are ones that continue to be relevant today. We should be worried about each of them and fragmentation is one of them. I think, the prospect of a diverse democracy in which people are so defined by the groups that they cannot leave it, that they are bound by rules that are set by their own group, that they have no democratic agency, that they can have no contact with each other across those groups, that's one of the dangers that we face. >> Jane Coaston: I was -- I'm interested in -- to hear you talk a little bit about those group dynamics because you talk a lot about how there's this idea that we have two conflicting ideas, I think often in politics, both across the right and the left, which is -- and they are in opposition. One, is that groups will always be in opposition to one another so it is best to have some sort of détente where the groups do not interact with one another. Or it's that the more groups interact with one another, the better off we'll be. The more -- if you could just force contact or encourage contact, probably, more accurately, between groups you would have a -- you're not so different you and I, a moment, and you would -- you could inspire peace and a sort of communitarian ideal. In your book, you argue that neither of those are exactly true. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned about, just at the basic level, how do we create tolerance between groups? Is that possible? And how does that work? What do you need to have that happen? >>Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So, a few points on this. One of them is that there's this really rich literature on what's called intergroup contact. And it starts out with Harvard psychologist called Gordon Allport who helps refugees during World War II. And he never tells us which group. He says he had prejudices against one of the groups he worked with. And then working with them and getting to know them better, he actually did have this you're not so different you and I moment. And he thought perhaps that's generalizable, right? Perhaps it's the case everywhere. And there's a whole bunch of studies which seemed to confirm that. There's a study for example of a Boston housing project in which segregated housing project, you know, White respondents had their negative views of African-Americans. And then an integrated housing project where there are neighbors door-to-door, they ended up having much more positive views. And so, clearly, being neighbors in that kind of context did seem to reduce prejudices to some extent. But the more people researched this tradition, the more they realize that there's certain really important conditions that have to be true in the background for the kind of integral contact to work. So one of them is that not in society as a whole, but within that context, they have to have equal status. So it doesn't work if one person's the boss and the other person's the employee, for example. They got to be colleagues. They might be unequal in certain ways in society but in that context they have to be equal. The other is that they have to work together on something. So it works if you're part of the same team either at work or on sports. It doesn't work if you're on opposing teams, right? There has to be encouragement from a sort of larger social ecosystem for you to get along. And then, I think is really important in terms of how to think about education, for example, today. I think it's one of the things why I'm personally a little bit concerned when I see some elite private schools in New York City. This is true at Dalton, at Horace Mann, in DC, it's true at [inaudible] Sidwell Friends. Separate kids with 10 or eight or six, where the teacher comes in and separates them into different group by their ethnicity or by their race. And says, OK, you're an Asian-American, you have to go over there, you're African-American, you have to go over there, you're Latino, you have to go over -- you're White, you have to go over there. And I get that the instinct is often to try and encourage a kind of a political consciousness that can fight against injustices and that can give them space to talk about discrimination that it real, that they may be experiencing. But I think that it actually triggers all of those in-group mechanisms I've been talking about, it triggers all of us, oh, this is my group. And once you've explained, well, this is my group, they always tend to favor the members of the group over the members of the out group. And that particularly worries me when you have the White affinity group. Either you do what we did when I was a kid in Germany, which is people that either Catholic or Protestant religion classes and so it's like me and the two kids of Turkish immigrants sitting around, you know, doing nothing. That doesn't seem right. Or you have is White kids and you're trying to tell them, hey, you should somehow feel bad about the very real bad things that White people did in this country, but actually, most likely that it's going to trigger us in mechanisms that actually push in the opposite. There's [inaudible] interesting studies that suggest that, that for example having a lecture on White privilege actually makes people perform in a more discriminatory manner on the implicit association test. So I'm going to play to you a prejudice is here for a moment, Jane, and say, the better solution is to have them be part of a sports team. >> Jane Coaston: Yes. >> Yascha Mounk: Right? In which we're saying, hey, we might have these differences in society but in this context, we're members of the same team and we're actually trying to share this with important goal of winning this tournament. That's actually an easier way to get people to understand each other. So, [inaudible] Conduct Theory is not a cure that's limits to how effective it can be but under the circumstances it can actually have a positive impact. >> Jane Coaston: I'm curious. You talk a little bit towards the end of your book about a lot of, you know, kind of the demographics or destiny ideal. But I think that that actually gets to a question I have about those group dynamics. Because if, you know, I'm a biracial American but I also have all of these other intersecting identities and I'm curious to hear from you, based on the work that you've done, what identities have been proven to be stronger and which have been proven to be weaker? I often think about how the -- one of the many horrors of American slavery is that you have people who are all technically the same religion but they are enslaving other people of their same religion while, you know, sending African-Americans to stay in the balcony of the church that they're all attending. When -- or, you know, they're all Christians and yet there was a clear demarcation. >> Yascha Mounk: Hmm. >> Jane Coaston: And I think often about how African-Americans today, politically, are generally more socially conservative but will still likely vote generally as democrats. Those cross-currents -- you know, they may not agree with democrats on a host of issues having to do with general social liberalism but on issues of race, they do. >> Yascha Mounk: Hmm. >> Jane Coaston: So, is race just the most powerful group unifier or -- and why do you think that is? >> Yascha Mounk: That's a great question. So, let me take a little bit of a run-up to it. The -- in general, this instinct that I'm going to form a group and I'm going to treat its members better than outsiders is incredibly strong but what defines that group? What is the criteria by which I decide are you a member of my group or are you a member of a different group? Very, very, very strongly a cross-context. And the most powerful story about this is about a social scientist called Henri Tajfel, who really want to understand why groups can sometimes be dangerous in these ways and he said, look, I'm going to create the silliest, stupidest groups I can think of and have their members play games against each other and they won't discriminate against each other because these groups are really stupid. And then, I'm going to slowly add features to those groups until we get to a stage where they start to discriminate, and that'll me something about what the minimum threshold is we start to engage in these behaviors. And so he got a bunch of kids in Bristol in England into a lab and he showed them a sheet of paper with like 150 dots on it or something like that and he have them guess how many dots on the sheet paper. So some said 130 and some said 170 or something. He said, OK, you're going to underestimators and overestimators and when you play this distribution game where you give each other points and later you can, you know, redeem for cash. And it turned out that he failed because the underestimators immediately started to discriminate against the overestimators. And I recreated with my group of students at Johns Hopkins. I mean, I have -- you know, it's an incredibly diverse campus. My students think of themselves as the most tolerant people in the world and in many ways they are. But I have them debate whether a hotdog is a sandwich or not. And the kids who fought that a hotdog is a sandwich start to discriminate in exactly the ways that Tajfel described against the kids who fought for the hotdog is not a sandwich, right? And you see that, you know, there's different ways of conceptualizing who is in and who's out across society, so, you know, in the United States, somebody who's mixed race, somebody who's half White half Black is Black, is African-American, that's because of a particular history of slavery in the [inaudible] the society. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, that is not the case. If you have somebody who's half White half Black, they're going to be seen as certainly not Black and possibly White in certain places. There's a special kind of designation in South Africa. So really, depending on the context, the identity of that person is going to be seen very different socially. So, in general, I would say it's not clear whether one thing is more powerful than others. For much of [inaudible] republic, the distinctions were less about race than about other kinds of things. You have very deep conflicts between Catholics and Protestants for centuries. You have deep conflicts between Shias and Sunnis in the Middle East. You have deep conflicts between members of different tribes but aren't exactly different races, different ethnicities perhaps in a certain kind of way in much Sub-Saharan Africa. In American history, the distinction -- not so much between White and non-White, but I think really between Black and not Black has been so fundamental that today in the United States, race continues to be the most important motivator of group difference. But I don't think that there's anything which means that that needs to forever continue to be the case. >> Jane Coaston: I would rather it worked. >> Yascha Mounk: I agreed. I think that's a really important point. >> Jane Coaston: I want to back-up a little bit, because something that you're responding to, in your book overall, is a growing sense of pessimism or as call the youth call it, "doomerism", that you see on both the far left and the far right. And I see your book, is a sense, a response to that. So, I -- but I'm interested to hear from you that that pessimism, in a sense -- about -- you know, you see that with the right, with the idea of demographics or destiny where they start getting into the great replacement and things like that, and you see that with the left with thinking about climate or thinking about any number of political phenomena, I am curious to hear from you, what do you think is the best way, not just as a writer, but you make recommendations for politicians and for how the state can respond, but how can and should governments respond to that type of pessimism? >> Yascha Mounk: Yeah. So first of all, I mean, I can pessimist with the best of them, right? I mean, I started to -- >> Jane Coaston: You're German, so, like -- >> Yascha Mounk: I'm German, so that's already -- I'm, you know, [inaudible] and earnest. You know, when I was in graduate school, I was told that I don't have to worry about the future of democracies like the United States and France and Germany and so on. That they were affluent enough and had changed governments, free and fair elections enough times that we can fast forward history by 50 years and that's always going to be the case. And I made my name as a pessimist by saying that the rise of populates, especially on the far right, was a very clear and present threat to these democracies and that we couldn't assume that those populates would never win and we couldn't assume that if they were in power, they wouldn't be able to make real damage. So, you know, I've been the pessimist in the room many, many times. I do think, though, that at this point, we've actually become too pessimistic about a number of issues and in particular about the state of our diverse societies, of our diverse democracies. So, what I observed in this debate, is we're kind of pincher movement. A lot of people start with this deep optimism. They sort of say, look, I mean, how difficult can it be not to be a bigot and not to be a racist? How difficult can it be to treat your neighbor decently even if they're from a different country or even if they have a different skin color? That should all be super easy, and so, building diverse democracy shouldn't be that hard. And when we look at reality and we say, look at the injustice and the discrimination, the racism that undoubtedly exists today, that means we have something uniquely wrong with us, and actually we should be really pessimistic about the future. And I sort of start in the opposite direction, which is that I start with, I think, real pessimism about how difficult this project is to accomplish. We don't have a precedent for building diverse democracies that actually treat their citizens equally. We have this powerful group mechanism we've been talking about. We see throughout history, but not all, but most of the worst crimes of human history consisted in these terrible wars and civil wars and genocides, and ethnic cleansings carried out between different kinds of identity groups. Democratic institutions can actually exacerbate this difficulty because in a monarchy or in an empire, you don't have power, I don't have power, as long as you both trust the monarch, I don't care if you have more children. In a democracy we're always looking for majorities. And so, if I used to be in the majority and now you have more children than I do or there's more immigrants coming in who look like you rather than me, I'm going to have this or some people are going to have this fear, this panic of what kind of change it brings about. So, what we're trying to do here is new and it's really, really hard. But I think you can start from that point of view, you can actually look at the last decades and you can look at the present reality of United States, of Germany, of Australia, of so many people, of so many countries around the world and say, you know what, we've made real progress actually. Countries like Germany no longer think that to be a true German you have to have grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents who already lived in that country, who already were German. The majority now rejects that kind of ethnic notion of membership. In the United States, 30 years ago, certainly at the time when I believe your parents have been together, what is it, do you say, 49 years or something? >> Jane Coaston: Yep. Yep. >> Yascha Mounk: Certainly at the time when they got together but within our much more recently lifetimes, the majority of Americans thought that what they did was immoral, that interracial marriage is immoral. Now, that's down to single digits in the United States. >> Jane Coaston: They outlived them. >> Yascha Mounk: Yeah. Which is an amazing thing. We have -- when you look at something like immigration, there's this weird dovetail and different forms of pessimisms. So, there's the far-right which says, you know, yeah, immigrants from Italy and Ireland could succeed because they're White and they're Christian, and so sure, they could succeed. But the immigrants today, these people say, you know, from El Salvador and from Vietnam and from Kenya, they won't succeed because there supposedly something inferior about them, culturally or perhaps even genetic, right? And that's why they're struggling, that's why we're not doing well, et cetera. Now, a lot of my friends and acquaintances on the left obviously reject -- rightly reject that tradition of blame, but they actually echo of a discourse in a weird way. Because they also say, look, these immigrants aren't succeeding. It's just we're not succeeding because of discrimination and the racism and so on that they're suffering. Now, there is undoubtedly discrimination and racism against those non-White immigrants, that's true, but for the book, I actually looked carefully at the best studies on the topic and what I found is a much more upbeat picture. What I found, for example, is that in the first generation, people who come in from poorer countries often struggle, because they didn't have much educational opportunity, they come in often with fewer work qualifications and so on. And so often, they do make less money than the average. Sometimes they struggle to learn the language fully. But the children and the grandchildren integrate into society extremely successfully. They all, of course, speak fluent English. They are much more likely to gain higher degrees, to gain higher wages than the children or grandchildren of similarly-situated people who don't have immigrant parents. And as a result, immigrants today from Central America and Asia, and Africa are rising the socio-economic ranks at about the same speed as Italians and Irish did a century ago. Now that obviously shows, unsurprisingly, that those people on the far-right who says -- who say there's something wrong with them are wrong, but it also shows that the pessimists who are my friends, who say that the discrimination against non-White immigrants are so extreme that they can't succeed are also wrong. And that too, I think, is important to point out. >> Jane Coaston: You talk a little bit about how the many can become one or whether or not they should. And it actually reminded me, the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer, which is famous as the first talkie in America. Has anyone actually seen that film, out of curiosity? Yes. So you recall -- >> Yascha Mounk: It's a very educated audience here. >> Jane Coaston: I'm -- I really -- I'm relying on that. So, it -- but -- and it reminded me the stories of how we transmit culture is not new. So, The Jazz Singer, it's about this young Jewish kid who wants to sing popular songs but his father's a cantor at the temple and won't let him. And so he runs away and does what you do when you want to sing popular songs in 1927, you do it in blackface. And so, the -- a lot of the famous songs from the movie are in blackface. And eventually, after a long back-and-forth, his parents come in to accept him, he returns to his family, but he still continues to sing popular songs. And the film ends with him singing My Mammy, in blackface to his Jewish mother. Which I've always thought, it was like that's a cultural salad if ever there were one. But I'm interested, because you talk a little bit about the melting pot metaphor, the idea that you would come to the country and you would combine with everyone and you would hold on to some of your traditions but others, you would take on the traditions of others. Then, there's the salad bowl, which is like you stay separate but you're altogether. And then there's your idea of the public park. First, I want to ask, why has it been that we're still having these same conversations? This -- our conversations often about immigration and the mixing of peoples. Everyone sounds like you're doing the passing of the great race or something. And I'm curious as to why you think the public park metaphor is the right one -- >> Yascha Mounk: Hmm. >> Jane Coaston: -- for countries like ours? >> Yascha Mounk: So first of all, I do think that some of those debates are kind of silly and it speaks to a point I was just making about immigration. >> Jane Coaston: Right. >> Yascha Mounk: So, you know, I hear a lot of fears in the far-right that, you know, one day English won't be the predominant language in the United States and, you know, a third of the country will speak Spanish and a third of the country will speak Chinese and so on. And then I see some people on the left, that will a good thing, you know, English shouldn't be the dominant language. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we have those completely different languages and so on. And both of those discourses just completely miss the sociological reality. Sociologists actually have a model for how language transmission works which applies with incredible accuracy to the United States but also to France, to Germany, to all of these different kinds of immigrant societies. And what happens is very straightforward. The first generation, people acquire the new language, English, in this case to varying extent, some very, very well, some barely at all. The second generation or their children usually are fluent in both languages. So they speak the language of origin in the home. Often they are spoken to in that language and then respond in English, but certainly they are competent in the language. But in a clear majority, they prefer English. When they're with their siblings, with their cousins, with other friends who have a similar kind of background of migration, they tend to prefer English, because they're more comfortable in English. By the third generation, and you can have a little bit of nostalgia about that even, only 1% still speak the language of origin. So actually English has a complete victory. And so, I think, therefore a lot us fears and then some of us have fantasies of wouldn't it be nice just completely miss that actually people do integrate in those kinds of ways and that happens pretty naturally. Now, as for those metaphors, yes, so there's this sort of metaphor of a melting pot which, you know, you have two assignments from this, the first is to go and watch The Jazz Singer, which I will. Or perhaps that's not an assignment. I haven't seen it. >> Jane Coaston: Well, as long as -- I mean, there's a 1927 version which in blackface. Then there's the 1980 version with Neil Diamond and don't watch that one. That's all I'll say. >> Yascha Mounk: OK. All right. >> Jane Coaston: One of those is important and the other is just bad. >> Yascha Mounk: So Jane's assignment may or may not be for you to watch a movie with blackface, I'm not sure. My assignment is to go and read the play, The Melting Pot, by Israel Zangwill, because there's all of this sneering references to it in the literature but actually it's a beautiful play that expresses a very moving ideal. What he says tells the story of this Jewish immigrant whose family is killed in a pogrom in Kishinev. And he comes to the United States and falls in love with a daughter of a Russian baron and they agree to get married, but her father is outraged by this and arrives unexpectedly on the scene to stop her from marrying a Jew. And David, her love interest, recognizes him as the general who oversaw the slaughter of his family. And David is this composer who wants to compose a great American symphony that gives voice [inaudible] to a new American man, to the man that is the result of this melting pot. That's his grand artistic vision but he cannot bear the idea that his fiancé's father killed his family and so he breaks it off. But at the very end, they reconcile because he realizes that he's a failure in his vision. But actually what it means to build this melting pot is to overcome the hatreds of the ancient world to such an extent that he should be willing to marry this woman he loves who is the daughter of the murderer of his family. So it's actually a morally very powerful play, but takes seriously the deep conflicts in the world. It's not naive. But the way that the melting pot has been used, was to ask too much homogeneity. It was to say, look, you have to leave all of that old world behind in such a way that perhaps some parts of your original influence stay, but we're all the same as each other. And that I think is much too homogenizing. It's unrealistic and it's also not the kind of society in which I want to live. Now in counter reaction, what's become popular is the metaphor of either the salad bowl or the mosaic, but they gather the same thing. And that's the idea of a society that perhaps looks a little bit like Lebanon, which is to say, you have all of these different groups and they kind of vaguely are governed by a common set of rules, but really they have nothing in common. They live completely parallel to each other. There's not many points of contact between them. Society becomes, in the words of a British philosopher, Lord Parekh, an association of associations or a group of groups, right? And that I think, is also an important mistake. And so what I argue for in the book is two things. One, that actually we should think of individuals with the rights and duties as a fundamental building block legally of American society. And that doesn't mean that we don't respect groups. In fact, freedom of religion, freedom association are so important precisely because we understand how important people's groups are to them. But they need to have the right to leave the groups as well. They need to have a right to make connections with other people as well. And when we respect groups, it's precisely because we're not tyrannical of their members. It's because those who are part of them choose freely to remain members of them. Most people want to continue to be part of groups that they grow up in, the religion of their parents, the cultural, ethnic group of a parent, but they are able to leave those groups if they want. They are able to say, I'm not going to have the same religion as my parents. I'm going to go live in a different community. And it's because they have that freedom, that the groups we have in society deserve our respect, because they're not compelling their members. So that's one point I make. And then the other point that make is, look the melting pot doesn't work and the salad bowl doesn't work, there's a third kind of metaphor that might be more useful and that's that of a public park. Why because we can go to Bryant Park around here, which is beautiful after this talk and we can say, hey, we have some more questions to which I was going to sit there not talk to anybody else and that's one of the rights we have in a society. We're not compelled to talk to anybody else. But we might also choose to talk to some [inaudible] other people who are sitting around and make new friendships, make new connections. And in a diverse democracy to make it work, I think you need a little bit of both. Which to say that it's perfectly fine for the Amish to stay among themselves, mostly, right, for various groups in society to say, for me, the most important thing is my religious or cultural group and I'm going to limit my contacts with people outside of that. That's one of the things that you're entitled to do as an American citizen. There's no problem with that. But as a society, we should also encourage enough connective tissue that the whole of society isn't just a group of groups, isn't just an association of associations, and so the same way that you can judge, aesthetically, a public park and say, is it the kind of place where there's new friendships, new connections being forged? Are people actually open to speaking to each other? Was everybody on their guard and passing each other like ships in the night? We can also judge a society and say, is there enough connective tissue, are enough people choosing to make those new connections? because to make our democracy work, we need those connections, we need that connective tissue. >> Jane Coaston: I think my last question to you would be that, I am curious as to how you think political institutions, what do you think they should be aiming for in helping to support diverse democracies and what should they be steering away from? It's something I was struck by was, whenever I'm thinking about groups, I'm always thinking about how groups are interacting with one another but also how some groups perceive the existence of another group as a threat to that group in their existence. And I'm always curious as to how states, political institutions, how we can think about that. So I'm curious what you think people should be looking to and looking away from. >> Yascha Mounk: Yeah, let me let me answer, one, is at the level of formal institutions and then second, more of a level of informal institutions in electoral politics. So at the level of formal institutions, it goes back to what I was just saying about the fundamental individual rights and liberties that people have, right? So there's a big debate between philosophical liberals on one side and communitarians on the other. And communitarian's say, well look, we should just say, these groups are the fundamental building block of society and that way we're sure that minority groups and minority religious groups have the fundamental rights they need. That they're not oppressed, that they don't suffer the terrible oppression of a state that we've seen so often in the last century, so we don't have to fear the tyranny of a majority. And that is more true to the fact that most people aren't individuals who choose the life conception from scratch. They are people who come as members of those family networks, as people with strong religious traditions and beliefs. But that misses the importance of also protecting people against a cage of norms. It misses the importance of protecting a gay kid who may grow up in a fundamentalist Christian household where the parents want to put him in conversion therapy. It misses the importance of protecting children from female genital mutilation. It misses all of the ways in which groups can also oppress their members. And so if we want to protect against the way in which democracy can push towards conflict, can make groups afraid of each other, we need to give them this double freedom. We need to make sure they can leave their communities if they wish, but we also need to make sure that groups have the rights, if their members are freely choosing to remain parts of them, to not have to fear the state, not to have to fear the tyranny of a majority, that they can engage in religious worship that is deeply unpopular without having to fear for the safety of the houses of worship. But they can criticize a president or criticize the prime minister without fearing that they'll end up in jail. So having those two freedoms at the same time, really helps to deal with the conflict that democratic institutions can otherwise encourage. So that's the level of formal institutions. By the level of informal institutions, it goes back to the thing that you mentioned briefly about these sort of dreams, which I think are nightmares of the rising demographic majority of a way in which demography is destiny. So there's this deep belief in America -- it's a funny thing, you know, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals basically don't agree on anything anymore, except one really big ambitious theory that's both wrong and pernicious. And that is this idea that America is about to be majority minority in about 2045 because the White population is shrinking and the non-White population is growing, that White people tend to vote Republican and Non-white people tend to vote Democrat, and that therefore Democrats have this rising democratic majority. Now that motivates a lot of demographic panic on the far-right. Michael Anton, who later went on to work as a senior advisor in the Trump White House, said in his very influential essay in 2016 that what we have to do most of all is, I quote, "The ceaseless importation of third world foreigners." end quote, who are going to destroy the Republic and mean that the Republican party never has a chance to win again. That's what drives a lot of voter suppression and all kinds of other terrible things. It also drives that kind of strange triumphalism. On the left we say all we have to do is to mobilize our co-voters which are supposed to be non-White voters and then victory is inevitable. That's why so many media outlets got wrong with 2016 election because they thought there's no way that Trump can win because of demographics. This is all wrong. Think about Irish voters in the 1960s. They voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. Now they will vote overwhelmingly for the Republican Party. You cannot make those kinds of predictions. In fact, in 2020, the main reason why Donald Trump was competitive is that he significantly increased the share of the vote among every non-White voter demographic among African-Americans, among Asian-Americans, and especially among Latinos. And the main reason why Joe Biden is legitimately elected 46th President of United States is that he significantly increased his share of the vote among White voters relative to Hillary Clinton in 2016. But I want to go one step further, actually. I no longer believe that America is ever going to be majority minority. To think that America is going to be majority minority, you have to apply the one drop rule in an extreme way, not just to African-Americans but to every demographic group. You have to say that somebody who is -- who has three White grandparents and one Chinese grandparent is going to think of themselves as a person of color who is in fundamental opposition to that different demographic block. You have to think that Latinos have a deep identity as people of color that empirically they do not have. A lot of think of themselves as White as it turns out. You have to think something, but I doubt, that you know, somebody who has French royal family on one side and a parent who is a Brahman who stood at the apex of one of the most oppressive caste systems in the history of the world on the other side and you -- is born in this country, I'm sure has suffered some discrimination because of the color of his skin but also probably grew up with real privilege, is somehow naturally part of the same category as somebody who has many, many, many ancestors who were enslaved in the most extreme ways. None of this actually makes sense. And so I think, even -- not just the idea that Democrats are going to win every election because of this stuff, but even the idea that America will, in any meaningful sense, ever be majority minority is a misinterpretation of our sociological reality. And so where does agency come into this? I'm not in the business of giving Republicans electoral advice. But I hope that they're going to build a kind of cross-ethnic working class coalition. I think that would be a good thing for American politics. And I hope the Democrats are not going to give up on some of the predominantly White states that Barack Obama won in 2008 and in 2012. >> Jane Coaston: We have a question, how effective do you see gerrymandering as a means of a group developing power over another group in a diverse democracy? >> Yascha Mounk: I don't think it's very effective. I mean, you could imagine very, very, very extreme forms of gerrymandering that would be effective in that kind of way. In the United States, it has historically swung perhaps 15 or 20 house seats, which is certainly a deep problem and certainly unfair. But the Senate is not gerrymandered and you still have problems in the Senate. The presidency is not gerrymandered and we still have Donald Trump be President of the United States. And what we're now getting in the next election cycle is actually kind of paradoxical outcome, which shows what the biggest problem of gerrymandering is, which is that because Democrats have said we've been outcompeted at gerrymandering all of this time, we're going to gerrymander as hard as we can in New Jersey and all of these other states. It no longer looks like Republicans are going to have an advantage because of gerrymandering in the next cycle of the election. Very serious political scientists have looked at this and they say that effect has gone. What it still does do is to pull our politics to the extremes because even for Democrats and Republicans are not favored one or the other, you have so few competitive districts that a primary election becomes the actual election in something like 70% of districts. And that means that the incentive of legislators is always towards the base rather than towards average citizens who are actually turning out in the general election. So I think gerrymandering is a real problem in the United States, but not because it allows a kind of form of domination, that's one element of it, but because it is just wrong and pulls our parties to the extremes. >> Jane Coaston: A few more questions. Would you consider India an example of a diverse democracy that has come under threat from the rule of Narendra Modi and Hindu nationalism? If so, what do you think went wrong? >> Yascha Mounk: Well, the first part of the question is easy, yes. The second part of the question is hard. Yes. So India, you know, is an amazing country and an amazing democracy in part because people had so little hope for it at its founding, a lot of political scientists looked at India in 1948 and said, you know, it's a very poor country, it's a country which at the time had very low literacy rates, how can they sustain a democracy? This is not going to work. And yet, the most populous democracy in the world has sustained itself with brief moments of real crisis for many decades. And part of the reason for that was the wisdom of its founders, who in a Hindu majority country said this is not a Hindu nation, it is not a nation defined by religion of its majority group. It is a secular state, which endeavors to treat, not always successfully, but endeavors to treat its different religious groups with fairness. There was always dissenters to that and I guess one simple way of explaining what happened is that they won. That the people from the beginning said, no, we should have the majority impose its will. This should be a Hindu nation, not just in the sense that its majority is Hindu, but in the sense that it should rule. They built a grassroots organization and took over politics and its political arm, Narendra Modi is now the Prime Minister and he has been very effective at not only making life more difficult for Muslims in the country, but also crushing free speech, at undermining the separation of powers, at undermining the independence of Indian Supreme Court. And so the poor state of Indian democracy today is one of the great reasons, for those of us who care about democracy, to worry about the state of the world. >> Jane Coaston: Another question what's your opinion on schools educating only certain groups of children, e.g. Chinese schools with only Chinese children, Orthodox schools with only children of Orthodox parents, is this good or not so good for a diverse democracy? And I feel like this is something where you could either put this in the salad bowl model or the public park model. >> Yascha Mounk: Yeah, so I think it's fine if there are some schools like that. I would worry about as a predominant model, right? So this is something we say, look, there's a right to do that, right? Parents have a right to fund private schools and that's an important, right? And so shouldn't be able to racially discriminate for all kinds of historical reasons. It's perfectly fine, for example, to say, you know, we're going to have a very strong Chinese language element, which assumes a certain amount of fluency when you come in. Now they turn away a White or Black kid at the door if they have that fluency, that would be wrong. But effectively it'll create a school where 98% of people are Chinese, right? Certainly, I think it's possible to have religiously-based schools and in those kinds of ways. But public schools are also an incredibly important avenue to build a sense of common identity, to build connections between different kinds of families, to make sure that people actually come to get to know each other. And so, even though this is legal, and I don't think we should forbid it, if this was the predominant model of schooling in the United States 10 years from now, I think that'll be concerning for the country and I would worry about it. And so I don't want the government to encourage it. So one of the points I criticized in the book, and this is sort of -- was done on the salad bowl model, is the New Labor government in the United Kingdom, which funded all of those state-based faith schools. So they founded Jewish schools and Hindu schools and Muslim schools that were set up and funded by the state. And that, I think is a big mistake precisely because it does encourage that kind of salad bowl model which undermines the connective tissue we need >> Jane Coaston: Well, this has been such a fascinating conversation even though we did not talk at all as much about sports as I was going to try to work [inaudible] about sports. Yascha Mounk, thank you so much for joining me. >> Yascha Mounk: Thank you, Jane. Thank you, everyone. [ Applause ] I think I've been advised to awkwardly sit on the stage as those of you wish to purchase a book, buy a book and then I can sign it, if you like. >> Jane Coaston: Awesome >> Yascha Mounk: Thank you [inaudible].