Great Experiment

No democracy has yet fully managed to be both diverse and even-handed in how it treats its ethnic and religious communities, yet that combination now sits at the heart of the democratic project. Yascha Mounk calls it the defining experiment of our era. Drawing on history, social psychology and comparative politics, he examines why societies struggle to hold together people with different backgrounds and what it would take to do better.

His central argument is that societies should work toward a future in which the identities people are born into matter less in public life. This does not mean ignoring injustices past or present. The aim is to address them so thoroughly that they no longer decide who belongs. Whether citizens come to see one another as strangers or as compatriots depends, Mounk suggests, on the institutions we build and the choices we make.

The book offers both a close diagnosis of a pressing problem and a reason to think it can be solved. Mounk, a political scientist known for his work on populism and the health of democracy, makes the case that giving up on diverse democracies is not a real option, and that the task is to pursue a more ambitious vision for how societies should be organized.