Our friend and fellow blogger Dan Little has a wonderful academic blog, Understanding Society, that deals with issues “in philosophy of social science and the workings of the social world.” Dan is a very clear expositor of philosophical ideas, and I think that even if you have not had philosophical training, some of his posts will be accessible to you. That is certainly true of a recent post that I think is relevant to our group’s purposes, “A political philosophy for an inclusive multicultural democracy.”

Dan writes:

Here I want to lay out the skeleton of a political philosophy incorporating the ideals of an inclusive multicultural democracy. I maintain that a stable and inclusive multicultural democracy is a positive value for the whole of society: all citizens are benefited by a varied and harmonious population of peoples with distinct traditions, values, and practices. This is a society in which there are many groups and identities in society (racial, ethnic, sexual, class, nationality), and in which members of these groups have the moral emotions of compassion and respect towards members of other groups. Difference exists without discrimination and prejudice; more fundamentally, difference exists within the context of a cohesive sense of shared community. Rather than antagonism there is friendship across groups.

Dan links this idea to the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., who advanced

the idea that citizens in a just multicultural democracy will experience the moral emotions of compassion and respect for each other. King described this as a kind of ‘civic friendship’ in which people from different groups succeed in living together harmoniously and leads them to experience a sense of goodwill and shared identity with their fellow citizens.”

I might add that it also links to deep elements in Western political theory; Aristotle, for instance, maintained that there were two virtues fundamental to a well-functioning polis or society, justice and friendship. (There are key questions about how civic friendship might operate, but let’s save them for later.)

As Dan points out, a key question from the standpoint of political theory – or more simply, how we understand what we are about in a democracy – is can, or to what extent can, the state, the government, actively work to nurture such civic friendship?

So achieving a just, stable, and cohesive multicultural democracy is a worthwhile goal. But will a well-ordered liberal democratic state have the authority — and perhaps the duty — to take measures that enhance the workings of a multicultural democracy?

The question is particularly poignant at this moment, given Trumpists’ attacks on DEI and so-called “wokeness,” and the rapid, too-often-preemptive, capitulation of universities, businesses, law firms and others on this matter. DEI might have – and I think it has had – its problems, and I might post about that in the future. But what we are seeing now is a wholesale rampage against exactly the kind of multicultural democracy that Dan is discussing.

What has been for some time the dominant theory of liberal democracy might well answer the above question about the state in the negative. In that view, “goods,” including even something like “civic friendship,” are private matters or matters for civil society, not matters for the state. The liberal democratic state’s responsibility is strictly to ensure that there is a space in which citizens can pursue their own conceptions of the good, as long as no harm is done to anyone else. Dan explores this issue in a subsequent post, “Can liberal political philosophy support anti-racism?”

One of the issues we face now is: resistance to Trump is one thing, but what comes next? In many ways we as a society through institutions like universities, governments, and businesses (motivated by markets, but still …) were moving us toward a more multicultural democracy. Now that is all under assault. When we get through this moment, how do we recover and better implement movement toward a genuine, broadly inclusive democracy?