When Social Inequality Maps to Demographic Diversity, What Then for Liberal Democracies?

摘要

How did the United States get to this "yes, but please not too much longer" state of affairs? A Rapid Historical Tour Demographic diversity in America has for four centuries been about race more than religion, ancestry, or language-and when these other population characteristics were pushed on to the public's agenda they were racialized-Catholics and Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese and Chinese ancestry in the same period, speaking German in the eighteenth century or Spanish in the twentieth. The justification had to be robust enough to persist into Independence, with its Republican premise that all men are equally endowed with natural rights.n America's narrative of unity based on diversity predates the policy regime of group rights that emerged from the civil rights era and then found fertile ground in multiculturalism, prompting commentators such as Schlesinger to see in group allegiance "a threat to the brittle bonds of national identity that holds this diverse and fractious society together" (Schlesinger: 113).