The Archipelago of Democracy

An alternative to multiculturalism & the melting pot, for connection in a fractured time

Can anything be a higher priority in the United States right now than conquering the twin problems of political violence and the generally violent nature of our culture? How can we consider ourselves a nation at peace when every day brings a need to ratchet up security? I have a panic button under my desk. There were security guards outside exam rooms on my university campus yesterday. Jewish colleagues have grown accustomed to having security at synagogues. Our most pressing question must be: How can we make peace — not somewhere else in the world, but right here at home?

Some national-level policies that would help: Approaches to our political economy that reinforce the middle-class. Repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that we can regulate algorithms the way we regulate other consumer goods. Data ownership by platform users so that we can break the oligopolistic power of tech companies. The most fundamental change we need, though, is in ourselves. We need to transform how we attend to one another in our daily lives.

We all need to be members of villages, linked in a vast network of island-villages, all connected by bridges, and all linked to a big island, which is our shared public square. We need an archipelago of democracy.

Last week I hosted a conference called After Neoliberalism: From Left to Right. Speakers from across the political spectrum — from the Heritage Foundation and New America; from the Trump and Biden administrations — used a similar vocabulary. People need healthy versions of connection, belonging, and a sense of purpose. Importantly, these cannot be provided by government. They cannot be provided by the market. They cannot be provided by an identity-based politics, which divides as much as it connects. They cannot be provided by technology.

They can be provided by family, faith, and community and friends. They can also be provided by cults, gangs, and radicalized cells. The question is how to have more of the former, grounded in love, humanity, and peace, and less of the latter, as well as a lot less of the isolation and atomization that renders people vulnerable to recruitment into dangerous forms of community.

Perhaps if we pause to consider what sort of social culture might bring peace, we can more readily consider how we might get there.

Over the last 100-plus years, we’ve had several different visions for the American social fabric. After the high rates of immigration in the early 20^th century, an image of a melting pot and goals of cultural assimilation emerged. In the second half of the 20^th century, multiculturalism arose as the preferred alternative, as newcomers and native minority populations understandably fought to preserve cultural heritages that provided their lives with meaning even as they also sought upward progress in American society. Ethnic studies and identity-based politics became a staple of American life.

The first model asked too much of people; the second, too little. The first assimilationist model was too cruel in the way it asked people to give up their histories and cultural traditions and sometimes even languages. The latter model damned the pursuit of a shared American culture as colonialist and imperialist.

An archipelago of democracy offers a new vision. Each of us resides on an island of origin. This provides a source of personal identity, but we also all have an ownership share in a jointly-owned civic island. Bridges connect our island and the big island, and also all of our islands to one another. We should find ourselves frequently visiting each other’s islands and being welcome there, as well as able to participate in the shared island knowing that we bring various and wonderful things to the conversation.

Without any doubt, each of us forms our personal identity from what we accept or reject from our families, faiths, and neighborhoods, from choices we make about how we navigate the world’s responses to our race, gender, and sexuality, and from the ideas and commitments we form through engagement in the spectrum of ideological views available to us. Yet we cannot have a functioning democracy unless a large supermajority of us also adopts commitments to core norms of free self-government, including commitments to constitutionalism, rule of law, respect for rights, nonviolence, and universal inclusion. The responsibility of the democratic citizen is to integrate those elements of civic value with the picture of value that comes from our personal identity, so that we can fashion for ourselves a civic identity.

The archipelago is a mental model for practices of flexible connection. We hundreds of millions of Americans have things we share, and things we don’t, and that’s ok, because what we share consists of a set of values that allow us to negotiate through our differences to compromise agreements on solutions to common problems.

This mental model can help us work toward civic cohesion and civic strength on a national level but also on smaller scales. Every university should cultivate a sense of university-based civic identity for its students. Yes, each student may bring a set of particularities to the table — demographic background, faith, viewpoint — but part of the job on campus is to connect that personal identity to the shared civic identity that gives that campus its cultural orientation and purpose. At Harvard, where our motto is “truth,” we should be able to connect our personal identities to the norms necessary for truth-seeking: be hungry to hear disagreement, listen for understanding, disagree in ways that also communicate respect for the human being with whom you disagree.

For an archipelago of democracy to come into existence — where innumerable and distinct micro-communities are woven into a strong national community — everyone needs in-real-life micro-communities to belong to which are also networked to the greater whole.

This is where the work of peace-making comes in. How can we invite all those who dwell in the dark shadows of alienation into micro-communities — whether of family, faith, neighborhood, school community, or affinity group? And how can we ensure that those micro-communities all have wide-open bridges to opportunity and empowerment?

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P.S. The mental model of an archipelago of democracy emerged during a conversation about how to move beyond identity politics at last summer’s The States Forum convening. Watch the whole thing here.