For the foreseeable future, the bonds of community must be particular bonds, and the very character of a regime requires such bonds. The essential reason for this fact is that liberal democracy privileges discord and establishes majority rule as the principle of decision making in the political sphere. In order to sustain this institutionalization of conflict, there must be a strong sense of commong belonging. There are costs inherent in this regime, prices to pay; the regime requires, in particular, that when minorities are overruled they recognize the legitimacy of decisions made by the representatives of their adversaries. This coast is bearable and is borne in Western regimes for two reasons: (1) because these democratic regimes are also liberal (and the liberal rule limits the scope and cost of the democratic rule); and (2) because of the existence of communitarian bonds forged by national unity. There are of course counterexamples: Canada and Belgium, which are divided into two communities and which tinker and feel their way toward viable solutions; and a number of African states in which tribal rivalries and the absence of a true nation are major obstacles to the establishment of, and respect for, liberal-democratic rules. ~Philippe Beneton, Equality By Default

Beneton is a joy to read. Here he makes a point that I have stressed in the past, and which would not have been entirely unfamiliar to early generations of Americans, for whom a homogenous population was essential to the survival of a republic. What republics and democracies have in common in spite of their significant differences as types of regime is the need for common identity and political consensus. (This tends to produce a bland style of compromise politics in which there are no stark alternatives, but also fewer chances of political disagreements erupting into civil war.) When a common identity is lacking, or political consensus breaks down, democracy is a fast track to civil strife and bloodshed, and this is truest of those societies in which tribal and ethnic loyalties retain greater power.

Democracies that pride themselves on their ethnic and racial diversity and actually allow ethnicity and race to become politicised and a marker of political identity will sooner or later go the way of a Bolivia or an Ivory Coast as tribal and racial consciousness becomes the banner for mass mobilisation and/or supremacism combined with violence. For a democratic system to succeed at all, these identities should not be suppressed (they will not disappear, but simply take on more radical and destructive forms) but be superseded by some common national identity that incorporates all members of the political community. However, I cannot stress enough that this common national identity must be based in the history, the people and the land of the nation to which all newcomers are joining themselves; if the overarching national identity is ideological in nature, it will not last much more than two generations without suffering significant internal strife.

All of this is why either the thorough political assimilation of immigrants or the reduction of levels of immigration is essential to future stability of the American political system. The alternatives are a breakdown in political consensus, a loss of shared identity and the rise of a more aggressive tribal politics.

Democratic elections, even in the managerial age, are always affairs of identity politics, as everyone chooses candidates based not on what the candidates say but on how closely they resemble you, the voter. Perhaps this is why some people could describe Clinton without irony as “the first black President,” because most black Americans could identify with him out of whatever shared cultural habits or references they may have held in common. It is certainly why evangelicals embraced George “Christ Is My Favourite Philosopher” Bush, since it was not because of any striking or distinctive religious conservative credentials that they flocked to the man; it was the personal story of accepting Christ that resonated with many evangelicals, which may help explain their otherwise baffling loyalty to the man. As these examples show, identification with a candidate does not always need to be strictly ethnic or racial, but we would be kidding ourselves if we denied that it was a significant factor, even when we are supposed to think that it “shouldn’t” matter.

The Ivory Coast in particular was once something close to a model African democratic success story: it was democratically governed, relatively prosperous for West Africa, multiethnic and generally peaceful, but also a magnet for foreign labour from the surrounding nations because of its relative prosperity. Pressures began to build to define Ivoirite, i.e., Ivorianness, vis-a-vis neighbouring countries, which aggravated ethnic resentments, which was followed by President Gbagbo’s writing about the superiority of his tribe and stoking anti-foreign and specifically anti-Fasoan hatred among his kinsmen. Northern Ivorians took this ill, which created the conditions for the attempted coup that sparked the war.

The “return of the tribes” happened all right, and Mr. Brooks’ precious democracy did not smooth out the rough edges of Ivorian politics, but instead provoked an attempted coup against Gbagbo and made Ivorian political conflict–which had already been increasingly organised along tribal and ethnic lines–into an ethnic war aggravated by the Muslim-Christian division of the country. “Melting pots,” even if they have actually succeeded in assimilating new populations, can themselves melt down and break, and the more large numbers of unassimilated people–people who may not want to assimilate–that a country takes in puts that much more stress on the capacity of any country to absorb and incorporate the newcomers. If assimilation is simply assumed rather than actively pursued as policy and as a social rule, it will not work nearly as well, leaving whole swathes of the country increasingly isolated from the rest.