The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure

One of Barack Obama's Recommended Reads for Summer ' A] brave and necessary book . . . Anyone interested in the future of liberal democracy, in the US or anywhere else, should read this book.' --Anne Applebaum 'A convincing, humane, and hopeful guide to the present and future by one of our foremost democratic thinkers.' --George Packer From one of our sharpest political thinkers, a brilliant big-picture vision of how to bridge the bitter divides within diverse democracies Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time. Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk explains why we need to create a world in which our ascriptive identities come to matter less--not because we ignore global injustices, but because we have succeeded in addressing them.