Democracy and Diversity with Yascha Mounk (S3 Ep.16)

My guest today is Yascha Mounk. Yascha is a political scientist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. He's also the founder of "Persuasion", which is a great online magazine I really recommend you all read. He is also the host of "The Good Fight" podcast. Yascha has a new book out called "The Great Experiment", which is what we'll be discussing in today's episode.

We talk about group psychology and tribalism, their origin, and human nature. We discuss the difference between nations that are built around specific ethnic groups on the one hand and nations that are built around abstract ideas on the other, the challenges faced by multi-ethnic democracies, the threats to diverse democracies from the right and from the left, and why diverse democracies can be less stable than diverse autocracies. We talk about colorblindness, white identity politics and wokeness, whether increased contact between racial groups is the antidote to racism, and whether diversity is an inherent good or a contingent good. We go on to talk about the idea that demography is destiny, the fluidity of racial identity and how one's identity can change in response to social incentives, what it would look like to have a colorblind legal regime in America, immigration and cultural assimilation, and much more.