[T]he great challenge and promise of more radical and liberal visions of the nexus of cultural pluralism and democracy is to create societies, polities, and norms that allow all members of a given society to participate equally as members of the polity, to strip away barriers imposed by distinctions of gender, social class, religion, ethnicity, origin, and presumed racial distinction. Both Western and non-Western societies continue to struggle with the conflict between relatively recent egalitarian ideals and inegalitarian social and political orders designed by prior generations of government and leadership to maintain dominance of a particular ethno-national group, religion, or presumed race.Michael G. Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), at 17-18.
The most durable and enduring democratic polities have nurtured an ethnos within them, often at the expense of minoritized and racialized groups. The United States, France, and Britain--but also contemporary Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Scandinavian nations, Ghana, South Africa, Indonesia, and many other countries classified as democratic--have exhibited this tendency. The larger number of studies of these countries and he likelihood of particular groups or subgroups attaining the most preferable positions in the economy, polity, and society attest to this bias in the most democratic and societies in the contemporary world. How to make societies less ethnocentric, and more ethos-centric, is one of the great challenges of balancing cultural difference and democracy in contemporary nation-states.
W. E. B Du Bois wrote about the problem of the twentieth century being that of the color line. It remains so today, both here in America and around the globe. In the United States, Trump and his supporters did not create the color line. He and they just exploited it, made it darker and deeper.
The United facing numerous problems and challenges, from health care, to failing schools, forever wars, failing domestic and international institutions, gender issues, violence, drugs, guns, and on and on. However, when it comes down to it, there is one overarching problem or challenge that brings them all together: Racial Inequality. Not simply along black-white lines, but across the spectrum. And the question is whether America is going to be a country that truly believes in and, then acts meaningfully to create true equality in a pluralistic society? Or whether America is going to continue to be, or revert to being, a White-Christian-Male Privileged Society (with a dash of model women and minorities tossed in here or there). Those who argue, for example, for universal health care are not going to achieve it as long as some members of society are deemed less than human, as less worthy of health services. Those who want gender equality are not going to get it as long as some women, mainly women of color and poor women, are viewed as less deserving of being treated both as women and equal. One is not going to get equal access to education if some children are not deemed worthy of the investment.
So, the Democratic Party needs to be what the Republican Party has abandoned when it cease to be the--yes, flawed--Party of Lincoln and became the moral corrupt Party of Trump. The Democratic Party has to get radical, not merely progressive but radical, and embrace and fight for equality across the board. If that means offending Establishment democrats, so be it. If it mean not winning over some independents, so be it. This is the battle to be fought. This is the hill democrats need to see as worth dying on. Are we to be a free and equal people? Or, are we to remain a people where some are more equal than others, where some are more free than others?
Again, THIS IS THE BATTLE WORTH HAVING. AND IT IS THE HILL DEMOCRATS SHOULD FIND WORTHY OF DYING ON IF NECESSARY.
