The Limits of Pluralism in a Tolerant Society: A Conversation with Jacob T. Levy
There is no one magic liberal solution to address the insecurities that change generates for homogeneous groups
Recently, Aaron Ross Powell sat down with
, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Coordinator of the Research Group on Constitutional Studies at McGill University and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, to discuss the nature of pluralism and toleration and what it is that makes a multicultural society great. The following Q&A has been adapted from their conversation on Aaron’s ReImagining Liberty podcast.
Aaron Ross Powell: What does it mean to say that ours is, or should be, a pluralistic society?
Jacob T. Levy: All modern liberal societies are, in at least some ways, pluralistic. So far, that’s just a descriptive fact. I’m not yet claiming that in those pluralistic societies there is a valuing of the pluralism. All that’s entailed, thus far, is a descriptive meaning of pluralistic: These are societies in which people disagree about political and religious questions, in which people pursue various different ways of life, and live in very economically differentiated circumstances.
Pluralism is a specifically modern configuration. It is historically contrasted with an idealized vision of an integrated, holistic life, especially the Catholic Europe of medieval times, where everyone was living more or less the same kind of life and essentially engaged in subsistence farming with small exceptions in the cities and in the upper classes, and everyone subscribed to the same religious creed. In such a society, there was no real need for political contestation.
All of those things get transformed over the course of modernity, and liberal democracies are societies that are committed to building on, facilitating, and respecting the various forms of pluralism—the plural ways of life, economic activity, religious orientation, political commitment—that develop.
In a sense, the least difficult pluralism to grapple with, at least conceptually or philosophically, is a plurality of ethnonational or linguistic backgrounds—precisely the features that we see today as constituting the hard fact about national identity. Those differences are easier to come to terms with intellectually or morally or philosophically than differences about how we should live together or how we relate to God. But they’ve proven to be extremely difficult to come to terms with in light of the political force of nationalism and the urge for national homogeneity.
So, on top of all those other kinds of pluralism that I mentioned, we’ve started to really try to come to grips with having national political identities that are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilinguistic. Contrast, for example, the pluralism of descendants of different kinds of 19th- and early 20th-century European immigrants to the racial pluralism of, to begin with, the coexistence of whites in the United States and African Americans descended from those who were brought here in conditions of slavery, then with the added racial complexity of increased migration from Asia and Latin America over the course of the latter part of the 20th century.
Above I mentioned that when we say that society is pluralistic sometimes we just mean that descriptively rather than normatively. But I actually want to argue that in order to think of a society as truly pluralistic, we can’t mean that as a descriptive fact only. For a society to genuinely count as pluralistic, its pluralism must be treated as neutral or positive—not as a problem to be solved. Often the pluralism is treated as neutral, and that can work—but what it can’t be is a negative. That it’s neutral means that it should not be an occasion for political violence to try to suppress our urges to forcibly homogenize. Of course, all of that comes into conflict with the politics of ethnonationalism, white nationalism, and Christian nationalism that are so ascendant in the United States.
Powell: I gave a presentation on pluralism and toleration recently, and one of the ways that I framed it was that pluralism is both a fact about the world but also a value. It’s a fact in that it’s a description about the world, a statement about the quantity of diversity in it, and about the possibility of cultural dynamism. But it’s also a value in that it’s a perspective that involves looking at that diversity and dynamism and … valuing it.
Is this what distinguishes pluralism from tolerance? Tolerance seems to be what you’ve described as the neutral appraisal of pluralism—that you’re different than me, you like different things than I do, and I’m going to put up with it. When I commit to tolerating something, that means that I don’t like it, but I’m not going to beat you over the head because of our difference.
Is there a meaningful distinction between saying that we are a tolerant society and that we are a pluralistic society?
Levy: Tolerance starts off as an individual perspective, an individual moral trait. Before we talk about a tolerant society, we talk about the attitude of tolerance of the individual, which, as you say, has a connotation of negative judgment.
In fact, the question of whether I can tolerate something only arises in the first place if I have some reason to disapprove of it. So tolerance isn’t a celebration of the other. Tolerance is a way of engaging in spite of the presence of disapproval. I don’t think pluralism is an individual character trait in the same way. Pluralism is an irreducibly social description. Individuals and societies can be tolerant or intolerant, but only societies can be pluralistic.
Tolerance is actually part of the social disposition that makes pluralism possible. It’s not the case that in order to have a pluralistic society, its members have to adopt a posture of constant celebration of everything they are not. What is a necessary condition, though, is tolerance. In order to have a pluralistic society, we have to exhibit consistent mutual tolerance. There will always be some things that other people do, ways of being that other people embody, that we will have a more enthusiastic attitude toward than the things which we merely tolerate. But pluralism is capacious enough to accommodate disagreement.
In pluralistic systems, sometimes we really deeply disagree. Pluralism can sometimes mean living alongside people whose beliefs, attitudes, and ways of life we really deeply disapprove of. Tolerance is then the bedrock. We can’t go below tolerance, to something less than tolerance, and still have a functionally pluralistic society.
Powell: That very much fits with the way I’ve argued for embracing pluralism not just as a description of society but as a goal to aim at. Though we sometimes oscillate between affirmatively celebrating other people’s ways of life and merely tolerating them, one aspect of the pluralistic ethos that we should celebrate, not merely tolerate, is that pluralism entails that society is not a monoculture. The presence of other people doing things differently than you or I might choose to do them is worthy of celebration.
My long-running argument is that going beyond tolerance and toward a celebration of pluralism strengthens our liberal institutions. If the reason that we’re getting along is mere tolerance, then that’s worrying because the distance between tolerance and intolerance is not too great. On the other hand, the divide between an embrace of pluralism and intolerance is much vaster. Going from merely tolerating others toward an intolerance of them is not a huge distance. Once you’ve arrived at intolerance, you’re in the conceptual space where “solutions” to this problem, like Trump’s mass deportation campaign, start to lure you in.
If you were to ask the people waving the “Mass Deportation, Now!” signs at the Republican National Convention why they were waving those signs, what would they say? You might get a handful of Daily Stormer or Stephen Miller types who straightforwardly confess to wanting an ethnonationalist society and their answers will be dripping with contempt for nonwhite populations and cultures. But most people aren’t going to say that; most people aren’t going to explicitly ground their preferences in a racist screed about the other. In fact, they’ll probably say something along the lines of, “Look, I think it’s great that there are all kinds of different people, languages, values. But some of those people, some of those values, aren’t in the best interests of our country. They’re harming our economic conditions, harming our societies.” They’ll give a story about why pluralism can’t be infinite—there have to be limits; there have to be things that not only will we not celebrate, but we won’t tolerate.
This concern over an excessive pluralism is sometimes a cover for a wholesale rejection of pluralism, for a rejection of pluralism as a virtue or goal in the first place.
Levy: There’s an important difference between the politics of migration in the United States and the politics of migration in a lot of other Western liberal democracies, even though there are some important commonalities too. The argument you just laid out is one that people offer about Islamic immigration and the panic in nationalist European politics about the rise of refugee and asylum seekers from the Middle East over the course of the last 10 years after the Syrian civil war. It’s presented in the very terms you just described. The idea is: Europe as a Christian/post-Christian civilization can’t successfully tolerate and integrate Islamic immigration past a certain volume because of the values differences that run too deep.
The most interesting instances of this argument are the notionally liberal versions, the notionally feminist or pro-LGBTQ versions, that we see today, especially in the Netherlands. We can’t sustain our feminist society, we can’t sustain our gay-tolerant society, if we suddenly have a population coming in from the Middle East that isn’t committed to those values. The version of the argument that we see in Hungary obviously doesn’t have that feature to it. But it’s still framed in terms of a mismatch between the values of the citizenry and the values of the people who are coming in.
We saw some of that in the United States after 9/11. We saw some of it in the first Trump campaign, which got a significant boost in late 2015 from the Islamist Paris attacks. The first act of Trump’s anti-immigration presidency was the Muslim ban, the ban on 13 majority-Muslim countries.
But that’s not the fundamental fact about American migration politics, and that’s not what the “Mass Deportation, Now!” signs were about. Those are about migration from Latin America, and there’s not actually a story, not even a fictional story, that is offered about why Latin Americans—who, after all, are almost entirely Catholic Christians—have values or a way of life that are somehow deeply incompatible with American values or way of life.
You mentioned that some who wave those signs will emphasize the immigrants’ impact on the economic order. But that isn’t a values question. That’s a fear that so-called illegal immigration, which has occasionally spiked over the course of the last 50, 60, 70 years, will negatively impact our society’s economy. But the United States has now had a full employment economy for a decade. Indeed, it’s had labor shortages for meaningful parts of that time and it’s had a full employment economy even with all of the levels of migration that the United States has been successfully managing and incorporating over that time. So, I don’t think that the “Mass Deportation, Now!” signs are a response to an economic shock that the migrants have caused, just like I don’t think that the signs are a response to anything distinctive to Latin American ways of life or values. So, what are the signs all about, then?
I think the signs stem from a nationalistic urge that might not be presented in overtly racialist terms—like, as you rightly noted, Stephen Miller would present it—but that aren’t far from a phrase that I’ve heard over and over again since 2015 and that completely caught me off guard when I first started hearing it: “If we don’t have borders, we don’t have a country anymore.” What on earth does that mean? I really struggled with it at first. I think what people meant was that we wouldn’t have a nation. In this context, “having a nation” was really meant in an ethnonational, ethnoracial, and ethnolinguistic sense. The idea was that it just doesn’t count as an American nation anymore if the population is too brown or too Spanish speaking.
Now, that idea has a whole legacy behind it in the United States having to do with racial diversity, with white-black politics—a legacy that is much older than the age of mass migration. It calls on sources of American nationalism that have always been hostile to full equal membership for African Americans. But in this context, the claim that you don’t have a country if you don’t have borders is a claim that national identity isn’t stable anymore because of the sheer volume of migration from Latin America changing the character, the ethnonational character, of the so-called American nation.
“There are things that we can do, and practices we can pursue, to cultivate pluralism-friendly institutions. We can establish, and continually shore up, relatively robust freedom of religion and freedom of association. We can continue to allow the presence of private school systems that can have intellectual and moral content that is not the same as the content of the state school system. The U.S. has done this more than other countries. We can have a variety of exemptions for faith and religious communities from laws that would mandate the application of pure anti-discrimination rules to the internal life of religious associations. Those are tools for making sure diverse pluralistic communities can retain enough of their differentiation from the wider society and retain enough of their coherence to be able to survive over time and maybe to diminish the sense of threat. But you’re not going to be able to do that for each and every community within a pluralistic order. And the dynamism of diversity happens faster than your legal institutions and legal practices are going to be able carve out special supports for.” — Jacob T. Levy
So, “Mass Deportation, Now!” is ultimately a straightforward urge for ethnic cleansing from the nation. It’s not an urge to restore anything meaningful in a value system that is shared by people who were American citizens prior to 10 or 20 years ago that are somehow not shared by the people who have been coming in across the southern border.
Powell: It’s interesting how much this relies on a very narrow conceptualization of the nation. In essence, they use “the nation” and “the country” as proxies for their own worldview.
If you pressed those people by asking them, “What is it about Latin American migrants that you think is a problem?” They’re not going to specifically say “the color of their skin.” Some might bring up that they don’t speak English, but that won’t be their primary issue. Instead, they’ll put it in terms of values or differences in cultural standards or something to that effect. And the concepts nation and country, to them, just encapsulate the set of values they personally subscribe to. The idea behind their anti-immigration stance is that these different values and standards undermine our nation and are in an important sense incompatible with it.
So, “They’re going to take away our nation” is a roundabout way of condemning the set of values or cultural standards that immigrants are bringing in—or, in the European, and specifically Dutch, version that you cited: “They’re going to take away our nation” is sometimes used to really say, “They’re going to oppose rights for gay people based on their religious commitments.”
What’s interesting is that this overlooks the great diversity that exists not just across different kinds of people but even among the same type of people. There are lots of Muslims who oppose gay rights, but there are lots of Muslims who don’t. There are certainly Latin American immigrants who are not going to integrate into America the way some people want, but there are lots of them who will. At the same time, you will also find diversity within the categories of people who imagine themselves to be the Herrenvolk, the nation.
Levy: That last point you made has actually proven to be really important in the politics of migration in the U.S. over the last decade. Elements on the right have been obsessively pushing this nonsense claim that Democrats are “opening the borders” in order to get new voters, which includes the idea that the very people who are busy hiding from the immigration police, the very people who constantly fear deportation, are going to risk all of that to cast an illegal vote. The right see these people as being outside the boundaries of the nation. Democrats are trying to win elections, so goes the claim, by getting un-American voters.
Now, this is a standard move in populist politics. Take a fraction of the whole body politic, a fraction of the whole citizenry, and redefine it as being the real underlying whole. Those who aren’t part of this fraction don’t really count as part of the larger set. So, if you’re not a conservative Republican, you don’t really count as an American in the first place; Democrats and liberals and urban elites and so on and not really Americans to begin with. The only way they win elections, the thinking continues, is by bringing in more people who aren’t really Americans. So there’s an acknowledgement of the diversity of the existing American populace at the same time as an attempt to anathematize it. “The people we disagree with, we recognize they exist. But they don’t really count as Americans. So, we will assimilate them to the category of these fictional illegal voters who are being imported across the southern border.”
Powell: This reminds me of something a friend of mine once noted about pluralism that I’ve thought about ever since. One of the benefits of pluralism is it enables self-authorship in a deep way. We should want people to be able to craft their lives, within reason, in the ways that best fit their needs and desires. Everyone’s different—everyone’s ideal life will look a little different. That means the ability to author your life becomes paramount.
There’s a negative liberty sense to that—“if you really want to be into Marvel Comics, I’m not going to stop you from being into Marvel Comics.” But we’re social animals. Our lives are lived in a social context. And that means there are a lot of ways of living that require a critical mass of other people wanting to live that same way in order to achieve them. If you want to be Catholic and you want to live in a deeply Catholic way, that is challenging if there are no Catholics within a hundred miles of you and you don’t have access to a Catholic church and so on. Or if you want to live a traditional, conservative life, if you want to Wendell Berry it up, and there’s no one else who wants to live that way, it’s going to be hard and you’re not going to feel like you have the kind of self-authorship that someone who sees their cultural preferences more widely reflected does.
For a lot of people, if they see their particular way of life being de-centered in the culture, that feels like their way of life is being taken away from them. It leads to this anti-pluralistic strain of thinking which holds, “You pretend that I can live the way I want to, but you really have taken it away from me because you’ve taken away access to a sufficient, critical mass of fellow people.” That doesn’t seem crazy to feel that way, but it’s also clearly in tension with both pluralism as diversity, because if there’s sufficient diversity then the number of people living any one way is going to be smaller, and diversity over time, because if this is the way you want to live and you want these people and then things change, some of those people will change as well.
That also seems to play into immigration concerns. There’s this sense of: “Our way of living was x, y, and z. And now, if enough people who are different come in, there won’t be as many people committed to that particular way of living.”
Levy: So, I’m ambivalent about the idea of self-authorship. I’m not harshly critical of or dismissive toward it—ambivalence means ambivalence—but I do think you and I disagree on this.
The authorship element in this concept means creating or constructing your life—not in a biological but in a cultural or social or vocational sense. Here’s the thing, though: A lot of times, when it comes to the things that people want to do with their lives, they don’t necessarily want to be the creators of those things. They want life templates to be pre-available. When it comes to most of the things they want to do with their lives, they want to be able to, as it were, speak a moral and normative language that has already come into existence independent of them.
“‘If we don’t have borders, we don’t have a country anymore.’ What on earth does that mean? I really struggled with it at first. I think what people meant was that we wouldn’t have a nation. In this context, ‘having a nation’ was really meant in an ethnonational, ethnoracial, and ethnolinguistic sense. The idea was that it just doesn’t count as an American nation anymore if the population is too brown or too Spanish speaking. … So, “Mass Deportation, Now!” is ultimately a straightforward urge for ethnic cleansing from the nation.” — Jacob T. Levy
That’s not to say they’ll never want to break the mold, or that when they have such feelings they want to be restrained from doing so. But the idea of constant self-creation about everything would be a frightening one for people. And to aggressively, affirmatively value self-authorship … that’s one of the ways liberal society can come across as legitimately frightening to people inclined to traditional ways of life. The underlying self-authorship notion sometimes manifests as, “We don’t believe you’re really free if you happen to be living out the religion that you were raised in.”
Powell: I’m not sure that’s actually the right way to frame the self-authorship idea. I don’t think we need to cast it as a radical and constantly ongoing process of self-creation and recreation but rather as a capacity to choose from an existing menu of life-options, and to revise as needed or desired. When we talk about literal authorship, there are lots of authors who get started writing fan fiction and then pivot into writing incredibly formulaic genre fiction. “I’m going to write teen paranormal romances” or “I’m going to write hardboiled detective stories.” These are already extremely well-defined. If I told you, “Hey, I just wrote a hardboiled detective novel,” you could immediately start telling me all sorts of things about my book that would probably be true without ever having looked at it.
So, in thinking about self-authorship—to keep the metaphor going—there are lots of pre-existing genres, and many authors are quite happy to spend their entire careers just reading and writing within the parameters of their preferred formula. Some, of course, will do interesting new things within that formula: push it in new directions or do something experimental on the margins. Some will even head off in radically new directions. But all of that seems like self-authorship in the sense that that’s what they’ve chosen. Sure, it was a socially embedded choice and not a decision conjured from a blank slate, but it’s still authorship because the choice was still theirs.
Levy: Right, now we’re closing the gap a little here. I’d still want to emphasize how much good storytelling is done amidst and because of an existing repertoire of familiar stories, and how rare it is for experimentalism to be a sign of good authorship. Most people’s lives, to the degree that we want to characterize what they’re doing with their lives as creating the story of their lives, are not radically experimentalist. Their lives are not necessarily better when they go radically experimentalist and they’re not necessarily worse when they’re operating within the repertoire of existing stories. It's good for there to be a repertoire, a range of things a person can integrate into their lives and integrate into their revisions of their lives as they go.
To that extent, yes, diversity and pluralism are assets toward a person’s ability to lead his or her life, but that diversity and pluralism has to not end up as a homogenized mixture. There have to still be meaningfully different life choices that are available. And, as you said, it becomes an issue if you lose access to existing traditional or religious communities—though not just those communities.
The question of whether I, as a gay man, can lead a life capable of activating the full range of things one does with one’s life—to be able to marry, raise children, to live in a community, to be able to be out in the world, not just be out with a capital O, but to be part of a community in which I can introduce people to my husband—all depends on a critical mass of other factors being in place. That’s not something I can construct on my own, or even that two people can construct on their own. Even the possibility of finding a suitable life partner or romantic partner from among a range of options, rather than there being only two of us in the same space, that requires a critical mass. When homosexuality was criminalized across most of the United States, it was also deeply socially stigmatized. Because of that, you saw tremendous sorting migration into a handful of cities where, because of the presence of a critical mass of people, it became possible to lead those lives.
All of us need other people to be telling stories that are compatible with our stories. We need enough of them around that we can opt into what it is that they’re doing. I’ve talked a lot about the importance of sustaining communities in which we can freely live out our lives in my books The Multiculturalism of Fear and Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. To get back to where you were trying to go with all of this: communities can erode due to an influx of other new people. And to the degree that my ability to live my free life depends on our ability to lead a life that makes sense to us together, yes, it is absolutely the case that the dynamism of a diverse, free society where people can move around and move in can be a source of threat. It can be a threat even before it descends into anti-pluralistic or populistic or nationalistic politics. But it’s one of the resources that that kind of politics can always draw.
Powell: So, what do we about it?
Because the solution definitely isn’t saying something along the lines of, “Since you want your trad Catholic lifestyle, what we’re going to do is forcibly prevent anyone who is not Catholic from moving in, and forcibly prevent anyone who’s already in from expressing opposition to Catholicism.” We’re not going to say that because that’s incompatible with liberalism. And this isn’t a partisan point. So, gay people sorted geographically into San Francisco. Let’s say the city passes a law saying you can only move in if you are either gay or an ally. That’s anti-liberal.
So, then, what’s the solution?
Levy: I’m not much of a solutions person. By that I don’t mean that I don’t try to look for ways to make progress or make things better, but that I don’t much believe in formulae to solve problems. This is actually what makes politics in liberal societies so difficult: this interplay between the diversity that we need to draw on and the difficulty of sustaining that diversity in the face of constant erosion and mixing at the margins.
There are things that we can do, and practices we can pursue, to cultivate pluralism-friendly institutions. We can establish, and continually shore up, relatively robust freedom of religion and freedom of association. We can continue to allow the presence of private school systems that can have intellectual and moral content that is not the same as the content of the state school system. The U.S. has done this more than other countries. We can have a variety of exemptions for faith and religious communities from laws that would mandate the application of pure anti-discrimination rules to the internal life of religious associations. Those are tools for making sure diverse pluralistic communities can retain enough of their differentiation from the wider society and retain enough of their coherence to be able to survive over time and maybe to diminish the sense of threat. But you’re not going to be able to do that for each and every community within a pluralistic order. And the dynamism of diversity happens faster than your legal institutions and legal practices are going to be able carve out special supports for.
“Pluralism is an irreducibly social description. Individuals and societies can be tolerant or intolerant, but only societies can be pluralistic. Tolerance is actually part of the social disposition that makes pluralism possible. It’s not the case that in order to have a pluralistic society, its members have to adopt a posture of constant celebration of everything they are not. What is a necessary condition, though, is tolerance. In order to have a pluralistic society, we have to exhibit consistent mutual tolerance.” — Jacob T. Levy
To some extent, geographic decentralization is a standard tool. I’m not someone who thinks that federalism is a particularly important part of that story because American states are much too big to serve as that kind of cultural or associational community without tremendous internal injustice toward all of the people within an American state who don’t subscribe to the same doctrine. But a degree of town or local or city self-government can do something. So, too, can the ability to geographically sort into groups like homeowners associations or neighborhoods that have defined characters as neighborhoods. But then that raises particular risks—consider San Francisco, where the cultural conservatism interacts with the kind of economic pulling up of the drawbridge that characterizes NIMBYism. Those are both genuine dynamics of NIMBYism: that we don’t want outside people and that we don’t want the loss of our property values. And you get a toxic kind of politics that emerges there.
So, in some sense, there’s nothing discoverable as a magic solution but to just keep trying to live with the tension. That is, there’s not a formula of liberal politics that once and for all is going to allow us to associationally or geographically sort, because in every moment and in every year and in every generation, some people are moving out and some people are moving in. And some people within our community are experiencing a desire to reshape it, and some people are seeking to join part of our community, but not the whole thing.
Given that those margins are never stable, given the boundaries are constantly eroding, if people have any freedom to choose and freedom to move at all, you don’t get to say with safety, “Right, we’ve got our community thoroughly encased in amber and it will never transform anymore.” There has to be a political and moral willingness to face change and a recognition that at the level of the nation-state at least, there’s no hope—at least not with any kind of stability or political and moral decency—of imposing the homogenous vision that you think that you have. You can’t solve your local problem. “We here in our congregation find that our believers are slipping away by going to [not sure], so in order to solve that problem, we will embrace Christian nationalism and try to force our congregation’s views onto 300 million people.” You just need to teach people political values to able to draw a distinction there and say, “Of all of the ways that you think that you’re called on to preserve your congregation from the loss of believers, among them can’t be forcing your doctrine on 300 million people and redefining the American nation as if it is the same as your congregation.”
This post has been adapted from a prior conversation on Aaron Ross Powell's ReImagining Liberty podcast. Please consider subscribing to Aaron’s newsletter.
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
The thing I don't get about the "We won't have a nation without borders" argument is that no one argues that the USA is not divided into states. The Federal government requires state governments to have open borders with each other, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. The fact that people can move from Ohio to Michigan without needing to get a green card does not mean that Ohio and Michigan do not exist.
Open borders hasn't even erased regional differences between US states. California, Michigan, West Virginia, and New York are all different places.
A bit of a slog, but worth it.