Should-Read: Yascha Mounk: Why so many Westerners feel like democracy has failed them

Should-Read: I never understand why people say things like “we’ve never managed to transform countries that thought of themselves as being monoethnic and monocultural into multiethnic ones”. An awful lot of America’s “white” people today look exactly like the people the Know-Nothings were trying to keep out. “White”—i.e., not Black—became the multiethnicity umbrella term (for everybody who wasn’t Black): Yascha Mounk: Why so many Westerners feel like democracy has failed them: “People no longer feel that the political system is actually delivering for them…

…The stagnation of living standards for ordinary people. From 1935 to 1960, the living standard of the average American doubled…. But living standards haven’t gone up in decades, and now they’re just saying, “Let’s throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks.” A lot of this discontent is driven by economic concerns, but the form it takes is cultural or racial. We have to recognize that we’re in the middle of a unique historical experiment: We’ve never managed to transform countries that thought of themselves as being monoethnic and monocultural into multiethnic ones, which is what’s happening in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the United States. Some of these countries were always multiethnic, but they also had a clear racial hierarchy in which some people had advantages over others. Overturning all that is desirable, but it’s also politically difficult. We’re in the middle of a giant fight. A lot of people are rightly saying, “We need to live up our ideals,” but a bunch of people feel they have something lose because of it…