Pluralism Is Infrastructure

A democracy that can hold its disagreements has to be built. We haven't been building it.

Everyone says they want pluralism. Almost nobody in American political life is organized to produce it.

This is a strange situation, and I think it deserves more attention than it gets. The word pluralism appears in democracy discourse roughly the way the word “sustainability” appears in corporate marketing - ubiquitously, approvingly, and without reference to any specific practice that would make the thing it names real. We invoke pluralism the way a person in a long illness invokes health: as a word for the condition we would like to be in, decoupled from any plan for actually getting there.

I want to argue that this is not a vocabulary problem. It’s a design problem. A pluralistic democracy is not a state of mind or a cultural attitude. It is a specific kind of political infrastructure, and we’ve been failing to build it for so long that most Americans no longer know what it is supposed to look like.

Here’s what I mean. Oregon, where I live, is a useful illustration. More than half the state’s voters live in and around Portland, which is racially diverse and politically liberal; the rest of the state is largely rural, overwhelmingly white, and politically conservative. Portland’s electorate shapes statewide outcomes by sheer math, and its elected officials - mayor, council, legislators, much of the congressional delegation - are almost without exception liberal Democrats or social democrats. That majority is real, and it’s entitled to govern. But consider what the majority produces when filtered through a two-party, single-member-district system.

If you live in almost any rural Oregon county, you’re represented by Republican conservatives at the county level and effectively unrepresented at the state level, because the statewide coalition is assembled without you. The only meaningful political voice you have stops at the county line. That’s alienating on its own terms, and it’s also the ground in which something more dangerous grows. When the only representation you can access tracks hard to the right - toward the Posse Comitatus (power of the county separatism) ideology and anti-federal county-supremacy politics the Bundy family trades in - the system has effectively sorted reasonable rural conservatives into the same political home as its most reactionary elements. Alienation plus no exit produces radicalization. And if you’re a conservative Republican in Portland, the mirror image applies: no local representation, often no candidate who represents your actual views, and no path to being heard inside city limits.

Both experiences are failures of pluralism, and neither is solved by either side winning harder. The system itself can’t hold these perspectives in productive relationship, which means the disagreement metastasizes into resentment, alienation, and the radical-flank politics that feeds authoritarianism on both ends. A pluralistic system would give each constituency a real political home from which to act, and coalitions would form issue by issue across those homes. Ours does not.

The authoritarian project on offer in this country is one answer to the question of how a society organizes disagreement. Its answer is that disagreement should be eliminated - that there should be one nation, one people, one party, one truth, one leader, and that pluralism itself is a weakness to be overcome. That answer is coherent, attractive to a frightened population, and currently on track to win unless something different is built.

The something different is pluralism, actually built. Not as a slogan. As an infrastructure.

The category error

Most American political conversation takes place inside a frame where politics is fundamentally one-dimensional. There is a left and a right. Every issue is located somewhere on that spectrum. Every person is a point on the line. The question is always where on the line you stand, and the options are always some version of closer to left, closer to right, or somewhere in the middle.

This frame is so pervasive that most of us treat it as natural. But it’s not natural. It’s, in fact, the product of specific institutional arrangements, principally first-past-the-post elections in single-member districts, which, as a French sociologist named Maurice Duverger noticed in the 1950s, reliably produce two-party systems over time. Two-party systems, in turn, reliably produce one-dimensional politics, because two coalitions competing for fifty-percent-plus-one have to bundle positions into coherent packages and sell those packages as take-it-or-leave-it deals.

The result is a politics in which every disagreement is forced into the same binary. You cannot be, in American electoral politics, economically egalitarian and culturally traditional. You also can’t be environmentally protective and skeptical of regulation, and you can’t be pro-family and pro-immigrant without specifying which party’s version of pro-family and pro-immigrant you mean. The bundles are the options. You take a bundle or you don’t participate.

This isn’t pluralism. This is its opposite. A pluralistic society is one whose political system is capable of running on multiple axes at once, so that different issues mobilize different coalitions, no single cleavage dominates indefinitely, and the ruling coalition on any given question can vary depending on the question.

Most of the democracies we admire run this way. A functioning parliamentary democracy will have a cluster of parties that align differently on economics than they do on immigration, and than they do on climate, and than they do on cultural questions. Coalitions form issue by issue. The government is a coalition, and the coalition shifts as issues shift. Disagreement doesn’t accumulate into a single overheated binary, because there are multiple axes for it to distribute across.

This is what we don’t have. And it’s not an accident. We’ve been institutionally prevented from having it.

What pluralism actually is

Let me offer a definition, because the word is used so loosely that it has nearly lost its meaning.

Pluralism is a political condition in which multiple, distinct, organized, and irreducible perspectives coexist in the same society with enough institutional scaffolding that their disagreements are productive rather than destructive. Four things are load-bearing in that definition. Let me take them one at a time.

Multiple. Not two. Two is a duopoly, not pluralism. A pluralistic society has more than two significant organized political formations, because the alternative is binary competition, and binary competition collapses all disagreements into the same axis.

Distinct. Not variations on a single theme. The formations have to have actually different analyses of what’s wrong and what should be done. A pluralism of brands is not pluralism.

Organized. Not just present as individual sentiments. The perspectives have to have institutional form - parties, unions, congregations, civic associations, movements - through which they can act in public life. An unorganized opinion is not a political actor.

Irreducible. Not reducible to some deeper single thing. A pluralism in which every disagreement turns out, on closer inspection, to be a proxy for the master disagreement, is a one-axis politics in disguise. Genuine pluralism means that some of what people disagree about is not further decomposable.

All four of these are conditions that have to be produced. None of them is automatic. None of them is stable. Each of them requires infrastructure.

The infrastructure, named

Three kinds of infrastructure produce and sustain pluralism. I want to name each, because the naming helps make clear why we are currently failing to build any of them at the scale required.

Rules infrastructure. This is the electoral and institutional rules that determine what political formations can exist at all. Proportional representation, multi-member districts, ranked-choice voting, fusion voting, public financing, lowered ballot access thresholds, and, in the American case, the gradual dismantling of counter-majoritarian veto points that currently allow a minority faction to govern against the preferences of the majority. These rules determine whether a new political formation can enter public life or is structurally prevented from doing so. Under current American rules, the answer is overwhelmingly prevented. The rules don’t permit what they do not permit.

Coalition infrastructure. This is the organized civic institutions through which distinct perspectives maintain themselves as ongoing political actors. Parties, of course, but also unions, faith networks, small business associations, farmer cooperatives, tenant unions, professional associations, immigrant mutual aid networks, neighborhood institutions, and the dense fabric of civic life that Alexis de Tocqueville once described as the defining American feature. This fabric has been thinning for half a century, under pressure from economic concentration, cultural individualism, geographic sorting, and active political suppression, often justified on racist premises. Without it, people can’t participate in public life except as individuals, and individuals cannot sustain pluralism. Only organized collectives can.

Relational infrastructure. This is the habits, dispositions, and trained capacities that allow people who disagree to remain in working relationship across their disagreements. This is the least tangible of the three and the most critical. It’s not cultivated by reading essays. It’s cultivated by doing politics, together, over time, with people whose views differ from yours, in institutions that make the working-through of disagreement part of the work itself. Labor organizers know this. Good faith community leaders know this. Movement trainers know this. Political scientists generally do not know this, because it’s craft rather than literature. It’s also the piece that no rules change can produce by itself. A proportional electoral system in a country of atomized individuals who don’t know how to disagree productively is still going to fail. The relational infrastructure has to exist alongside the rules.

All three are necessary. None alone is sufficient.

Why the authoritarian project is winning against this

The authoritarian project has an advantage, both rhetorical and organizational, that pluralism doesn’t have. It offers coherence. It says: one people, one truth, one leader. It doesn’t have to hold together multiple axes. It collapses them, deliberately, into a single axis of belonging versus not belonging. That collapse is its entire political technology. Everything the project does - its demonization of immigrants, its attacks on universities and science, its targeting of LGBTQ people, its capture of the courts, and its theatrics of strength - is in service of producing a single-axis politics in which the only question is whose side you are on.

Pluralism can’t answer this with its own slogan, because pluralism is by definition not a slogan. It’s the messy practice of holding together things that don’t naturally cohere. Its coherence comes from work, not from branding.

This is why the American response to authoritarianism has struggled to articulate itself. The movement against the current regime has a lot of the components of a pluralistic response, but it has not assembled them into an infrastructure that can hold. It has the civic energy of Indivisible chapters and faith coalitions and union halls and neighborhood block captains. It has organized labor, organized faith communities, organized immigrant networks, organized civil rights organizations. It has, in certain places, genuine cross-partisan organizing on specific issues. What it does not have, yet, is the sense of itself as a deliberate project of building pluralistic political infrastructure - the rules, the coalitions, the relationships - that will outlast the current crisis and govern what comes after.

That absence is the strategic gap. Authoritarianism has a project. Anti-authoritarianism has a reaction. Pluralism is what a project for anti-authoritarianism would look like. We have not yet assembled it.

The bottom-up qualifier

One more thing, because it matters.

The infrastructure I am describing can very much not be built top-down. It can’t be built by a coordinating center, a lead organization, a single funder strategy, or a party committee. Pluralism built from a center stops being pluralism, by definition, because a center would have to decide which perspectives count. A pluralistic politics has to emerge from the organized activity of multiple distinct actors who are not coordinated and who do not want to be coordinated.

This is what bottom-up means, structurally. Not the absence of leadership, but the presence of many leaderships. Not the rejection of strategy, but the coexistence of different strategies that share a commitment to the rules of the game and the relationships that make it workable.

The infrastructure, in practice, looks like a thousand small organizations getting better at working with each other without needing to agree on everything. It looks like unions and small business associations finding a common cause on anti-monopoly without requiring either to adopt the other’s politics on immigration. It looks like urban progressives and rural conservatives building cross-partisan electoral reform campaigns without pretending their cultural differences will disappear. It looks like faith communities hosting the conversations that secular organizers can’t host, and secular organizers running the campaigns that faith communities can’t run, and each understanding that they need each other without becoming each other.

This is slow work. It is relational work. It doesn’t produce the rapid coherence of authoritarian politics. Its strength is different, and longer-lasting. Authoritarianism, once it cracks, collapses quickly, because its coherence is imposed and has no organic support. Pluralism, once it is built, is nearly impossible to dismantle, because its coherence is woven into thousands of horizontal relationships that no central actor can reach.

The long history of democracy is, in this sense, the history of that weaving. The periods when it was undone were periods when the weaving stopped. The work we’re being asked to do now is the work of resuming the weaving, on purpose, at scale, as a deliberate infrastructure project.

The call

If you are organizing right now, I want to suggest that the question to carry into your next meeting is not only what are we building that will hold eighteen months after breakthrough, though that question still matters. It is also this: are we building toward pluralism or away from it?

A movement that builds toward pluralism is a movement that deepens its relationships with formations unlike itself, that works across cleavages rather than within a single one, that contributes to rules changes that create room for more political life rather than less, and that treats the cultivation of cross-axis relational capacity as part of the work rather than a distraction from it.

A movement that builds away from pluralism is a movement that sharpens its own internal coherence at the expense of its reach, treats other formations as competitors rather than potential coalition partners, defers rules change as a technical matter, and collapses its politics into whichever single axis feels most urgent in the moment.

Both kinds of movement exist in the current American landscape. The difference between them will decide whether the post-authoritarian period produces a consolidated pluralistic democracy or a restoration that sets up the next authoritarian cycle.

Pluralism is not a feeling. Pluralism is an infrastructure. It has rules, it has coalitions, and it has relationships, and each of these has to be deliberately built, by specific people, in specific places, at a specific scale, over a specific period of time.

The people are available. The places are everywhere. The scale is national. The period is now.

Let’s begin.