Pluralism

Pluralism makes a country homogeneous. By allowing everything, all shades flow together into a compact uniformity that erases everything else from view. Alternatives are hardly imaginable because they are already included in the mixture where they fade out and disappear. Only the self-satisfied mainstream is left.

For all partisan fighting and loud disagreement consensus prevails. In presidential speeches it is celebrated as a “community of values,” but for most people it is hardly more than an indifferent condition of normality. It is as dominant and monolithic as anything a totalitarian state could invent, but since it seemingly comes from nowhere, it is hard to know where to direct any discontent.

Pluralism is an ingenious solution to the problem of control, which so obsesses totalitarian states. Any government needs to battle anarchism and the pluralist system has managed to subdue it by seemingly including it. A potentially disruptive element is told to compete on the established electoral marketplace where it will soon be drowned in the crowd.

But if any protesters would refuse to participate in that system or if they seem to be seriously contesting the established order, they are accused of threatening the community of values in which they live. The one fundamental value of this community is presumably its pluralism, and therefore, bizarrely, by daring to be different they are a threat to pluralism.