Pluralism in the United States

Pluralism in the International Business Landscape

Definition of Pluralism in the context of U.S. international business and public trade policy: A type of political representation where power is distributed through many private organizations that can limit one another’s action.

Concept of Pluralism

In the U.S., in the context of Democracy and Citizenship, Pluralism has the following meaning: Pluralism describes an ideal-theoretical arrangement of society and representative government according to which many different groups with competing interests use their varying but not grossly unequal resources to shape election outcomes and public policy. (Source of this definition of Pluralism : University of Texas)

In the U.S., in the context of Political Participation, Interest Groups and Lobbying, Pluralism has the following meaning: Pluralist theory describes an ideal-theoretical arrangement of society and representative government according to which many different groups with competing interests use their varying but not grossly unequal resources to shape election outcomes and public policy. (Source of this definition of Pluralism : University of Texas)

Pluralism

Definition of Pluralism

In the U.S., in the context of Political Economy and Public Policy, Pluralism has the following meaning: A theory that American politics is best understood through the generalization that power is broadly (though unequally) distributed among many more or less organized interest groups in society that compete with one another to control public policy. Some groups dominate in one or two issue areas while others dominate in other issue areas. Pluralism describes an ideal-theoretical arrangement of society and representative government according to which many different groups with competing interests use their varying but not grossly unequal resources to shape election outcomes and public policy. (Source of this definition of Pluralism : University of Texas)

Concept of Pluralism

In the U.S., in the context of Political Economy and Public Policy, Pluralism has the following meaning: A theory that American politics is best understood through the generalization that power is broadly (though unequally) distributed among many more or less organized interest groups in society that compete with one another to control public policy. Some groups dominate in one or two issue areas while others dominate in other issue areas. Pluralism describes an ideal-theoretical arrangement of society and representative government according to which many different groups with competing interests use their varying but not grossly unequal resources to shape election outcomes and public policy. (Source of this definition of Pluralism : University of Texas)

Political Perspective

Democy and Nationalism

In the United States “there are conquered and incorporated Peoples-Indian tribes, Mexicans-who stood in the path of American expansion, and there are forcibly transported peoples-the blacks-brought to this country as slaves and subjected to a harsh and continuous repression. But the pluralist system within which these groups have only recently begun to organize and act is not primarily the product of their experience. Today, the United States can only be understood as a multiracial society. But the minority races were politically impotent and socially invisible during much of the time when American pluralism was taking shape-and the shape it took was not determined by their presence or by their repression.

In contrast to the (rest of the) World, where pluralism had its origins in conquest and dynastic alliance, pluralism in the New World originated in individual and familial migration. The largest part of the U.S. popUlation was formed by the addition of individuals, one by one, filtered through the great port cities. Though the boundaries of the new country, like those of every other country, were determiried by war and diplomacy, it was immigration that determined the qharacter of its inhabitants-and falsified John Jay’s account of their unity.

The United States was not an empire; its pluralism was that of an immigrant society, and that means that nationality and ethnicity never acquired a stable territorial base. Different peoples gathered in different parts of the country, but they did so by individual clioice, clustering for company, with no special tie to the land on which they lived. The Old World call for self-determination had no resonance here: the immigrants (except for the black slavesj had come voluntarily and did not have to be forced to stay (indeed, many of them returned home each yearj, nor did groups of immigrants have any basis for or any reason for secession. The only
significant secessionist movement in U.S. history, though it involved a region with a distinctive culture, did not draw upon nationalist passions of the sort that have figured in European wars.

But if the immigrants became Americans one by one as they arrived and settled, they did so only in a political sense: they became U.S. citizens. In other respects, culturally, religiously, even for a time linguistically, they remained Germans and Swedes, Poles, Jews, and Italians. With regard to the first immigrants, the AngloAmericans, politics still followed nationality: because they were one people, they made one state. But with the newer immigrants, the process was reversed. Because they were citizens of one state-so it was commonly thought-they would become one people. Nationality would follow politics, as it presumably had in earlier times, when the peoples of the modem world were first formed. For a while, however, perhaps for a long while, the United States would be a country composed of many peoples, sharing residence and citizenship only, without a common history or culture.

In such circumstances, the only emotion that made for unity was patriotism. flence the efforts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to intensify patriotic feeling, to make a religion out of citizenship. “The voting booth is the temple of American institutions,” Supreme Court Justice David Brewer wrote in 1900. “No single tribe or family is chosen to watch the sacred fires burning on its altars . .. Each of us is a priest.” The rise of ethnic political machines and bloc voting, however, must have made the temple seem disturbingly like a sectarian conventicle.

Few people believed politics to be a sufficient ground for national unity. Patriotism was
essentially a holding action, while the country waited for the stronger solidarity of nationalism.

Whether the process of Americanization was described as a gradual assimilation to Anglo-American culture or as the creation of an essentially new culture in the crucible of citizenship, its outcome was thought to be both necessaryand inevitable: the immigrants would one day constitute a single people. This was the deeper meaning that the slogan “From many one IE pluribus unum’ took on in the context of mass immigration. The only alternatives, as the history of the Old World taught, were divisiveness, turmoil, and repression.

The fear of divisiveness, or simply of difference, periodically generated outbursts of anti-immigrant feeling among the first immigrants and their descendants. Restraint of all further immigration was one goal of these “nativist” campaigns; the second goal was a more rapid Americanization of the “foreigners” already here.

But what did Americanization entail? Many of the foreigners were already naturalized citizens. Now they were to be naturalized again, not politically but culturally. It is worth distinguishing this second naturalization from superficiliy similar campaigns in the old European empires.

Russification, for example, was also a cultural program, but it was aimed at intact at rooted communities, at nations that, with the exception of the Jews, were established on lands they had occupied for many centuries. None of the peoples who were to be Russified could have been trusted with citizenship in a free Russia. Given the chance, they would have opted for secession and independence. That was why Russification was so critical: political means were required to ·overcome national differences. And the use of those means produced the predictable democratic response that politics should follow nationality, not oppose it. In the United States, by contrast, Americanization was aimed at peoples far more susceptible to cultural change, for they were not only uprooted; they had uprooted themselves.

Whatever the pressures that had driven them to the New World, they had chosen to come, while others like themselves, in their own families, had chosen to remain. And as a reward for their choice, the immigrants had been offered citizenship, a gift that many eagerly accepted. Though nativists feared or pretended to fear the politics of the newcomers, the fact is that the men and women who were to be Americanized were already, many of them, patriotic
Americans.

Because of these differences, the response of the immigrants to cultural naturalization was very different from that of their counterparts in the Old World. They were in many cases acquiescent, ready to make themselves over, even as the nativists asked. This was especially true in the area of language: there has been no longterm or successful effort to main tain the original language of the newcomers as anything more than a second language in the United States.

The vitality of Spanish in the Southwest today, though it probably results from the continued large-scale influx of Mexican immigrants, suggests a possible exception to this rule. If these immigrants do not distribute themselves around the country, as other groups have done, a state like New Mexico might provide the first arena for sustained linguistic conflict in the United States. Until now, however, in a country where many languages are spoken, there has been remarkably little conflict. English is and has always been acknowledged as the public language
of the American republic, and no one has tried to make any other language the basis for regional autonomy or secession.

When the immigrants did resist Americanization, struggling to hold on to old identities
and old customs, their resistance took a new form. It was not a demand that politics follow nationality, but rather that politics be separated from nationality-as it was already separated from religion. It was not a demand for national liberation, but for ethnic pluralism.” [1]

Pluralism

Resources

Notes

1. MICHAEL WALZER, Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980)

See Also

• Political Economy
• Public Policy
• Ethnicity
• Minorities
• Political Participation
• Interest Groups
• Democracy
• Citizenship
• Lobbying