Defending and Rejecting Democratic Pluralism – The New American Conflict

American Democrats and Republicans are growing increasingly divided on questions of social equality. In the last 40 years, Democrats (and the country as a whole) have become significantly more progressive in their views of women’s rights, civil rights for Black Americans, and LGBTQ rights. On the contrary, the average Republican has maintained the same attitudes that they held in the 1980s. But looking only at average Republicans obscures an important process occurring within the Republican Party. Republicans are becoming internally divided on these questions of social equality.

Set against the backdrop of the recent U.S. elections, Lilliana Mason will delve into the growing American political rift, focusing on how debates over social pluralism and political equality are at its core. She will examine the insurgent movement within the Republican Party that increasingly rejects the principles of a pluralistic society, and discuss the profound consequences this shift holds for the future of democratic governance in the U.S.   

About the speakers 

Lilliana Mason is an SNF Agora Institute Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She is co-author, with Nathan P. Kalmoe, of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Her research on partisan identity, social sorting, and American attitudes about political violence has been published in top political science journals and featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and BBC. She is a member of the 2024 class of Carnegie fellows. 

Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562), oil on panel. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.