A Pluralist Manifesto
This 4th of July, here’s how to teach America’s diverse origins.
Will you be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday July 15? I will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about how liberalism should respond to the postliberal threat. Find out more and get your free ticket here! —Yascha
The rise of Civic Thought programs and the demise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs are two of the main hallmarks of this moment in higher education, and they are viewed as closely related.
The conventional wisdom will tell you that this is mostly about ideological rebalancing: DEI is the den of progressives who are obsessed with identity; Civic Thought is the lair of conservatives who want to return America to a more homogenous heritage.
But I think there is a different way of looking at things. The distinguishing feature of schools of Civic Thought is a focus on American foundations, and when you focus on American foundations, you find that America is, inescapably, a diversity project—an experiment in diverse identities coming together to build a greater whole.
Consider Roger Williams, who, in 1635, was banished from John Winthrop’s Puritan theocracy for his diverse opinions and built the state of Rhode Island on the foundation that people of “other worships” could be “peacable and quiet Subjects, loving and helpful neighbours, faire and just dealers, true and loyall to the civill government.”
Or the group of mostly Calvinist men in the hamlet of Flushing who in 1657 felt a duty to oppose Director General Peter Stuyvesant’s order forbidding Quaker practice. In a document that came to be called the “Flushing Remonstrance,” they wrote:
The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extends to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam … our desire is not to offend one of his little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title hee appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desiring to doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us.
Or the time in August 1790 when President George Washington was received in Newport, Rhode Island by the Warden of the Touro Synagogue, Moses Seixas. Seixas had high hopes for the new nation, but sought assurances that Jews and other religious minorities would be protected. Washington responded in a document that became known as the “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island”:
The government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction and persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves good citizens … May the children of the stock of Abraham sit in safety under their own vine and fig and let there be none to make them afraid.
Or July 1858 when Abraham Lincoln came to Chicago to celebrate Independence Day. From the balcony of the Tremont House Hotel, in a time of national turmoil over slavery and immigration, Abraham Lincoln told the gathered crowd that they should be proud to be direct descendants of the Founding Fathers. “They were iron men,” Lincoln said. “They fought for the principles that they were contending for.”
And then Lincoln pointed out that there were many present who could not trace their ancestry back to the Founders by blood. How should the nation view these immigrants? He continued:
When they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.
These examples should be standard teaching in a Civic Thought program. And you could add hundreds more—Thomas Jefferson reverently owning a Qur’an, Benjamin Franklin making donations to multiple religious communities in Philadelphia, James Madison defending Baptists in Virginia, our 1782 national motto being E Pluribus Unum.
America is inescapably a diversity project.
Because the United States of America is the world’s first attempt at diverse democracy, many of our greatest minds and most renowned leaders have devoted themselves to these principles. That tradition of thought and practice has a name: pluralism. There are three pillars of pluralism.
Welcoming diversity in a three-dimensional manner, by which I mean the recognition that not only do people have a right to their identities, but that identities give meaning to people’s lives and vitality to our democracy, and therefore we have a stake in protecting people’s ability to practice their identity.
Recognizing that, in a diverse democracy, deep disagreement is inevitable, and the goal should be to build both a political architecture and a civil society strong enough to hold together people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies. As John Rawls said, “How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?”
Cultivating an ethos whereby people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies can disagree on some fundamental things and work together on other fundamental things—in Yuval Levin’s phrase, an ethos where people who do not think alike can still act together.
These three pillars of pluralism can be found in the writings of some of America’s greatest leaders and most renowned philosophers. James Madison ensured that it was integrated into the political architecture of the nation, most importantly through the Constitution. In the early 20th century, the philosophers Horace Kallen and Alain Locke developed the intellectual tradition of cultural pluralism, which described the nation as a harmonious gathering of different cultures, in the same way that an orchestra is a harmonious gathering of different instruments. Alexis de Tocqueville and Jane Addams emphasized how American civic institutions gathered people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies to solve problems and achieve shared goals that require cooperation across difference.
In the tradition of pluralism, distinct identities (black, gay, Catholic, female, southerner, etc.)—and the communities that emerge to celebrate and sustain those identities—are viewed as valuable pieces of the broader whole, rather than as elements tearing the fabric apart. These identity groups are what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” of society, where people find an intimate community that connects them to the larger society. The political scientist Robert Putnam highlighted that it is in these groups that people learn the building blocks of democracy—how to inspire volunteers, run meetings, and organize activities.
If the American foundations are taught rigorously, pluralism will be at the heart of any Civic Thought program. In that sense, schools of Civic Thought would be engaged in a form of diversity work. I think they should embrace that. In fact, I think schools of Civic Thought should be viewed as champions of diversity efforts on campus.
I recognize that this might seem, at first glance, like a counter-intuitive idea. Diversity work has in recent years been viewed as the province of DEI programs, and as DEI programs were discredited, diversity work has been thrown out like the proverbial baby with the bathwater.
But, as you can see from the American foundations I sketched above, diversity work is not just embedded in the American project as a matter of historical fact; it is one of the nation’s defining strengths and something we ought to take pride in. Because universities bring together young people from a diversity of identities, traditions, and beliefs, campuses need intentional ways to navigate difference and cultivate a healthy common life. The problem with DEI programs is not that they champion diversity efforts; it’s that they run entire campus regimes in a diversity framework that demonizes so-called majority groups, asks minorities to constantly demean themselves through victim narratives, and divides everybody into the camps of oppressor and oppressed.
Civic Thought programs should champion diversity efforts in the framework of pluralism, where people are taught the importance of respect for diverse identities and for cooperation for the common good based on the key documents and events of America’s founding.
An ambitious Civic Thought program might even consider doing this not just in the classroom, but also through the kinds of co-curricular activities that make residential colleges so special. Such a program would not only teach how the Founders proactively welcomed Jews and Muslims into the new nation—it would also have spaces where Jews and Muslims on campus can express their identities. Jews might celebrate shabbat, Muslims might break their fast during the month of Ramadan.
A Civic Thought program that championed pluralism would also seek to foster cooperative activities between these distinct groups. Perhaps this would take the form of an interfaith tutoring program that drew on the fact that knowledge and service are sacred in both Judaism and Islam. Pluralism is not afraid of the deep differences between identity communities, and so there would be programs where Jews and Muslims could have civil discourse on topics where they likely disagree, such as the war in the Middle East.
Moreover, an ambitious Civic Thought program would make room for perspectives long associated with DEI efforts on campus, including sharp critiques of America’s failures to live up to its ideals and theories like antiracism and intersectionality. These too have a connection to America’s founding, in the form of speeches like Frederick Douglass’s “What To The Slave Is The Fourth of July” and Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman. The problem with the DEI era was not that these perspectives were present; it’s that they were largely viewed as the only acceptable perspectives to hold, and that they effectively became policy through things like required DEI statements and bias response training. It is no wonder the public trust in the university declined significantly.
The great Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the university exists not simply to transfer knowledge, but to initiate students into the conflicts inherent in a diverse democracy and prepare them to articulate and navigate those disagreements in a reasonable way. This means that alongside academic excellence, higher education has the responsibility to form active citizens capable of cooperating across deep difference—the key challenge of our day.
If schools of Civic Thought on college campuses are to help universities reclaim this vital civic role, they cannot treat diversity work as a failed project to abandon simply because previous DEI programs were ineffective and lost the trust of the public. Instead, they must recover its deeper purpose and do it better by embracing America as a pluralism project.
Eboo Patel, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. He served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama.
This article is adapted from a keynote speech delivered at the Civics in Higher Education National Summit at Tufts University on April 10, 2026.
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