Letter to the Editor: On “Pluralism”

I’ve been a reader of The New Yorker since I was a wee lad. Admittedly I mostly looked at the cartoons, and only infrequently found my attention captured by the three-column format they were enfolded in, but as I grew older I found more and more of the articles of interest. The descriptions of shows I could never see, the restaurants that received that vaunted “Table for Two” treatment, and the profiles of interesting people talking about interesting topics all caught my eye. I’ve only rarely found myself disagreeing fundamentally with the articles I read, and more rarely still felt a need to write a response, but in the face of a piece I considered to be fundamentally intellectually dishonest I had to write a response. When I read “The Pluralism Pivot”¹, after I got done shouting at my empty kitchen, I sat down with pen in hand. My actual letter to the editor is presented at the end of this post, but I felt like there was much more to say than could fit in any column inches I could hope to be given.

When conservative pundits like Charlie Kirk and Chris Rufo started shouting about “indoctrination” happening on college campuses, I dismissed it. In fact, Critical Race Theory―the field they set out to demonize―is a long-established field with a well-reasoned body of work behind it. It provides both a theoretic framework for understanding power imbalances and media portrayal of different communities, and a lens through which legal and political actions can be analyzed―and often, hidden motivations discovered. Reactionaries on the far right hate this because it’s an effective way of dismissing many of their wilder claims, and clearly shows how long-term, systemic racism has shaped our society. CRT informed the development of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion frameworks, so of course that had to be undermined as well. I believe that this new concept of “pluralism” was created, using a name otherwise applied to existing fields of research and conversation, to refer to some invention of the Right that they could hold up as a rival theoretic framework―but it has no substance to it.

As far as I can tell, the root of the framework of “pluralism” is, “I have to be taken seriously and you have to admit that you were excluding me.” In any conversation worth having on difficult topics, every party should be outside their comfort zone in some crucial way. The best such environments are where all parties are experiencing similar, but different, levels of discomfort. We grow through adversity. Let’s consider this passage, then:

Pluralism demands that conservative evangelicals who don’t believe in same-sex marriage be welcomed to campus alongside gay students and that political conservatives who oppose affirmative action have fruitful discussions with people of color.

What are the actual imbalances here? All of these students are told, “you need to be tolerant of these people, and listen to them”, but what’s the actual opposing group in each case? For the conservatives, you have gay students (who they believe should be denied rights) and students of color (who they believe didn’t get to their positions by skill and merit). For the students of color, they are being asked to treat (supposedly white, though it’s actually never said) students who believe that they fundamentally do not belong there with respect, but little is given in return. For the queer students, you’re being told that the position that you do not deserve protections, rights, or privileges under law that are granted to others, is on equal footing to your demand for the simple respect of being left alone, to live as you will. In both of these cases, one side is being told to tolerate that another person exists, and the other is being told to tolerate that a person wants to exclude you―from the academy, or from society. This is not the same.

Throughout the article, there’s a significant emphasis on the importance of the feelings of conservative students and conservatives in broader society. Be they LDS (don’t say Mormon) or from other faiths; or just white, rich, and socially isolated; we’re told of how hard it’s been to feel so attacked in recent years. I can understand, really. It’s hard to see constantly demeaning remarks about your community coming from people in relatively high positions in society, be they politicians, university presidents, the media. I know this personally: in 1993, President Bill Clinton enacted Department of Defense Directive 1304.26, establishing the policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”―you could be gay and in the military, you just could never admit to it, and if they decided you were, you would be dishonorably discharged. Watching any sort of media from the 1990s is a reminder of exactly what society thought of gay people; Friends has several notably bad arcs around homosexuality and gender dysphoria. Churches and other religious institutions reject the queer community―the Salvation Army does not provide support to homeless gay men, for instance. (They now claim that’s changed, as of 2019.²) What I’m saying here is, after a span of maybe a decade of real, actual progress on equality and discussions of historic harms, conservatives are now pitching an absolute fit that they’re not being catered to and have to actually confront the realities of the world their ideology and their predecessors helped shape.

It’s also worth remarking that this new “pluralism” is being pushed at a time when these conservative forces feel that they are most ascendant; not only are they in control of the branches of the federal government, they seem to dominate the media landscape as well. Clearly, the far right felt like they had to have an academic movement to counteract their dreaded Critical Race Theory, something they could use to carve out a rhetorical space for themselves. After all, if you have no argument to stand on, academia will cut you down. It’s just disappointing that they landed on a misunderstanding of viewpoint diversity as their means to their end. In discussions about embracing viewpoint diversity, proponents always include recognizing one’s own potential for fault, that your assumptions can be wrong. To the conservatives, apparently, this means that other people must recognize their potential for fault; somehow this requirement does not also hold true for them as well. At no point is the conservative evangelical to be challenged to ask, “is my opposition to gay rights wrong?” just as the political conservative is not to be challenged about the actual purpose and background of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are merely asked to tolerate the people they disdain.

Now, I keep putting “pluralism” in quotes here. After reading Green’s New Yorker article, I wanted to know more about that “pluralism” and … well, starting with Wikipedia I found a bunch of different schools of thought in various fields, none of which seemed quite right:

Pluralism, the political theory: Power is distributed between the government and various non-governmental organizations, which all engage in the political process. We see a form of this play out in the US as the interaction of our political parties, trade unions, and other civil organizations.

Pluralism, the political philosophy: A lasting peace is possible between communities of different backgrounds and experiences in a larger culture by celebrating unique aspects of each culture, while retaining their sub-cultural distinct communities versus dissolving those communities as in multiculturalism or assimilation.

Value pluralism: This one’s the closest in meaning, I think. This theory claims that there can exist multiple competing ethical (value) systems which are each internally consistent, but are externally inconsistent between each other, while all still remaining coherent or morally sound in a society.

This “pluralism” we’re discussing, that competing beliefs and expectations should be given equal weight and courtesy, comes closest to value pluralism―but where it fails is that the value systems in conflict in value pluralism are where individuals’ own value systems seem to be contradictory, but are each consonant with an overall societal value. Instead, this “pluralism” seems to derive more from agonism, a theory where conflict drives progress―but since the far right are whiny babies, their positions must be protected from analysis or deconstruction, while they are themselves allowed to cast aspersions on others’. My desire for rights is, according to their rules, an object suitable for debate, but their desire to deny me rights is, instead, a position that may not be assailed. I remain unamused.

In doing my investigation to write this letter, I realized that Dr. Allen was talking about a very different form of pluralism from the vague assemblage of poorly-thought-out ideas that Green presented as a coherent political or social theory; intrigued, I ordered a copy of her book Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. Unsurprisingly, I found a far more persuasive and coherent argument for pluralism in the political philosophy sense: a single polity formed of multiple distinct cultures in a structure of mutual respect. She writes of the sacrifices each community makes as a part of forming a more coherent overall society; in Green’s writing, on the other hand, one community is expected to tolerate the presence of people who they want to deny rights and privileges, and the other is expected to tolerate being told―and not being allowed to challenge―the assertion that they do not deserve rights, or do not deserve their achievements. I was struck by how little some of this has changed since the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford being turned away from Little Rock Central High School, as Hazel Bryan screams at her; these are many of the same arguments, even some of the same people.

All of this to say, a softball article intended to promote the importance of outreach to conservatives while downplaying their positions’ issues wasn’t really what I wanted to read in a normally incisive and erudite magazine like the New Yorker, and I’m disappointed that such a weakly researched article advancing lazy arguments made it through to print. Possibly the worst part is, most of the people interviewed are discussing real problems: we do have issues around tribalism and an inability to communicate across boundaries, we do have siloing, and we do have a need to provide accommodations for people with different lifestyles, especially on college campuses. However, when those accommodations are being demanded for people who are otherwise used to comfort, and who as a bloc have acted to enforce harms on other communities, there’s something truly off-kilter. The expectation of one’s own comfort should not come at the expense of recognizing that other members of the community either deserve basic rights, or deserve to be at an institution to begin with; until we can agree on that, I see no point in attempting to make my spaces more comfortable for people who want to harm me and mine.

The letter

Sent to The New Yorker by me, and presumably not selected for publication as it’s been several weeks.

After reading “The Pluralism Pivot” (April 21, 2025), I was left to wonder about the critical framework and body of research behind this new “pluralism”—but when I investigated, there wasn’t much. The report by Dr. Allen³ that’s briefly mentioned discusses viewpoint diversity, but doesn’t seem to establish a field on par with, say, Critical Race Theory. That was an established field with significant bodies of work behind it before the conservative pundits descended; instead, this seems to be a wholecloth invention lacking in theoretical framework or substance.

The best discussions come from all participants being pushed to the limits of their comfort, assuming they’re able to remain civil. However, there was an unacknowledged imbalance throughout the article that became more and more evident the further I read. The examples given of pluralistic integration, conservative students opposing gay marriage and affirmative action meeting gay students and/or students of color in cordial discussion, do not engage with the power imbalance or nature of the distinction at all. The conservative student is asked to tolerate the Other, while students of color are expected to be cordial with someone who believes they didn’t earn their place, or who believes that gay students don’t deserve equal rights.

Lastly, since it cropped up here too: the idea that conservatives are against gay marriage, and that’s all, is a fabrication in of itself. It was never just about marriage; in his concurrence on Dobbs, Clarence Thomas specifically cited Obergefell and Lawrence as cases he felt the court “should reconsider”⁴—reopening the idea that sodomy laws should be enforceable, and directly attacking the safety of the LGBTQ+ community from the bench.

Viewpoint diversity requires that all parties be willing to accept that they might be wrong. I do not see such humility in the people demanding it now.