IN SEARCH OF A GOOD EMPEROR

One of the hard truths of human affairs is that diversity and democracy do not go easily together. In the Middle East today as in Europe’s not-sodistant past, the transition from authoritarianism to popular sovereignty seems to run through ethnic or religious purges. Worldwide, many of the models of successful democratic government are effectively ethnostates, built on past cleansings or partitions or splendid isolation. And in the West in recent years, both mass immigration and cultural fragmentation have brought authoritarian temptations back to life.

This pattern runs deep in our species’s history. A new paper from the economists Oded Galor and Marc Klemp finds a strong correlation between diversity and autocracy in pre-colonial societies, with a legacy that extends to today’s institutions as well. The authors suggest that authoritarianism emerges from both bottom-up and topdown pressures: a diverse society seeks strong central institutions for the sake of cohesion and productivity, and internal division, stratification and mistrust increase “the scope for domination” by powerful elites.

Here in the United States we like to think of ourselves as exceptions to this rule — and, notwithstanding the fate of the Indian tribes and the legacy of chattel slavery, we have been more successful at combining republican self-government with racial and religious diversity.

But at the same time we aren’t exactly governing ourselves via New England town meeting anymore. As America has become larger, more diverse and lately more fragmented, power has grown ever more centralized in Washington, and the face of that central government, the presidency, has accrued more and more authority. The caudillo-from-Queens style of Donald Trump is unique to the man himself, but it’s also an outgrowth of trends that go back generations. We still have republican forms in place, but we also have a kind of elected emperor who presides over our enduring colour lines, our not-always-melted immigrants, our increasing mistrustful sects and tribes and classes.

The European Union doesn’t have so singular a leader, but its ruling class is in a similar situation — they’re the custodians of a diverse imperium, trying to preside over Greeks and Germans, Scandinavians and Sicilians, Christian natives and Muslim immigrants, while wielding powers that are at least one remove from democratic accountability.

This means that in understanding the challenge facing Western leadership, it’s worth pondering the ways in which the world’s authoritarian regimes interact with ethnic and religious diversity — exploiting it, managing it, or both.

In one common pattern, authoritarian rule evolves as a way for a majority or plurality group to hold power against the claims of diverse minorities, and to impose a kind of uniformity on weaker ethnic or religious groups. The Erdogan regime in Turkey and the Saudi monarchy’s Sunni authoritarianism offer obvious examples; so does the The coalition that Barack Obama built across two presidential elections united minority constituencies with the upper-class intelligentsia and promised to champion their diverse interests against the remains of the country’s white Christian heartland core. The Trump reaction was more Erdoganian or Putinesque, promising to protect a once-dominant majority, to restore its privileges and reverse its sense of cultural decline.

In Europe, meanwhile, the European Union often seems to be run for the benefit of Germans at the centre and ethnic minorities at the periphery, favouring separatists and immigrants over old national majorities. The present populist surge is, in its turn, an attempt to establish a different dynamic between the Continent’s diverse factions, in which Germany has less power, more immigrants are turned away, and the old nations reassert themselves as centres of influence once more.

Neither continent is poised for a real slide into autocracy — I think! But on both, paradoxically, the country of the future still has a place for them. Whatever the basis of his power, he needs to be constantly attuned to the ways that diversity, difference and distrust can make political conflict seem far more existential than it should.

Our last two chief executives recognized that they needed to make efforts along these lines, but with exceptions — George W. Bush after Sept. 11, Obama in his 2008 campaign — they were not particularly successful. In Obama’s case, his White House failed to grasp the feeling of abandonment and crisis in the white heartland, and the extent to which that feeling was creating a new identity-based voting bloc. He failed to grasp, too, how threatening the regulatory state’s enforcement of liberal sexual norms was to religious conservatives, how much it made them feel like strangers in their own country.

From that alienation and fear came Trump, who is barely even trying to reach out and reassure, to make his nationalism seem larger than just white identity politics, to make the groups who feel afraid of his administration sense that he has their anxieties in mind. There might be a form of nationalism that helps bind a diverse society together, but Trump’s seems more likely to bind a “real American” ex-majority in opposition to every other race and faith and group.

His eventual successor, liberal or conservative, should not seek to learn from Assad or Erdogan or Putin. But he (or she) might learn something from an earlier age’s custodians of diverse, fragmented societies — from monarchies like that of the Austrian Hapsburgs, in particular, that worked to contain and balance religious and ethnic divisions, to prevent disintegration and forestall totalitarianism, and might have succeeded longer absent the folly of 1914.

If we’re going to have an imperial presidency, we should want a president who thinks less like a party leader and more like a good emperor — who doesn’t just divide and conquer, but who tries to make all his empire’s many peoples feel like they’re safe and recognized and home.