ABSTRACT
Equality and inclusiveness are defining properties of the contemporary democratic order. We usually do not ask “Who is eligible?” but it is a hard fact that societies do not easily include everybody (or “just anybody”) among those eligible for equal treatment, even when the rhetoric and the public ethos-especially in the United States-condemn distinctions when they are group-based. The U.S. has always struggled with group-based divisions, and religious, ethnic, racial, and linguistic (hereafter termed “communal”) divisions have trumped most other types (including gender barriers). We excluded slaves (later freed African-Americans) and the Native Americans who met the European settlers when the latter arrived in North America. Eligibility questions were raised about immigrants from Ireland, Scandinavia, Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia, and southern Europe. Protestant America questioned the American credentials of Catholics and, perhaps a bit more closely, Jews, when they arrived in large numbers (a great read here is Samuel Freedman’s The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond). Asians, Hispanics, and the other “new” immigrants have only made the inclusion questions more vexing.
