One would think that Obama’s election would be a sign that ethnic and religious pluralism is a good thing that doesn’t have to result in “internal eternal ethnic conflict.”

I can understand how one might think mixing would have to lead to such conflict forty-five years ago, when blacks couldn’t even vote in Virginia or North Carolina, or sixty years ago, when state legislatures were thinking about extending Jim Crow separation to Jim Crow counties (bantustans).

But today, to dismiss the idea of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy between the Jordan and the Mediterranean seems to have missed the entire point of what makes Obama’s success such a watershed.