I am repeatedly struck by the extent to which conservatives have given up on the America we all grew up with: apparently it costs too much and we can’t afford it, and besides, we can’t all get along, so we can’t enjoy it.

In 2011 New York Times columnist Ross Douthat warned Americans that we can no longer provide a strong social welfare state—the kind of society that supports people the way we did from the mid-1930s until the end of the 1970s—because we’re too diverse for it. As Douthat argued:

Historically, the most successful welfare states (think Scandinavia) have depended on ethnic solidarity to sustain their tax-and-transfer programs. But the working age America of the future will be far more diverse than the retired cohort it’s laboring to support. Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.

Douthat seemed to fear that the “brown and beige” kids who’ll be paying into Social Security and Medicare for the next generation might not look kindly on supporting a population that’s disproportionately white. So we may as well unravel our social insurance programs before those tawny kids pull the plug on Grandma? How cynical, how sad.

It’s brazen of anyone on the right to warn us that government programs might polarize the country along racial lines, as though we are not already polarized, at least partly because of GOP divide-and-conquer politics. Yet the relationship between American diversity and trust in government is actually an old controversy, with Douthat adding a twenty-first-century right-wing spin. Scholars have long debated whether Americans have a weaker public sector because of our heterogeneity. Some argue that we have less social support and more harried lives than people in comparable nations, at least partly because we don’t want to take the chance that increased social spending and a broader safety net will help “other people,” those slackers and moochers we’ve always feared.

In fact, the United States lags behind all industrialized nations when it comes to direct government funding of health care, family leave, child care, and unemployment benefits. In an influential 2004 book, Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference, Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser attributed most of the gap in social spending between western Europe and the United States to our unrivaled mix of racial and ethnic groups and the distrust that engendered.