Cohesion in Practice: Lessons from Minneapolis
By: Allison Ralph
We’ve thought a lot about the word cohesion here at Cohesion Strategy. We’ve also thought a lot about how some words mean different things to different people. Cohesion is one of those words.
“Social cohesion” has recently reemerged in American political discourse. It sounds neutral—almost comforting. Who, after all, is against cohesion? Who doesn’t want a society that hangs together?
Well, it turns out that lots of folks don’t want a society that hangs together only by stripping some of their dignity. And cohesion really has sometimes been used to paper over injustice, to silence legitimate grievances, or to suggest that naming racism is itself divisive.
Fair enough.
To be clear, that’s not what we mean by cohesion. What we mean is a society that hangs together by protecting the rights that allow us all to pray, speak, think, gather, and express our discontents differently and publicly. And I don’t mean just protecting those rights for the people I happen to agree with – I mean really for everybody. Equally.
I was reminded this week of this ongoing argument about what this word means—and what it implies about who we should be as a nation—by a conversation between journalist Adam Serwer and Tim Miller on The Bulwark podcast.
Serwer and Miller were discussing the way Vice President J.D. Vance talked about cohesion in an interview with columnist Ross Douthat in the NY Times and contrasting that with how cohesion is being lived, imperfectly but powerfully, on the streets of Minneapolis right now, where multi-racial, multi-faith communities are showing up for their immigrant neighbors amid intensified ICE activity.
J.D. Vance’s Version of “Cohesion”
J.D. Vance argued in that interview that immigration at too high a rate threatens social cohesion by threatening shared identity.
America, he said, needs time “to cohere a little bit” before admitting more newcomers. Assimilation requires a pause.
“You’ve got to allow your own society to cohere for all the newcomers—the ones who are going to stay—to assimilate into American culture.”
At first glance, this language sounds reasonable. It echoes arguments made by William Galston that immigration rates can be simply too high. The argument appeals to unity, order, and stability. But as Adam Serwer and others have pointed out, this framing echoes a much older tradition in American politics—one that used “assimilation” as a polite stand-in for exclusion. In the early twentieth century, similar arguments were used to justify racial quotas and immigration restrictions aimed at preserving a white, Christian social order.
I’m not buyin’ it.
Vance’s argument quietly assumes that cohesion is fragile, that difference is inherently destabilizing, and that pluralism must be carefully rationed. Beneath the rhetoric of unity is an anti-pluralist logic—one that suggests certain kinds of neighbors make social trust impossible.
Not to mention that for all Vance’s reasoned language, what’s happening on the ground does not express a need for time and care for people to get used to each other.
His claim does not even hold up to empirical scrutiny. Decades of research from the Pew Research Center and the Migration Policy Institute show that immigrants and their children assimilate along every measurable dimension: English fluency, educational attainment, income mobility, and civic participation. Naturalization rates are high. Second-generation immigrants overwhelmingly identify as American.
More importantly, let’s just check the premise that assimilation is required for cohesion. I’m not buyin’ that one either.
Minneapolis, and a Different Kind of Cohesion
Consider the example of Minneapolis.
In recent weeks, as ICE activity has escalated, communities across the city have responded—not with fear or fragmentation, but with coordination and care. Neighbors are walking each other’s kids to school. Faith communities are organizing accompaniment teams. People are delivering groceries to families afraid to leave their homes. Rent funds are being shared. Legal resources are circulating. Clergy are showing up in collars and stoles, not as symbols, but as shields.
The folks involved are not a homogenous community. They are racially diverse, religiously plural, and linguistically complex. And yet they are functioning—arguably better than many “cohesive” communities built on sameness.
This is social cohesion in action.
What makes this moment so revealing is that it directly contradicts the central premise of Vance’s argument.
The people doing the real work of holding communities together are immigrants, pastors, rabbis, organizers, parents, and neighbors. They are men and women. They are white and people of color. They are Christian and Jew, Hindu and Muslim. Many of them are risking their own safety for the sake of others.
If cohesion means the ability of a community to care for its members under pressure, then Minneapolis is offering a master class.
The cohesion on display in Minneapolis is not about pretending differences don’t exist. It is not about forced unity or polite avoidance. It is about shared responsibility in shared space. It is about defending the rights that make pluralism possible in the first place—free assembly, free exercise of religion, due process, and the basic dignity of neighbors.
This is what protecting First Amendment values looks like on the ground. Not abstractly, but concretely. Not as ideology, but as practice.
Two Futures, Constant Choices
We are being offered two competing futures about who we choose to become as a nation.
In one, cohesion is something that must be protected from difference. It requires borders not just around nations, but around neighborhoods and identities. It is maintained by regular choices to exclude and to enforce by state power.
In the other, cohesion is something that is built through relationship, chosen time and again in small ways. It is tested in moments of stress, not erased by them. It assumes that democracy is strongest when people who are different from one another nonetheless choose to show up.
Minneapolis is not perfect. No community is. But right now, it is telling a truth that political rhetoric cannot obscure: pluralism does not weaken social bonds. It reveals them.
And that is a lesson worth paying attention to—before we decide which version of “cohesion” we are willing to defend.
From Rhetoric to Practice
One of the things we often forget in these debates is that social cohesion is not a feeling. It is a practice, and at Cohesion Strategy, we specialize in supporting that practice.
Our work starts from the premise that pluralism is not the problem to be solved—it is the reality to be navigated. We help communities, institutions, and leaders build the habits, structures, and shared norms that allow people to move together even when they don’t agree on everything. Especially then. Especially under pressure.
If your organization is asking how to move forward in this moment, I lead this work at Cohesion Strategy. Reach out to me via Linkedin DM, email, or sign up for an introductory call to start a conversation.