The Scarcity Mindset and the Future of Pluralism
By Maya Radwan
When political conflict sharpens, people often assume it’s about ideology. But more often, it’s about resources and belonging or more precisely, the perceived scarcity of both.
Cohesion Strategy Founder Allison Ralph was recently on a Healing Our Politics Episodelette, which you can listen to below, where she spoke about how communities fight over who gets to belong because they’re fighting over what they think they’re running out of—power, voice, identity, security. The frameworks we use to manage difference, whether hierarchical or purity-based, often break down when scarcity takes hold.
Allison laid out two primary methods societies have historically used to manage internal diversity. The first is hierarchy: diversity is tolerated so long as everyone “knows their place.” The Roman Empire is a prime example. It encompassed countless ethnicities, religions, and languages. It didn’t seek cultural uniformity, but it did require loyalty to the emperor and adherence to one’s assigned role in the imperial structure. So long as you paid taxes and didn’t rebel, you could worship your own gods and speak your own language.
The second method is purity. In contrast to hierarchy, purity-based systems demand conformity to core beliefs or behaviors. Dissent isn’t punished to bring people back into the fold, dissenters are expelled to protect the group. Consider the radical Calvinist communities that emerged after the Protestant Reformation: small, cohesive, and often violently intolerant of deviation. In these systems, inclusion is conditional on alignment.
Both approaches respond differently to stress. Hierarchies under pressure tend to grow more authoritarian. Purity cultures, facing external or internal threat, become more exclusionary. And under conditions of perceived scarcity, whether material, cultural, or existential, both can harden dramatically.
All this got me thinking about how these ancient patterns echo in today’s politics. Across the globe, nationalist movements portray immigration not as a matter of integration or economic opportunity, but as a fundamental threat to national identity. In the United States, debates over access to housing, education, and public benefits are often framed in zero-sum terms—as if expanding support for one group inevitably means taking something away from another. Even in liberal democracies, we see a rise in culture war politics that weaponize issues of race, gender, and religion from a deeper fear of cultural displacement. This is what scarcity thinking looks like when applied to identity: a belief that diversity itself endangers stability. When that mindset takes hold, pluralism becomes not a goal to manage, but a risk to contain.
The Scarcity Mindset in Today's Politics
Contemporary American politics increasingly reflects a scarcity mindset in very visible ways. Across more than two dozen states, legislation is advancing—or already passed—that restricts civic participation and public discourse. For example, state-level voter suppression laws continue to roll out, often targeting immigrant communities and minority groups, raising concerns about disenfranchisement ahead of the 2025 midterms.
Meanwhile, book banning campaigns tied to “critical race theory” or LGBTQ themes are gaining momentum nationwide. Texas, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, Mississippi, and others are implementing bans that remove diverse perspectives from school libraries and classrooms.
These efforts are publicly framed as protecting children, preserving values, or safeguarding tradition. But beneath that rhetoric lies an underlying fear: that our dominant culture is losing ground. The perception that expanding civic access, minority rights, or inclusive education somehow takes away from others reveals a scarcity mindset.
A powerful driver of scarcity politics today is the nostalgia embedded in slogans like “Make America Great Again.” That phrase implies a lost golden age a time when something essential, familiar, or powerful has been taken away. It taps into a broader belief that American culture and way of life has deteriorated, and that recovery requires reclaiming what was once “ours.” But the solutions this mindset produces are rarely collaborative. They are exclusionary focused on wall-building, ban-writing, and gatekeeping—meant to defend against perceived threats rather than create shared possibility.
On the other side of the spectrum, purity logic is increasingly visible in progressive spaces. Here, the collapse of coalition-building is partly due to an ever-tightening standard of moral or rhetorical alignment. Deviate from the prevailing language, question the framing of an issue, or express uncertainty, and you risk being labeled complicit or worse, cast out entirely. This kind of internal policing is about social legitimacy, about who is seen as “safe,” “in the know,” or worthy of platform and presence. And while rooted in a desire to protect minority groups or uphold justice, this approach often reproduces exclusion under a different name. Like economic scarcity, cultural or reputational scarcity narrows who gets to belong and erodes the pluralism needed to build lasting movements.
What History Tells Us About Abundance
But there are moments in history where societies under pressure chose to expand rather than contract.
One of the clearest examples comes from the medieval Low Countries. Faced with environmental threat in the form of constant flooding, Dutch communities built cooperative institutions to manage water. They pooled resources to build levies, drain marshes, and reclaim land - land that became arable and commonly governed. These weren’t altruistic projects. They were pragmatic. Collective action produced literal ground to stand on. The mindset was about shared survival and long-term gain. As Fareed Zakaria notes in Age of Revolutions, this experience helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of classical liberalism—rooted not only in individual freedom, but in the civic infrastructure and cooperation that made freedom possible.
The post-WWII U.S. GI Bill offers another case. Though deeply flawed in racial implementation, it treated upward mobility as a public good. Widespread investment in returning veterans led to long-term national growth in home ownership, education, and productivity. Abundance, in this case, was a strategy.
And then there’s the civil rights movement. In its later stages, particularly through Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership, the movement became more than a particularist demand. King explicitly framed his vision as one of shared dignity, calling for racial justice and for economic solidarity across groups. His Poor People’s Campaign rejected zero-sum logic. The liberation of Black Americans, he argued, wasn’t a threat to others’ freedom—it was a step toward a more just and sustainable society for all.
Each of these examples offers a common insight: abundance is what you’re willing to build together.
Why It Matters Now
Today’s political polarization is often misread as pure ideology. Scratch the surface, and you’ll find a deeper anxiety about loss—of resources, of identity, of meaning. And when scarcity thinking takes hold, the political terrain shifts. Societies gripped by scarcity become obsessed with loyalty, litmus tests, and gatekeeping. Those shaped by abundance create coalitions, innovate across differences, and survive long-term shocks.
Abundance is strategic. And history shows it’s our best bet when the alternative is collapse.
If you're working at the edges of these challenges—navigating questions of belonging, division, or narrative control—and want to explore how mindset shifts can reshape behavior, coalitions, and culture, get in touch with us at Cohesion Strategy. We support organizations in refreshing their strategies, rethinking program design, and building coalitions that span networks and sectors. Together, we can move from fragmentation toward shared possibility. #ExpandWhatsPossible