Danielle Allen is a professor, author, and former candidate for governor in the state of Massachusetts. Her books include Justice by Means of Democracy, Our Declaration, and Talking to Strangers, as well as a report called Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. This idea, reinventing our democracy or renovating it, has occupied Danielle for decades. As you'll hear, Danielle has a wide range of thoughts from the micro to the macro and from procedural to cultural about what we can do to improve how we govern ourselves and strengthen the institutions we count on to help with this audacious project.
Show Notes
About Our Guest
Danielle Allen is a seasoned leader, public policy and public affairs expert, national voice on pandemic response, and distinguished academic and author. Danielle’s work to make the world better for young people has taken her from teaching college and leading a $60 million university division to writing for The Atlantic, and, most recently, running for governor of Massachusetts. She cochaired the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, formed to explore how best to respond to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in political and civic life. Its final, bipartisan report, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, was released in June 2020 and includes six strategies and thirty-one ambitious recommendations to help the nation emerge as a more resilient democracy by 2026, the nation’s 250th anniversary. During the height of COVID in 2020, Allen’s leadership in rallying coalitions and building solutions resulted in policies adopted in federal legislations and a Biden executive order. Allen is also the author of several books addressing the broad history and personal significance of justice and democracy including Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Cuz: An American Tragedy, and, most recently, Justice by Means of Democracy.
Further Detours
- Danielle Allen was previously featured in the first episode of The Detour, "An America as Good as Its Promise"
- Earlier in Season 4, we talked with Manu Meel about strengthening democracy through building bridges.
- In her 2021 comic for Oregon Humanities, Lucy Bellwood looked at who is left out of our democracy as it stands.
- In "Putting in the Work," Jonathan Hill gives a guide to getting engaged when you feel powerless.
- Wendy Willis' essay "From Hedge to Hedge" challenges us to reimagine democracy as encompassing all that is.
Transcript
Adam Davis: Hello, and welcome to the Detour from Oregon Humanities. We're bringing you this episode just before Independence Day, and just as the United States is on the cusp of our Nation's 250th birthday. With this moment in mind, we're excited to share a recent conversation with Danielle Allen about the state of our democracy.
Danielle is a professor, author, and former candidate for governor in the state of Massachusetts. Her books include Justice by Means of Democracy, our Declaration, and Talking to Strangers, as well as a report called Our Common Purpose, reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. This idea, reinventing our democracy or renovating it, has occupied Danielle for decades. As you'll hear, Danielle has a wide range of thoughts from the micro to the macro and from procedural to cultural about what we can do to improve how we govern ourselves and strengthen the institutions we count on to help with this audacious project.
Danielle joined us at the Tomorrow Theater in Southeast Portland in May, 2025, as part of Oregon Humanities’ “Consider This” series on the theme, The People and The Public. Wherever you are in your party affiliation, geography, or attitude toward our government, we think this conversation about our nation's democracy in this charged political and historical moment will resonate with you.
We hope it helps you think about what you expect from our 250 year-old experiment in self-government and how you show up as part of it.
In a piece a couple months ago in The Atlantic, Danielle, you were writing about education and you began the piece by recounting a couple of early experiences that you had when you realized that the life of the mind was important to you. But I want to ask you, with democracy in mind, an early experience or two when you were like, oh, this is democracy and it matters to me.
Danielle Allen: I'm from a huge and super civically engaged family, and so in that regard, my first memories do go back to them. My granddad, helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida in the forties, so he was taking his life into his hands at the time–lynchings were on the rise, but we also used to go visit him a lot when I was a kid and he was this incredibly tall sort of leonine man.
He was a Baptist preacher as well, sort of had real kind of fire and brimstone sermons and a beautiful baritone singing voice. But he was also sort of like the mayor of the black half of the little town in southern Georgia that he lived in while I was growing up. And I think honestly it was him and that kind of really strong sense of responsibility for his community that is really my earliest memory of what civic leadership looked like. That there was a kind of family commitment to the idea that empowerment was really the bedrock for human flourishing.
Adam Davis: What's the concrete scene in your head that feels like it's sort of democracy in action or democracy embodied there?
Danielle Allen: I mean that specific case is him with lots of people and there always are problems around and people coming together to solve problems for each other and not big fancy problems, right? It's just somebody has run outta money and somebody can't go to school because of X or maybe their medical bills and so forth.
But this is, you know, the sort of world of segregated America. The segregated South has lasted for a long time, especially in places like Southern Georgia. And so even when I was growing up in the seventies and so forth, there was a real culture of do for yourself because actually state systems weren't necessarily, you know, doing much of anything. But that do for yourself culture was a very strong civic culture. So that's what I remember. Really it's just communities coming together to solve problems.
Adam Davis: And in your head there's a thread between those experiences and a book called Justice by Means of Democracy. And I don't know what the right term for this is, but it's called Our Common Purpose, Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. And if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it and we'll talk a bit more about some of what's in there, but there's a thread for you between those early experiences with your grandfather and “Six strategies and 31 recommendations about how”… okay, why are you saying, oh my God.
Danielle Allen: You know, you just had me in the world of my granddad and like his singing and stuff like that and then you took me to a bureaucratic report. So that's why I was making that kind of face. So that is a kind of question, right? How do you get from the heart of civic experience to also being able to deal with the institutional piece? And I think that is one of our real challenges in democracy. Democracy is basically like engineering at one level, all the institutional stuff, like it literally is engineering. It's design and it's design whose purpose is to figure out what are the mechanisms for sharing power. Just like in a car, you have to actually design it for power to move in particular ways to affect various things.
Same thing basically with the institutions of democracy, but somehow that sort of aspect of it, that engineering aspect of it–which actually I have to say, you guys have been doing really well here, right? Because you've been re-engineering city government in Portland. So yes, you do deserve a round of applause for yourselves for that.
You guys are leading the country in that kind of re-engineering, but I think the real mystery is how do you connect the very technical engineering to the heart experience of democracy?
Adam Davis: So maybe we'll stay with that question. And even if you take your example of a car and even mechanics, something as complicated as democracy feels to me, like it requires knowledge that I mostly don't have and that it also depends on experts who I mostly have to trust on faith.
Danielle Allen: Yeah. I mean, I'm gonna end up bringing in Aristotle. Anyway, but no, there's another aspect to this, which is just sort of strange because as you know, I had an unusual experience, which is that I debated this extreme right wing blogger named Curtis Jarvin, and his arguments are full of falsehood and logical fallacies.
But weirdly, we share a love of Aristotle. I think Aristotle has the best account, actually, of the role of expertise in democracy, and he has a beautiful metaphor for how knowledge should work in democracy. It should be like going to a potluck. And the point is that we all have something that we can bring.
And what you have to recognize is that everybody brings a sort of different category or kind of thing. So folks who aren't, you know, experts in extra wire, whatever, nonetheless bring in both values and a sense of what matters in life and in human experience, and that is fundamental knowledge for steering a community.
Also, people who don't have official expertise do bring in the expertise of whatever lived experience they have, and then that has to be partnered up with the technical expertise that experts bring in. But I think if you have that potluck metaphor in mind when you're thinking about the place of expertise in politics, it really helps, like experts should never do the work alone.
They have to work in partnership with people who are digging deep into the question of like, what are the core values of the community? And that is the job of every single regular citizen walking around as a civic participant and resident.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm. You mentioned just a few minutes ago, you mentioned institutions.
You mentioned the heart, and I wonder are those the two big categories to be thinking about when we're thinking about the parts to work on? Are there other big parts when we're thinking about building and reinventing democracy?
Danielle Allen: Heart culture, institutions, I think all three of those things go together.
So I mean, the heart. Democracy actually needs to feel good because otherwise why? Right? I mean, that's just sort of true about anything. And that doesn't mean it won't be hard. There's lots that's hard about democracy. But the fact is, I mean, I think empowerment does feel good, and I do often try to test this with my students.
I try to ask 'em to think about a time where they got something done where they felt that they were effective in the world. And then I asked them to share other adjectives about how they felt about that moment. And you begin to discover that there is, there's like a good feeling that comes from being empowered, from being effective and things like that.
And so that's really, I think, what we're trying to achieve when we're trying to make sure our democracy is functioning in a way that channels our voice where our officials are responsive to the kinds of needs that we put on the table. And that is a heart piece. And it is also the heart of relationships because we have to do this work together.
But then, you know, it is also about culture and the sense of habits and practices that make it possible when we kind of drive each other totally bats to nonetheless, actually find ways to negotiate productively. Right? And then we need to do all of that through institutions. I think of our institutions as like a house that we live in and we're trying to function in together.
And the question is like, does the house actually work for us as the people that we are right now? And then that's where the engineering comes in again.
Adam Davis: So you said democracy has to feel good, and I don't know that if we took a quick survey right now, people would say they're feeling especially good.
Danielle Allen: Yeah, let's not take a survey right now. I think that'd be a bad idea.
Adam Davis: But, there are a couple reasons that we might be reluctant to take a survey right now. One might be, well, democracy might feel worse sometimes than it seems, another might be, well, we're not in one. Like in a way when we set this up a few months ago, I think it felt different than it feels now.
And even with these recommendations in mind, right, which feel like these incredible recommendations. One recommendation, for example, is to move the day that we vote to a national holiday, another is to change how we district, making sure that there's support for cultural organizations that do bridging work.
Danielle Allen: Yep.
Adam Davis: All sorts of things like that, which feel further away.
Danielle Allen: I don't know. I mean. I think they’re are all important things that we need to do. I don't actually think they feel further away. I would say rather that the situation that we're facing, where we're watching the federal government be dismantled and we're watching the executive consolidate power in the executive, overriding checks and balances and separation of powers and the like, raises the question of not just how can we nourish the roots of democracy at a local level, in community and in place, which we know how to do. And people are doing more and more of it. I mean, the last eight years have seen a really meaningful resurgence of local democratic practices. But then the question is, how can all of that really positive sort of fresh growth of democratic energy fend off the assault of an authoritarian blueprint?
And so that's the hard part. Like it doesn't make the other not important. Like it's hugely important, right? That is where the richness of human life is. So we wanna keep affirming that. We have to put our thinking caps on about how to take that energy and have it be strong enough to counter what we're seeing at the federal level.
Adam Davis: The pronoun you used was the first person plural. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And it feels to me like one of the challenges with democracy that sometimes makes it hard, is that there's a lack of clarity around who the ‘we' is or who ‘we’ are.
Danielle Allen: Yeah. So that is a point on which I am super emphatic that the ‘we’ has to be bigger than we've ever thought it was recently.
That it is not okay any longer for the ‘we’ just to be the people who kind of more or less agree with us. That it is time for us to make the ‘we' what I call a cross-ideological super-majority, like really go out and find the people that disagree with you. And we have to form a coalition with progressives and center rights and farther right constitutionalists and things like that.
And basically people who love freedom. Because that is what is on the table right now. You know, there are, if you look historically at cases of backsliding democracies where things have been… there's been a reversal and people have managed to achieve that reversal. India is an example, in the context of India and Gandhi, and Poland is an example.
And in those cases what did happen was that people put aside their deep and important and substantive policy fights in a really big right left spectrum and said, We're gonna fight for freedom together. We're gonna reestablish rules of the game that make it possible for us to fight for policy issues inside the framework of free institutions.
So it's hard. It goes against the grain 'cause you know there's a lot to get through, to get to a place where you can actually start to build bridges across a really wide ideological spectrum. But Curtis Jarvin is not included in that super majority I'm talking about.
Adam Davis: So that's interesting of course, where you draw the line.
But also interesting is this idea of saying together we'll fight for freedom. And then you, you qualified that a little bit and you said fight for free institutions.
Danielle Allen: I don't think that's a qualification. No, I mean, so freedom is in the first instance, it's just in our human striving, right? It's just as creatures we go about the world trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday and doing that in our own private spaces.
And then ideally getting to do that with others in community spaces to shape the world we have together. And so the question then. It's really how do you protect freedom? And so free institutions are the tool that we use to protect freedom. So I don't think of it as a qualification at all. Just the necessary architecture for actually giving us the chance to exercise and protect our freedom over time.
Adam Davis: I'm gonna push once more on that because you started talking about freedom as a way to connect people across a wide range of political beliefs. And I don't, maybe I'm making assumptions here, but I don't think I would see the same consensus around a commitment to free institutions when talking about freedom.
Danielle Allen: What do you mean by that?
Adam Davis: Well, the way I hear freedom marshaled sometimes is as a kind of sentiment that pushes government away.
Danielle Allen: I see. Ah, okay. I mean, for sure we have had a culture in the country of a libertarian definition of freedom. Which is about get your hands off me. And it is not about community and the like.
And one of the challenges of democracy is that one of the things we contest is the definition of freedom in the first place. And now see, this is when I am gonna turn into a professor and I'm gonna give you a lecture. So the concept of freedom in the 18th century had two halves. There was the freedom from interference. You'll leave me alone with my conscience, leave me alone with my religion, leave me alone with my choices, with my private property.
But then there was also a second half, which was let me be empowered to play a role in politics, to be a voter, to be a juror, to be able to run for office and in other fashions as well steer my society. So when Patrick Henry says, give me liberty or give me death, he doesn't actually just mean let me have my religion.
He means that, but he also means let me run this place. Let me steer this ship. I don't want somebody else just arbitrarily imposing or dominating me. And so that combined concept has at its core the idea that freedom is to be free from domination, free from other people's arbitrary will, the only way you can be free from other people's arbitrary will, which by the way, we're all experiencing right now. Right? Like what does arbitrary will feel like? It feels like Donald Trump. Okay, that is like a perfect example of arbitrary will right now. All right, so freedom from dominations, like being free from that kind of thing.
And that was the sort of 18th century definition of freedom. And then for various complicated reasons freedom got split into those two halves in that kind of just leave me alone to do my own thing half. And then the give me the power to help shape things half. And that first half is the kind of libertarian one that has played a big role in our culture in recent years.
But the truth of the matter is that that version, if you don't also pay attention to empowering people politically through our institutions, political inequality does leave people subject to domination 'cause you end up with somebody else colonizing public space and doing the arbitrary things that we're currently watching.
So, at any rate, the point is that in order for us to fend off the experience of arbitrariness, we have to reclaim that rich complete definition of freedom as being about freedom from domination, not just freedom from interference. Did you follow me? All right.
Adam Davis: So at the start of that, you said you were sort of gonna put your professor hat on for a minute, which put me in mind to the fact that a few years ago you ran for governor of Massachusetts. What led you to go, okay, I'm doing this professor thing, I want to try to be potentially the governor of Massachusetts, and I'm curious both what that felt like and looking back on it now, whether there are things that you feel like you learned from it.
Danielle Allen: Absolutely. No. Thank you for asking that question because it does actually also give me a chance to come back to the ways in which democracy feels good. I have a lot to say about how that experience was super positive and I actually recommend it if you're feeling down about things. Running for office actually feels really good.
But you asked why I just got really angry is the truth. It was during COVID and I was just getting angrier and angrier because I was running a network of folks, research network, public health people, economists, legal people and stuff like that. And we were really early in making the case that there wasn't a trade off between protecting lives and protecting livelihoods.
If we really rapidly invested in testing infrastructure and made tests available for people so you could figure out if you had COVID, stay home, don't, so you didn't have to shut down if we could actually track where the disease was. And that's ultimately the policy we basically pursued. But it took like a year longer than it should have taken.
And there I was in Massachusetts, which is the world's crown jewel for biotechnology. We had all the capacity in Massachusetts to deliver testing infrastructure for the country really early, and we couldn't get our governor to move. And ultimately we did finally get Larry Hogan to move to set up an interstate compact to start getting people to invest in building out testing infrastructure.
But we could not get the governor of Massachusetts to do it when it was just like sitting there to be done. And on top of that, there I was at Harvard. We had literally as many tests as you could possibly want, starting from like March, early March of 2020. Okay.But the rest of the world didn't really have tests, and within the same state senate district, just like a couple miles away, Chelsea, high density population, immigrant population, we had one of the highest mortality rates in the country.
And to me, this was just unbearable, such a travesty when we had the capacity for that not to be happening. So anyway, I was mad and nobody else was gonna run against him because he had the highest popularity ratings of any governor in the country. There was this real discrepancy between the reality and the perception, and so I was like, somebody's gotta do it.
I was going to grit my teeth, eat my vegetables, and do this. And so that's why.
Adam Davis: Okay. That's interesting. I'm curious about the second part of that question about what you learned from it, because you've been talking about anger and the link between anger and taking more of a role in democracy.
Danielle Allen: So agency is therapeutic. Action out of anger is a reasonable motivation for advocacy, for acting in politics. I know many advocates or activists who are in this room have probably experienced that. Agency is the right therapy for anger, but politics isn't just about, you know, the conversion of anger into action precisely because it's about what you do with other people.
Like that's where the reward and the good feelings truly come in. So, for example. Best thing about running for office. Nobody tells you before you run for office that you'll have more friends by the time you're done than when you started. It's true. I'm like, wow, that's awesome. It just is like, like I have friends all over Massachusetts now that I didn't have before, and they're just like, great people doing good things for their community that care about the future of Massachusetts, care about the future of their towns.
I just love that. That just felt good. Can I tell you one more thing that felt good, please? So this was the other thing that I just was really blown away by. When you run for office, others of you in this room I'm sure have done this, you go to folks' backyards and you sit on people's front porches and talk about whatever, and I was sort of doing this and I was kind of surprised by how frank people were being with me. They were just really sharing really hard things in their lives. You know, family members who've had section eight. That's our kind of mental health when you're forcibly removed for mental health issues, and or substance use disorder, or job loss, or people who, you know, had gotten to a kind of financial point that they couldn't even afford formula and things like, you know, just really, really hard stuff and lots of tears.
And I'm thinking like why are these people telling me all these things? Because they don't even know me like I was. I didn't have any name recognition. I was just like Jane Doe off the street. Yet people were baring their souls to me, and then I realized it wasn't about me. They were sharing this way because there was some remote chance I could end up as governor. And they wanted to make sure that knowledge was there and they wanted to share some ideas about what should be done, which means they trusted our institutions. It was our institutions that they were trusting, not me. And that was just like a real wake up call for me because in spite of all of our stories about how alienated all we are and how disconnected we are, there's a deep well of trust among us in the institutions of our democracy.
Adam Davis: How else do you see that deep well of trust in our institutions showing up.
Danielle Allen: Yeah. So this is a great question and you know, we're all thinking about the issues of backsliding democracies and emergent autocracies, and I don't know if you guys have heard this phrase, it's competitive authoritarianism.
Yeah. So it's sort of like, looks like democracy, still have elections, that's what the competitive part means, or some kind of performative competitive process, but it's actually authoritarian. And so we're all thinking about this around the globe, right? Liberal democracy is in crisis. I mean, there's Hungary, obviously there's Turkey, there's the sort of longer standing issue of what's going on in Russia.
But just across the board, you know, pressures in Germany as well, Italy, et cetera. And you know, the question is, are we in the same position, is the United States in the same position as a Hungary for instance? And there are many people who say, no, we're not. And the reason is because we have a depth of civil society that many of the new democracies did not have.
And that seems right to me. And here's one other little element of that that gives me hope. I think we might turn out to be really lucky that this whole backsliding thing is happening the same year we turned 250 because there's all these civil society orgs all over the country that have been working for the last two years to get ready to celebrate the 250th.
For example, Monticello is gonna run book groups all over the country to read the Declaration of Independence. And tell of the sort of history of dissidents in Czechoslovakia and Poland in the period of the Soviet Union, and sort of what did it take for them to develop the dynamic that ultimately allowed them to reclaim their freedom? It was groups of dissidents passing around what were called Samot, which were sort of pamphlets with the Declaration of Independence in them and the Constitution and like all of our stuff. But they had to do it secretly. We get to have Monticello run book groups all over the country.
Totally in public. So I think we just might have a little bit of luck in that fact.
Adam Davis: You're listening to The Detour with Danielle Allen.
Can you say what you mean by civil society? It sounds like you're talking about something extra-institutional.
Danielle Allen: Shortest shorthand. For me, it's the space of freedom. Okay. It's about what we do with our time, with our creativity, our imagining, with our freedom, not 'cause anybody's told us to, just 'cause. Like we wanted to build this thing in our community.
That's what civil society is, and I think our civil society is robust because we have had the long tradition of, relatively speaking, comparatively speaking, free institutions. Not for everybody, not in all contexts. Think back to my granddad, right? He did not have that full space of civil society, it was very constrained in that small town, but it really is a space of freedom.
And so then more specifically, if one is thinking in policymaking terms, you know, our policymaking universe has, for a very long time, focused on the idea that either there are public sector solutions to things, that is, the government making rules or spending money. Or there are market solutions to things, but that's actually a limited view of how we solve human collective action problems.
It's really like a triad of resources, public sector, market, and civil society. And so civil society is all of the, you know, mission-driven, nonprofit, private organizations. And the truth is there's a heck of a lot of problem solving power in those organizations. So that's what I think about when I'm thinking about civil society.
Adam Davis: You used the word hopeful a minute ago, and you sounded, you have sounded, I would say, fairly hopeful about this thing we've been talking about, and justice by means of democracy and our common purpose. Reinventing American democracy in many ways doesn't just sound hopeful, and it certainly doesn't sound hopeful in a cavalier way.
You, I think you give a lot of very specific examples of why we should feel somewhat hopeful and where we could put our work in order to recognize that the hope has a basis. But I want to ask you about democracies. Dangers, weaknesses that you feel most aware of as you've been working on it for so long and in such thoughtful ways, the dangers and the weaknesses of this thing that you seem so deeply committed to.
Danielle Allen: Well, thank you for that. So maybe let me just frame that by saying first, I've come to believe that the only way we'll be able to defend our democracy is by renovating our democracy. That is, the work we have right now is not about defense of a sort of status quo. We have to actually recognize that the thing we call democracy has in many ways not been democratic recently.
Most people don't experience it as democratic, and also even more significantly, it hasn't been working. It just has been dysfunctional. We're not getting decisions made, we're not tackling problems that we have and so forth. And you can see that in all kinds of ways. Slowing mobility for young people, for example. In the incredibly consistent, persistent ongoing challenges we have like accessing health in any kind of reasonable way.
Like even if you have health insurance, it's a completely insane system and impossible to use and we all feel trapped in it. You can just go down the line, like housing. Just take housing, right? The whole country has a housing crisis and we can't figure our way out of that. So we have to be pushing through to different kinds of functioning in order to regain credibility for democracy.
I just think that's a kind of important mental frame, right? So then it is not just thinking about how do I defend, but how do I change? Again, like what you guys have done here in Portland, but so then you ask about dangers and vulnerabilities. So there's, unfortunately, a long list.
I don't want to give you the whole list, but one of them is how our party system is currently operating. I do think it's time for us to look at that with really clear eyes, and I'm not talking about either party here, actually, both parties and I'll be very, very specific. The parties have shrinking populations who are members. Okay? More and more people are not enrolled in any party. Yet the parties have captured our political institutions and control who our elected officials are particularly because of gerrymandered partisan primaries with really low turnout. So we have teeny percentages of voters actually selecting our elected officials.
Just to put it in concrete terms, Marjorie Taylor Greene in her district, has actually been chosen by 8% of the voters in her district, 8% of the electorate! But it's both parties. AOC was elected initially by 5% of the voters in her district. So our whole political apparatus has been captured by a really tiny percentage of the actual electorate.
And so that is a huge vulnerability 'cause it just means it's always detached from most of us, et cetera.
Adam Davis: And in that example, it sounds like one of the weaknesses is that it's not democratic enough.
Danielle Allen: That would be my view. Yes. Yeah.
Adam Davis: Are there any situations where you think actually the problem is like it's too democratic or is it always that our problems come back to not enough participation, not enough democracy.
Danielle Allen: So the way I think of it is there is an early 20th century sociologist, F. Michel. Sometimes people say Michael, but who wrote a book about political parties in which he made the case for what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy. The argument is that every single form of human organization tends over time to be captured by small elites.
He was so fatalistic about this law that he went ahead and signed up for fascism and joined Mussolini. So wrong answer, I would say. I said, I basically think he's right about human organization, always tending over time to party capture, but I would say the right answer is that therefore what democracy is, is the work of constantly undoing the efforts to achieve that capture.
Constantly undoing them. So I mentioned party capture. We also have the problem of corporate capture of our political institutions. We also right now have the problem of big tech capture of not just our formal political institutions, but you know, the entire structure of our public sphere.
Not to mention Starlink and the capture of our communications infrastructure, which if you have that, like you have everything. So we have a lot of capture problems that we have to undo. So yes, I do think the problems are generally capture problems, not too much democracy problems.
Adam Davis: I want to try to put together two thoughts.
I'm not sure I have them clearly, but one is going back to Aristotle and always in my head, is this idea of in every compound there's a ruler and a ruled. Aristotle seems to think that any complex object is going to devolve into something like what you're talking about. A part that rules and a part that is ruled. And then when you talked about, I think this is related to the next thing, oligarchy is a different form than democracy. I have a clearer sense of who's in charge in an oligarchy, monarchy, different form than democracy. I see who's in charge of corporate capture. In all of those instances, I kind of see the ruling element.
Clearly, it's just harder to see the ruling element in democracy, and I wonder if you could speak to seeing clearly the ruling element in this unusual form or compound.
Danielle Allen: Well, I think you've put your finger on what is special and also hard about democracy. I mean, I think in its ideal form if we, you know, could pull it off.
And for me, pulling it off means our institutions and culture share power, of really making sure that power is allocated broadly. That people of all kinds of different backgrounds have, you know, a seat at the table.If somebody says to me, it's. You either have a seat at the table or you're the meat on the table, right?
It's like that's the idea. Okay? We wanna make sure everybody's got a seat at the different kinds of decision making tables in civil society organizations, in political institutions and the like. And so if you genuinely do achieve power sharing, you are exactly depersonalizing power. It doesn't sit with any one person.
And so I think one of the biggest challenges of democracy is we have this idea that it's the will of the people, right? It's like, okay, it's my will, right? Like I want my will to come out the other end of a system of decision making. But the hard fact of democracy is that the things that come at the other end of the process, they don't actually match anybody's will.
Like nobody, like literally, like none of us actually gets what we want. And like that's the point. So that's hard. That's hard to process, right? But that's the only place where freedom lives because otherwise we're all getting subjected to somebody else's will. So it's a funny sort of way of actually trying to get us out of the trap of the problem of will.
Adam Davis: But don't, some people think, well, I get what I want, not outta democracy, but out of a different structure and that that's the argument, which is it. I choose a chance for me to get what I want, or I go into best-case scenario. I compromise and get something I don't really want.
Danielle Allen: Yeah. Well, so let's talk about compromise for a second. 'cause I think we have to kind of re-imagine what that means.
And yes, I think the problem of capture is driven by people's not feeling that they can accept not getting exactly what they want. Right? And so always kind of like striving to figure out how to get the thing to kind of just move in the direction that I want specifically. And so yes, like that is why sort of, that's the drive.
But then. I Hope that there's like a counter drive of that. Again, like love of freedom in the sense of not being dominated. That is what motivates people to push back against that problem of capture. 'cause I don't know about you, but I feel dominated by Trump. I feel dominated by Elon Musk just to start there, right?
I don't want to feel dominated by these people, so I intend to push back, right? So that's for me what the motivation story is. So I want to tell a couple stories about compromise, if you don't mind.
Adam Davis: Please. I will happily compromise with that desire.
Danielle Allen: There you go. Excellent. And this is really kind of nitty gritty in some of the work that we can do to try to cultivate healthy democracy.
This is in the space of thinking about civic education and K through 12 civic education specifically. And basically over a course of 70 years, this country prioritized investment in national security and economic competitiveness when it came to educational policy and over and over again for various reasons.
We did that and we sort of, you know, reached a point where we were spending $50 per kid per year on STEM education and 5 cents per kid per year on civics education, federal monies. So I'm like, oh, you get what you pay for and this is not a critique of STEM education. We do need that, but we also need the other education.
You know, after like, what was it, 40 years of that investment pattern, is when polarization started really rising. Then polarization made the problem worse because then when people said, oh, I think maybe we should start to try to get a little bit more civics education going here, adults were fighting so badly about how we would describe our history, that nobody could get it done.
A group of us came to the conclusion that kids desperately deserve rich civic learning opportunities and that therefore, if you wanted that to happen, well you actually had to solve for polarization. 'cause that's actually the obstacle at this point to making that possible for people. So we built a big group, about 300 people ultimately to work on trying to create a roadmap for excellence in history and civic learning.
And crazily enough, this sounds like it's from another planet. It was funded by the NEH and the US Department of Education under both the first Trump and the Biden administrations. But the group of 300 of us were diverse in every dimension. Race, ethnicity, demography, also viewpoint. And we sort of set out saying to each other, look, we know we really disagree on some serious stuff, but we have a really powerful sense of the urgency of kids needing to have civic learning.
So every time we hit something we disagree on, we're gonna just stop and wrestle it through until we come up with some way of moving forward together. All right. And we didn't know what that was gonna look like. We just presumed there was gonna be stuff that we were gonna have to fight over. But we were committed to the kids, right?
That clarity of common purpose. So we got going and it was like only two weeks that we had sort of started working where we hit a fight over whether or not we were educating kids for life in a democracy or life in a republic. I kid you not, we got like a total knockdown, drag out fight about that.
And it became clear that the people who were arguing for democracy were prioritizing the values of popular sovereignty, participation, and full inclusion, universal inclusion. And the people who were arguing for Republic were prioritizing the values of constitutionalism, rule of law and structure.
That's right. Okay. All right. Like there's values that make sense on both sides of this. We're gonna say we're educating kids for life in a constitutional democracy. So that's what we did. I think we would say that wasn't a compromise. That was actually the discovery of another solution because we took the time to service the values, motivating the positions on different sides, and then to figure out was there a way we could align the different values. So it was more like negotiated alignment rather than compromise.
Adam Davis: So you referred earlier to the conversation you had with Curtis Jarvin and you wrote a piece about that. That was in the Wall Street Journal, which concludes with a sentence that includes the word, ‘republic.’
Danielle Allen: “Our republic is ours to keep if we want it.”
I had to use the word, ‘republic' there because I was basically riffing off of Benjamin Franklin's statement, right? So I'm sure many of you know this story. The end of the constitutional convention, Franklin leaves the convention. They've been in what's now Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It's so hot, like they're all exhausted and been laden with dripping sweat in the final stages.
And he leaves. And the story is a woman passes him and says, okay, what have you created Mr. Franklin? And his answer is, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Adam Davis: And so you switched out the verb, ‘want’ for ‘keep’ in that, and I just want to say it's unusual. I can't remember reading anything of yours that feels sort of ominous until that sentence.
Usually I feel more hopeful and this, that piece–even the beginning of that sentence suggests that we have the institutions we need, but that "if we want it” has stayed with me. What's going on with the “if we want it?”
Danielle Allen: Sure. Although, I want to qualify one thing you just said. I don't really think we have the institutions that we need, right.
We have to renovate our institutions and, you know, I could go through the list like Supreme Court term limits and increasing the size of the House of Representatives and rank choice voting with multi-member districts. And we need all these kinds of changes to our institutions. So it's not that we currently have the institutions we need.
We gotta renovate them, gotta renovate them, gotta renovate them. But the “if we wanted” part is [where] I realized that there's this sort of thing about people who work on democracy, where I honestly think we kind of get into a rhetoric of pleading with people. Like, come on, you wanna protect democracy, right?
Like that kind of thing. I'm like, forget it. Forget enough of that already. Like we can have it if we want it. Like your call, you don't want it, that's on you, but decide do you want it or not? Right?
Adam Davis: Not pleading. I just want to say again that in this short book called Our Common Purpose, Reinventing Democracy for the 21st Century, there are six strategies and 31 recommendations, and they're specific and actionable, and so I would find it really useful.
Danielle Allen: Can I say one more thing about the actionable part? It's taken me a long time actually to come to this one because we are all trying to figure out what to do, right?
We're all trying to figure out what actions to take, and what I've come to understand is that democracy is never, never, never, never a solo person's activity. It is not a thing that we do as individuals. You have to join a group. That is the single most important thing that you can do to actually work on renovating our democracy and Common Cause, for example, is a group that you can join and be a volunteer for, but there are so many.
But literally like the first action anybody should take who is wondering what to do is join a group. Okay. Will you do that for me? That's pleading.
Adam Davis: I think it was an invitation.
Danielle Allen: I cordially invite you to join a group. This actually goes back to the issue about expertise. In fact, this is the answer to your question.
Great. This is fun. I think we're figuring something out here that we didn't actually know before. Basically our institutions are complicated. They are very hard to understand. They're opaque. It's hard to know where to start, how to make a difference. It's even hard to know just what the other people around you actually think about anything.
And so it turns out that the way you learn that stuff is in groups because collectively, we actually can build up that knowledge together. You have a group that's going to take Common Cause as an example, if you don't mind me making you an example, and they've been working on democracy things. For a spell.
And so like they know how stuff works and they've developed expertise through practice. You join Common Cause as a volunteer and you're getting a civic education just by virtue of participating in it. And the whole thing starts to make sense. And you're also connecting with people who come from different parts of your community than you.
And so they can help you start to get a bigger picture of what the range of opinion is in your community. And so. We solve the problem of expertise in democracy by actually dividing the labor and we divide the labor in groups.
Adam Davis: Thank you. Thank you. You can say a preliminary, big thanks to Danielle Allen.
Audience question: Hi. I would love for you to address the role of money in democracy right now and a better way that we might see in the future. Thank you.
Danielle Allen: Yeah, and I appreciate that question. Actually, it's funny, I was thinking about that on the plane this morning. I'm gonna say something that's really not gonna come from where you expect it to come from.
I was thinking on the plane about the fact that you can't do politics without money. Okay. Because it costs money to support a team. You can't do everything through volunteers, I guess is the basic point. And so like you literally cannot actually do politics without money. And what we have to recognize is that like in its good form, okay, we have a really problematic corrupt form.
But if you're just thinking in the abstract, in it's good form, money and politics should be like a barn raising. Okay? And the same with this in groups, it's like a division of labor. What money and politics should be is groups pulling their resources in order to make sure that they can advance their cause.
So I'm kind of thinking we need a slightly different vocabulary for the problem of money and politics because it's not that we wanna get like all money outta politics. I mean, you guys now have matching funds. Seattle has the democracy vouchers and where everybody gets a voucher to contribute to campaigns, for example, and the like.
There are reforms that can get us to a point where we have that barn raising picture of what it means to have money in politics. We also have to block the problem of corporate money in politics. There's a couple of different ways to do that. One. I mean, there's a group called American Promise, which is working on a constitutional amendment to get rid of the effects of Citizens United to, you know, define corporations as not people.
The second thing that's a possibility, which is also very good, is both Minnesota and Maine have now passed laws that prohibit political expenditure by corporations that have more than a certain percentage of foreign ownership. Which is basically all multinationals, which takes about 85% of corporate money out of politics.
So that might be the more feasible way in the short term.
Audience question (2): I really appreciated the question about what is civil society. I feel like since Reagan and Thatcher, Trump is a symptom and we've been in water that's been getting hotter and hotter. So I'm just wondering if you could talk a little about that trajectory, which is much longer than Trump, and how you see that in your work and what we need to do now.
Danielle Allen: Right. I mean, as Thatcher said, there's no such thing as society. Right. And that phrase is a good way of capturing a lot of the spirit of the neoliberal era. One of the problems with neoliberalism is that it actually, doesn't, in its analytics, economic models and other things, doesn't think about power.
And so if you put questions of power back into economic thinking, for example, in the labor market, how does power affect employer-employee relationships? And just all the way through, you get a very different picture of the kind of economic policy you need for a healthy and productive society. So there's a lot more that could be said.
The good news is that there is actually a whole network of economists and policy makers who are basically working in this kind of direction. And some of Biden's policies were actually a kind of first effort of experimentation in this new direction. So there was actually a lot of good in his policy work, though it was not necessarily well prepared or well delivered to the American people from the last election.
Audience question (3): In talking to people, it seemed like almost every form of traditional campaign outreach, whether it was going door to door, which I did in a swing state, or whether it was online engagement, whether it was telephones, just didn't seem to be moving the needle at all. And particularly with the younger people who are so focused on their technology right in front of their face, not joining groups, not engaging in these, how do we break through and get that re-engagement in our system?
Danielle Allen: I mean, I think you're asking the right question, and I suppose I would turn it back to you. I mean, I think if we can remember that the questions we should ask are ‘how’ questions. We're a very creative species and so we can answer those questions, right? So in other words, if one wants to recruit young people into a group, I think one of the first things one should do is try to identify the organizations that are actually already doing that and they exist.
So there's a terrific organization called Made by Us which really focuses exactly on this issue of bringing young people into civic engagement and group experiences with each other. So they have a lot of lessons to share. And so that's where I would start. Take lessons from them and then how to apply them in the context in which you're working.
Audience question (4): This might be a good follow up question to that. I'm actually asking a question on behalf of my 15-year-old who does not like to speak into microphones. So her question. As you know, a kid who is exposed to all the technology but wants to have her face outward to the rest of the world as well, what should she do as somebody who can't vote?
And the question that she asked was, “What do I do to not feel like a drop of milk in a sea of milk?”
Danielle Allen: I have a fifteen-year-old, actually, she doesn't, she won't ask me any questions, so I really appreciate your question. So I think on technology I 'm not very good at this, but I've started thinking about my phone as a pack of cigarettes and I'm like four packs a day here.
I actually think we have, we really need to reimagine what our technology is. Certainly the way companies themselves right now are using these devices, they are using them like cigarettes, right? They are addicting us and they are damaging us. They're damaging our mental health. They're damaging our sense of agency.
So I think the first job is to actually exert control over one's technology by figuring out how to control one's time in relationship to it. And I think if we can do that, that actually starts to open up new possibilities for all of us, including now this, you're gonna be really mad at me from repeating myself, joining groups.
So the question I would ask is, I'm sure there are organizations that would love to have a 15-year-old, and they don't have to be youth organizations. They can be any of the local nonprofits. They can be local party associations, for example. They'll be so grateful if you showed up. And the only challenge is that I think it can be hard if you're 15, to go show up with a bunch of people who are like, you know, a lot older and have a lot of different kinds of perspectives and so forth.
So what I would say is find a friend who has the same questions as you and go together.
Audience question (5): I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the role of cultural norms in acting as checks and balances in a democracy. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when having a felon as president was unthinkable.
And now that's where we are.
Danielle Allen: I'll tell you a funny story. So I've been writing this biography about an 18th century British politician, Third Duke of Richmond he was called. Politics in England in the 1760s got really crazy and really hot. And one of the things that really heated up politics was there was this guy named John Wilkes who was a convicted felon who kept getting reelected to parliament and like Parliament did everything they could to try to keep him out and get him out.
He kept getting reelected time and time and time again. So Britain's okay today. So that's been really reassuring for me, I have to say. And you're absolutely right that cultural norms matter a huge amount because we cannot actually, you know, regulate or merely institutionally design ourselves into appropriate, limited, government. It just produces an infinity of rules, right? Like there's always another way that can make a conflict of interest or this or that. You actually need people to carry commitment to the norms of good government with them. And that is work we do need to do as a culture. Those norms have eroded.
It is really important that leaders speak up for norms. So, for example, you'll have heard me say nonviolence is a norm multiple times in this conversation tonight. That is me speaking up for the norms of democracy that are under pressure. And it's just really important that people actually name the norms that matter.
Audience question (6): Trump has actually triggered emotions that really move the public in a new direction of her democracy. Had we not had this Trump reality, would we have been as far as we have in the three months that have taken place in terms of a reaction?
Danielle Allen: One of the virtues of democracy in principle is that it is a self-correcting system.
So democracies make mistakes like obviously we've just made a really big one, and if democracy is what it's cracked up to be, we will correct it. From the very beginning, people understood that the spirit of democracy would require renewal from time to time. And I think you're right. I think it would be fair to say that they expected that spirit of renewal to come from pressure, not from pride.
You know, pride turns into complacency and so forth. And then you don't invest in civic education for 70 years and then you end up under pressure. And so then can we correct, that's where we are right now.
Adam Davis: So I want to say two things as we conclude. The first is I just want to point back to the funny situation that Oregon Humanities is in. I think under we are under new pressure due to a kind of complacency that sometime in the mid sixties there was an idea of a Great Society that led to the creation of things like the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, lots of other things.
We seem to be in a different moment and it's interesting to think of what opportunities are there. And I would say really come to events, come to conversation projects. Read the magazine, support the organization. And I would say I'm not actually trying to make a plea for Oregon Humanities. I think I'm saying a version of what you're saying with ‘join groups.’
Danielle Allen: I know you are, but I'm saying Oregon Humanities. Okay.
Adam Davis: Thank you. And that points back to the second thing I wanted to conclude with, which is I think thirty years ago back in Chicago, I first ran into Danielle. And have had a good thirty years to that.
Danielle Allen: He made that up. It was like 15 years. Thank you Adam.
Adam Davis: Thirty years for me, fifteen for you, but to have the good fortune to see the work you're doing in so many places, in so many ways, and going from eighteenth century English politicians to twenty-first century suggestions about how to get more people voting is remarkable and it's a gift. And I just want to say a big thank you, really from all of us here.
So thank you.
Danielle Allen: Thank you. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, all of you Wonderful questions. Thank you very much.
Adam Davis: Danielle Allen is a political theorist, professor, and author. You can find more about her work in our show notes at oregonhumanities.org. Thanks for listening to The Detour from Oregon Humanities. Anna McClain is our producer, and Alexander Silvester, Karina Briski, and Ben Waterhouse are our assistant producers.
This is Adam Davis. See you next time.