Danielle Allen is one of the great thinkers of our generation… by which I mean the GenX generation that teeters on the brink between hopelessness about the future of democracy and passion about the ways in which our systems could be changed for the better. She is a classicist and political scientist at Harvard University, a former candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, and a democratic activist, leading Partners in Democracy.
More personally, Danielle is a friend and mentor, someone I turn to when I am feeling hopeless about the state of democracy in our country. We disagree on many things – reacting to my book Mistrust, Danielle has been clear that she’s committed institutionalist, dedicated to change through existing political systems, while I’m a big believer that some of these systems need to be productively disrupted. She’s a deep believer in the hard work necessary to build alliances between diverse groups of people. And she’s someone who’s done a fantastic job of using positions of meritocratic power – visible academic posts, a column in the Washington Post – to give voice to important issues around race, class, power and justice.
Danielle Allen in the UMass Amherst Old Chapel
The timing of Danielle’s talk is fascinating. We’re a week away from a very scary election, and this morning Danielle announced that she’s stepping away from the Washington Post, reacting to Jeff Bezos’s decision to prevent the newspaper from endorsing a presidential candidate. I had the chance to catch up with her this morning off the record and know that she’s working hard to maintain hope and optimism at a moment where things feel fragile and fraught – here’s my notes from her talk to a UMass audience this afternoon, titled “How to be a Confident Pluralist”
Danielle notes that this is a moment to consider what a healthy, flourishing democracy requires of us. Her work at Harvard, and as an activist, is on democracy, past, present and future… and she assures us that there’s no question mark at the end of that phrase. She shares her heritage with democracy, including a grandfather who established a first chapter of the NAACP in northern Florida in the 1940s, a moment where demanding the vote for African Americans required risking ones own life. Her grandparents on her mother’s side worked on women’s suffrage, with her grandfather marching for women’s rights while her grandmother gave birth.
Danielle’s father had 11 brothers and sisters, and she tells us that someone was always running for office. In 1992, her aunt was on the ballot in the Bay Area for the left-wing Peace and Freedom Party, while her father was running for Senator as a Reagan Republican. They couldn’t have been further apart, she tells us – her aunt was one of the first women married to another woman in California, while her father was a pipe-smoking, virtue-focused conservative. They fought fiercely over the Thanksgiving dinner table. And they both lived lives very consistent with their values and ideas. As a young woman, Danielle watched the debate, and noted that they shared a sense of purpose: a commitment to equality, empowerment and self government. They disagreed passionately about how this came about, but they both believed individuals needed the ability to succeed and grow. And Danielle knew that they had a bedrock commitment to treating each other with respect.
Many of us live with the question, “Can democracy survive?” or “Is democracy all it’s cracked up to be?” Danielle is confident in her answers – yes, democracy is essential. The question is how we get out of these troubled times and into a place where democracy works and flourishes.
If we are going to be free, if we are going to be able to shape our own lives, the key question is how we join in community with others to shape our collective lives. That seems harder now than in 1992 – the space between the left and the right may be even further than between the Peace and Freedom party and Reagan’s Republican party. But the path forward is the path of confident pluralism.
At the heart of confident pluralism is the idea that you are confident in your values and what they lead you to… and open to the idea that others are also passionately motivated by their own values. You need to understand and feel confident in defending your values, but confident enough to understand that someone else is working from values as well. (She namechecks John Inazu for putting forward the language of confident pluralism she is using here.)
Her father and her aunt were fighting to be part of institutions that channeled disagreement into democracy. You cannot have a political system without disagreement, but the point of democracy is to channel that disagreement into politics, rather than into violence. Fighting for the right to vote in 1940s Florida is part of fighting to be part of the contest. The end result of that contestation is not going to line up with your desires. 330 million people with different lived experiences is going to lead to compromise and negotiated settlement. Literally no one is going to get their perfect outcome. That makes democracy sound like a lot less fun.
But wait, isn’t democracy supposed to be the will of the people? That will of the people never looks like your will or my will. But being part of that process is that her grandparents were working for.
Diverse cultures should give us a diversity of thought, potential and ideas. The many ways of life that can be lived alongside one another are part of the benefits of pluralism. Being part of that process gives you the benefit of empowerment – you are part of the process, even if you don’t get exactly what you want.
We are at a moment of profound transformation: the global economy has been radically transformed by technology. Industrial activity has moved outside of the US, the economy has been reorganized around services, and we continue feeling these transformations in how out societies and workplaces function. Social media and the fracturing of attention is transforming us, and the rise of AI may transform things even further. Massive investment in technology is transforming the public sphere, including journalism and media, as well as new industries like social media and search. There’s enormous concentration of wealth, and disempowerment of large numbers of people in society.
We are watching the struggle of democratic institutions to navigate rapidly changing conditions – not only these economic challenges, but global challenges like climate change, and local challenges like gun violence. At the same time, authoritarian countries seem like they are adapting more quickly to some of these changes. Is democracy actually helping us, at a moment where it seems so toxic, divisive and paralyzed?
Those autocratic forms of governance don’t build legitimacy over time. They squeeze people out of participation and remove large swaths of the public from decisionmaking. Democracies, by contrast, enable the whole of society and takes advantage of their wisdom. She cites Amartya Sen’s observation that a democratic India has not suffered a famine, because the power of voters can pull attention to the suffering of people who might starve in an autocratic system.
The democratic pathway can look like it’s not getting the job done. For democracy to meet and master the challenges of a time like this, we need the collective intelligence of people working together on these problems. That, in turn, requires the culture of confident pluralism, the willingness to put opinions on the table and negotiate with others participating in the process.
She offers five steps for the prospective confident pluralist:
1) You need to know what are your core values, and why? Freedom? Equality? Justice? Wealth? Family? God? Solidarity? Community? Why do I put these forward, how are they different from what my parents valued?
2) Commit to the institutions of negotiation. You have to commit to nonviolence in decisionmaking, channeling disagreement into negotiation.
3) We have to know how to actually compromise. You can’t have these structures without compromise.
4) If you’re going this work of bringing compromise into your practice, it begins with listening – you need to understand both your own values and the values of others. One path to this is to mirror back to others what they said and check that you understood people correctly. Try this, and you’ll find 90% of the time, the other person will tell you “No, you didn’t hear what I was saying” – it can take a long conversation to even get to a strong articulation of what you’re disagreeing on… and you’re likely to find synergy and common ground in the process.
5) Finally, you’ve got to reject the culture of toxicity. You have to reject name-calling, the assumption of ill intent. Instead, you have to mirror Danielle’s father and aunt, having bedrock respect and ensure the safety of the other person.
Danielle talks about her work with a framework for curriculum for civics classes for K-12, funded by both the Trump and the Biden administrations, with a group of 300 individuals representing a wide range of geographies, experiences and expertise. All had an urgent sense that kids deserved richer civic learning opportunities, and all knew they would disagree on a bunch of stuff. The goal was to take the disagreements seriously, dig in and do the hard work so they could get to the finish together. That worked for about two weeks, until an argument: Were we educating people for life in a democracy or life in a Republic?
In Utah, it’s a matter of state law that we educate people that we live in a Republic, not a democracy. It’s a red herring, Allen explains: both words were used in the founding of the country. After a great deal of argument, they saw the values behind the arguments: rule of law, order and structure for the Republic folks, universal inclusion and popular participation for the democracy folks. They found a compromise around “constitutional democracy” as words that honored both.
She refers to a commission designed to bridge across political divides, Our Common Purpose, convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which came up with 31 recommendations for how we could transform democracy. (I was part of this commission.) The electoral college was an extremely fraught issue, because it can undermine the legitimacy of democracy, allowing the minority to win presidential elections. Democrats often wanted to get rid of the electoral college, while Republicans argued that the thumb on the scale for smaller states was essential. Both sides could see that a result that didn’t align with a popular vote was a problem, as was the ways of ensuring that smaller states weren’t silenced by California and Texas.
The solution that emerged was an expanded House of Representatives. It’s been roughly 100 years since we’ve significantly expanded the House, which would allow larger states to have more representation, but still give a boost to smaller states through the Senate. (Danielle ended up gaining bipartisan consensus for a significantly larger house, doubling the size. I argued for a 10,000 person house, holding to the original 30,000 to 1 ratio in the Constitution, which no one else liked as an idea.)
The only way to get these compromises: reaffirm the dignity of the people in front of us, work to understand their values, and seek to find solutions that allow us to advance democratic institutions together.