Danielle Allen's work straddles the line between past and present. On one hand, she's on the road this year talking about America's 250th anniversary in the context of her book on the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, she's hard at work on Substack writing and talking about democracy reform (or renovation she calls it). She's also leading a coalition working to bring nonpartisan primary elections to Massachusetts through a ballot initiative this fall.
Allen return to the show to discuss America's Semiquincentennial and what lessons today's democracy renovators can draw from the process that the Founders undertook to create the Declaration of Independence. We also discuss her work on Educating for American Democracy and Our Common Purpose, two national projects launched in 2021 that were the subject of her first appearance on the podcast. She talks about what's changed, for better and worse, in the past five years.
Discussed in this episode:
- "Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality" - Allen's book on the Declaration of Independence
- The Renovator - Allen's Substack
- Coalition for a Healthy Democracy - group leading the Massachusetts nonpartisan primary ballot measure
- Educating for American Democracy
- Our Common Purpose
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works this week, we are talking with Danielle Allen, who makes her second visit to the show. She also recently joined us for a visit at Penn State. If you know anything about democracy, I'm guessing Her name is familiar to you. She is the James Bryant Conant University professor at Harvard. She directs the Allen lab for democracy renovation and the Democratic knowledge projects, among many, many other things. The last time she joined us, she was talking about the Our Common Purpose report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which she co-chaired. But this time, we wanted to bring her to campus and to the show to talk a little bit about America's 250th birthday, which is happening this year. We've mentioned it in passing on the show a couple of times, but Danielle's scholarship, at least one aspect of it is on the Declaration of Independence. And her book, our declaration looks at what the document can teach us today and how you can read it in defense of equality. So we talk about that, as well as some of her, her more recent work on democracy reform. So lots to talk about here, both looking back and looking forward.
Chris Beem
Yeah, I was really a privilege to have her on campus, just such a an imminent scholar. I reread that that book our declaration for her visit. And, you know, let's just stipulate that, you know, she is, you know, a very, very accomplished historian. But really, what I really took from it this time was just how accessible it was. This is not a book that you have that was written for other, you know, political theorists. It was written for citizens and and, and she was able to achieve that.
Candis Watts Smith
So I also recently read Our Declaration for a totally different reason. And I think one of the things that she does really well is to really I mean, you know her, the major argument is that our ideas about equality and liberty are not zero sum, but are mutually necessary. But also she gives us some other ways to think about the Declaration of Independence, and the kind of, maybe I don't want to use say lazy, but just her kind of common what has become common sense around these documents and that she kind of highlights that one. It was a crowd sourced document. It was a collaborative document. And by crowdsource, I mean, you know, people across the colonies were asked, What did they think? What were their grievances with the king? There were several people on the committee to write the Declaration, and it had gone through many drafts, which are beautifully outlined in that book, that the principles were universal principles that they meant it for all human beings, that there was compromise.
Candis Watts Smith
There were folks who were, you know, who owned enslaved people, and there were people who were totally against slavery, working together to create this document that now ostensibly should, or let me see that should serve as a guiding light to how our democracy could work. I think the last thing that's this kind of there's many insights in this book, but one of the last things I think worth saying is that 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it would take more than a decade to write and ratify our national constitution, which would ultimately solidify the governing structures that were supposed to make enliven those principles. And you know, we kind of tend to want things to happen so quickly, but if we look at our history, we see one that it took longer for all of these things to solidify, that there were moments when it was not guaranteed, and it still is not guaranteed, that the democracy or Republic, or whatever we want to call it will survive, and that we're still fiddling with levers of power and the shapes of institutions. Is to bring forth the Declaration's principles, all the while everything is changing around us at a really quick speed.
Chris Beem
Yeah, you know, I mean, I think at one point in the book, she talks about how there is an optimistic dimension to the anthropology in the declaration that it has a notion of humanity that is ascendant, I guess that that nobody is in a better position to make judgments about my happiness than I am, and I'm able to do that no matter who I am, and we have to, even though we can fail, we still have to give all of us that that right to make those choices, which you know that's right.
Candis Watts Smith
So I do, I think there's something to that there. I think the rose colored part is and maybe the word, maybe the word that you were thinking of is happiness or liberty. And the reason why I'm asking about those two words is because, you know, Lincoln said for Liberty, liberty for some means I'm doing what you will with other people's labor, and some means doing what you will with your own labor. So there are these ways that words like liberty or happiness, happiness was the compromised word, instead of using the word property in the declaration independence. So anyway, there are these moments, and we've talked about this before, where there's like moments of we and there's moments of i, and it maybe we're in a era of i and it is Whew. It is taking a bite out of everything all of the time. But you know, some lessons have to be relearned, and they have to be relearned the hard way, and maybe this is one of them.
Jenna Spinelle
And I think that that notion of we is really a through line throughout Danielle's work, whether it is books like our declaration, I mean, we're ours right there in the title, or her more, you know, the democracy reform work that she does is definitely about making democracy and the institutions of democracy more accessible to more people, having more people participate. So we'll talk about that in the interview as well. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Danielle Allen.
Jenna Spinelle
Danielle Allen, welcome back to democracy works. It's great to have you joining us today.
Danielle Allen
Thank you, Jenna, it's great to be back.
Jenna Spinelle
So the last time you were on the show was about five years ago. At this time, it feels like forever and yesterday simultaneously. But at that point, we talked a lot about the our common purpose report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the project on democratic citizenship, of which you were a co chair, and there's a lot of different reforms, both cultural and structural, listed there, aimed at creating a stronger, healthier, more resilient democracy ahead of America's Semiquincentennial, which we are in that year right now. So a long way of getting to, you know, five years, six years on from that work, the report and the field work that preceded it, how are you feeling about the progress that has been made toward those goals, or perhaps not been made towards some of the things that you were writing about and thinking about.
Danielle Allen
Then, thanks so much. Jenna, yes, that 2020 report, it does feel like both a lifetime ago And yesterday, it was very ambitious report. We had 31 recommendations, some, as you said, on the cultural side of democracy, some on the institutional side, the truth is, we've actually seen a lot of really good forward progress. It puts me in a kind of odd position. I find it really hard to reconcile for myself what I see in terms of green shoots and positive energy at the grassroots level, then the obvious chaos and difficulty and complexity at the national, federal level, and then, thirdly, the fact that technology is moving so fast to rewire governance in ways that are deeply consequential and that our report didn't touch at all. So I'm never really sure which register I should be looking at in the grassroots where I was in Philadelphia earlier this week and visiting with a set of schools that have been really doubling down on civic education. I listened to a fifth grader talk to me about the play that she had helped develop to perform for the kindergartners in her school to teach them about the Constitution.
Danielle Allen
And she sort of leaned toward me and she said, yeah. Really had to think about engagement. I really wanted those kindergartners to be engaged because I really want them to know their vote counts. And I just thought, you know, it's amazing if we have fifth graders out there telling kindergartners with the real enthusiasm and passion that their vote counts, something right is happening at the same time, right? We're watching a Congress that has abandoned its role as the first branch of government, and again, a kind of technological infrastructure that has a degree of surveillance capacity that is historically unprecedented. So yes, I'm a little stuck between spin in between, honestly, in terms of knowing how to put all those pieces together into one picture.
Jenna Spinelle
To bring the declaration into the conversation a little more, you know, as I was rereading it in advance of this, this interview and your visit to Penn State, I was struck by, if you showed people today the list of grievances against the king that are in there, at least some Democrats would probably say Donald Trump is doing, or has done some of those things in there, and some Republicans would say that Joe Biden and Barack Obama did some of those things while they were in office. So I guess you know it's it's striking to me that our grievances are now perhaps more with each other than with, or at least perceived to be with each other, you know, regardless of what actually each party may or may not be doing. But, you know, we're now looking at each other as the enemy, as opposed to, you know, the king, or a shared external factor that the the colonists were 250 years ago.
Danielle Allen
That's interesting. That's an interesting that's an interesting way of telling this story. I would put it probably a little differently, to be honest. Jenna, so I would say that when Democrats complain about President Trump doing X, and Republicans complain about President Obama and President Biden doing y, they are actually both complaining about the same thing, which is that executive overreach an imbalance in the Constitution. The Constitution was designed to achieve the goal of legislative supremacy. You know that means the idea Congress should properly be setting the direction president should just be articulating a will that's coming out of the people. The reason this matters is because a will that comes out of the people necessarily is a product of negotiation and synthesis and sausage making, right? It's not pretty, and the thing that comes out, it's not going to line up with what anybody exactly wanted, right? We ought to be like, somewhat dissatisfied by the result. But the point is, it's not arbitrary. It becomes synthetic and sustainable over time when you transfer that initial kind of articulation of will from the legislative body to the president, that's when you get vulnerability to arbitrary power. Essentially, you get the sort of whimsical, frequently changing policy making experience of whiplash that we've all been living through. So the interesting thing is that our presidential system, you're right, has made us see that problem of executive overreach in partisan terms, rather than seeing through the problem of party to the actual problem of executive overreach.
Danielle Allen
So yes, that's a contrast to the American Revolution, where the stability of the monarchy, like the very fact that the monarch endured across administrations, meant that they could be very clear about where the source of the problem was, it's interesting to me, I think I like to share is that the British saw the same problem the Americans did. The British were also complaining about executive overreach, and actually so both countries, colonies, and then Britain itself had to solve that problem. Colonies solved it with a revolution, then a constitution that was supposed to have a reigned in executive Britain solved the problem with 50 years of just persistent reform efforts fighting corruption and trying to broaden the suffrage, broaden who was participating in voting. And the result of that was the modern constitutional monarchy. So now I ask you, compare the two executives, King Charles, the third president, Obama, Biden Trump. Doesn't matter which one you talk about, which country succeeded in restraining the executive, right? Not us. Yeah, not us. That's the real story here. I would say.
Jenna Spinelle
I wonder if you could talk about the importance of unanimity. I also was, you know, struck to see that it is a unanimous Declaration of Independence. So talk about the, I guess, both the process of getting to that unanimity and also why it was so important to the people engaging in the process that it be unanimous, right?
Danielle Allen
Yes. Well, we know it was important to them, because they went out of their way to achieve unanimity. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia actually introduced the resolutions to declare independence in early June Congress, though didn't vote at that time. Because they knew if they did vote, it was not going to be a unanimous result. They wanted to delay the vote until they could actually achieve a unanimous outcome. So as a part, actually, honestly, of stalling, they elected the committee to draft the preamble, and so Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Sherman and Livingston took on the job of doing that, and delivered the Declaration of Independence. So then we had the final vote, July 2. The reason unanimity mattered was because it did. I mean, they understood that they were constituting something new. They had in their minds a distinction between constitutive lawmaking and ordinary or routine lawmaking. Ordinary routine lawmaking. It's okay if the majority binds the minority, because you'll do it for a time.
Danielle Allen
There'll be unintended consequences. Things won't work. You're gonna have to revisit the decision, revise the law. It's an ongoing kind of contestation. It's okay if it has so so stability. But for establishing a political order, you need every stakeholder to buy in. If you don't have everybody buying into the very structure of the order, then you have a kind of active principle of civil war built into the thing itself. So you have to forestall that. I would say that's, that's what they were up to, and that's what they pulled off. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Jenna Spinelle
And this was also, you described the process as an exercise in democratic writing, the actual drafting of the words of the declaration. Can you share more about what that entailed?
Danielle Allen
Sure, absolutely. I mean, we have some crazy ideas. Even it's on the immigration Naturalization Service test, there's this idea that there's like, one author for the declaration. Of independence, then it's Thomas Jefferson. I always say, well, that they just, there's lots we can learn from Thomas Jefferson, including how to get credit for things. I mean, his tombstone says author, Declaration of Independence, and we've all bought that hook, line and sinker. Essentially, he wrote the first draft. He was the chair of the committee, but it was a group process. The first component of that group process was that in Continental Congress, they actually put ads in all the papers in the colonies asking people to write into Philadelphia with their stories about what the king was doing wrong. They crowdsource that list of grievances, in other words, and that kind of narrative, that diagnosis when they say, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people, then, you know, that moment, that again, diagnosis of the course of human events, they are bringing intelligence from all over their society into shaping that picture.
Danielle Allen
So that's the first thing. The second thing is, of course, how the committee operated. Yes, Jefferson wrote the first draft. He had existing materials. John Adams had been writing materials. John Adams wrote essentially a first draft of the Declaration for Massachusetts in January of 1776 a lot of its structure and argumentation ends up in the final declaration. So you have multiple people who are contributing to the intellectual case that's being made. And of course, in the actual month of June, 1776 Jefferson gives his draft to John Adams and Benjamin Franklin in particular. As first readers, they make critical edits. The word creator comes in because of that, not because of Jefferson, a few other kind of critical changes. And collectively as a group, they also have included a critique of the slave trade, they call it a violation of the sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people in Africa.
Danielle Allen
Then they take that draft and they give it to Congress. Congress cuts it by 25% we lose that great condemnation of slavery that was in the draft. Congress adds the phrase divine providence and the phrase supreme judge. In other words, somewhat increasing the religiosity of the text? It is a text that merges the secular vocabulary and a more religious vocabulary. It's a total merger. That merger reflects the fact that there were many voices contributing to the shape of the document. So the final thing they wrote on had voices coming in from all different parts of society. To point out, too, the way in which some of the language Abigail Adams uses in letters to John Adams actually echoes in the declaration too. John's own way of writing took a lot from Abigail. So at any rate, you know that really is a broad network of people who are contributing to what we get in the Declaration of Independence. Yeah, yeah.
Jenna Spinelle
And then, of course, that, you know, it's, it seems, you know, kind of, I think the last time you were on the show, we talked about, at least at that point in time, you felt like we were living in that period between 1776 and 1787 because there were all of these different ideas bubbling and things happening. And, I mean, it seems kind of wild that there was like that, that 11 year period of, I don't know, Limbo maybe. I mean, yeah, realize things were still happening and at the state level. But I guess time also moved much more slowly back then.
Danielle Allen
No, it really did. I mean, we can't. Underestimate, actually, how much difference that makes for us. So for example, during the Revolutionary War, it took six weeks for a letter to get back and forth across the ocean. And when you try to write the history of this period, you know there can be, like two year chunks, where I've started describing some of these two year chunks as like a murmuration, which is a formation of birds in the sky. You know, they sort of swirl for a while before they, like, form into formation and start flying in the same direction. And that was just a straightforward consequence of the technology of the era. It was a consequence of how communication worked.
Danielle Allen
At that time, our world is so different. I mean, the idea that right now, here we are. We're watching a war in Iran, and every single day we're able to count every casualty precisely. Every single day, the whole world knows precisely what the casualties were, where they were, how they were caused, et cetera. Changes utterly dynamics of politics. I don't think we have anywhere near kind of full accounting of consequences of that change of temporality, but it's a deeply real thing. Yeah. So it makes sense that five years ago feels like a lifetime ago in terms of the amount that's happened like, probably is like a lifetime's worth of stuff.
Jenna Spinelle
And is, I know, there's also the kind of the cycles of renovation theory, where every two or three generations there is a series of democratic reforms that happen. We can think about the, you know, reconstruction era, the progressive era, the civil rights era, it seems like we're due, or maybe past due, for for another cycle. Do you see, see evidence, both from what you know of history and from what you're seeing on the ground today, that that we are close to entering one of those cycles? Or, you know, how would you think about that?
Danielle Allen
Yeah, I think we're in it. I think we're in it. I think, okay, so this is where the technology story comes in. I basically think we're in that period of renovation of our institutions, except that right now, it's being done secretly and quietly by private companies that are fully embedding their technological capacity inside the government. At the same time we have, we do have a genuinely building grassroots movement for reform of our traditional, analog institutions. But that grassroots reform movement needs to embed the technology questions inside itself if it's going to have a chance of addressing with competing, taking space back from what private corporations have already achieved by way of transforming our governance structures.
Jenna Spinelle
Can you give an example of what that looks like?
Danielle Allen
Sure, I just was listening to 70% a paper which was essentially about how federalism has been completely reorganized because of data and data systems. So the federal government used to rely on states for data. Federal government no longer relies on states for data. They've Palantir in the center of government. And Palantir has built this incredible interoperable system that can suck up data from everywhere and turn it into a single, unified functioning data verse, essentially. And what this means is that, because the federal government needed stuff from states, states could make claims on the federal government, they could change and shape policy. There were choke plates and the like. So that really important element of the federal dynamic is now gone. And also, relatedly, the federal government hasn't had a lot of enforcement manpower, and it has relied on states to enforce federal policy. And then same thing that puts states in driver's seat to shape that policy, to make choke points because of now how data operates, federal government has much more extensive enforcement power than it did. I think we are all have not noticed how profoundly our Federalist structure has changed in the last 10 years. And it really is. It's like that long, long kind of time Mark. It's not just the last three or four years, but it's a big deal that we need to be able to name.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, that's that's helpful. Thank you for that. And so to bring the renovation back into this. How would you tie the technology piece to what you were saying before, about increasing the size of the house and proportional representation, or about, you know, redistricting efforts, or, you know, you can name whatever the specific reform is, but you know, how would you connect the technology piece to those things?
Danielle Allen
So the way we talk about this at my lab at the Kennedy School is you have to think of the institutions of representation as something like a spine, right? They have the job of moving information around and producing decision making that results in action central nervous system. But this. Spine in particular. And it the spine as a backbone of democracy, representative institutions. We know they should be flexible, agile, etc. Instead, what we have is kind of sclerotic spine. Some of the vertebrae are fractured, etc. So the question like, how do you grow a healthy spine in that kind of context? There are three vertebrae to think about. First vertebra is citizen connection to our political institutions, to that spine of representation. The second vertebra is how decision makers make their decisions, you know, sort of that legislative process.
Danielle Allen
And then the third vertebrae is the question of how that then all gets implemented, whether that's delivery of services or enforcement regulations, some of the judicial questions and so forth. So every single one of those vertebrae can be upgraded thanks to the assistive power of technology. And so we need to do that work for the spine at the same time that we are revisiting some of the analog mechanisms to make sure that the spine is truly connected to the whole people, not just part of the people. And then how we make sure that that's true? You know, sometimes we want to use technology to assist ourselves. So that's kind of long winded way of saying that, I think that where the democracy renovation movement is going to go ultimately is going to require a fusion of analog reforms and technological upgrades for our institutions.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. So you touched some ways back in our in our conversation about the need to, you know, as part of rebuilding people's trust institutions and making them responsive. It's perhaps not just about the institutions themselves. It's also about larger things, like economic inequality and those kinds of things. I know that that is sometimes a point of tension within the renovator community, like, how narrowly Do you focus on the specific thing that you're trying to do, versus if you do take a step back and try to address the broader issues, you run the risk of making trying to solve every problem in the world and which you end up solving none. Right? So how do you think about that tension and striking that balance between making specific, tangible changes, but also understanding that there are larger issues and factors at play here that go beyond any one reform or a set of reforms.
Danielle Allen
Well, there's got to be a division of labor, right? So that's why this project is really kind of collective impact project, so you need different people biting off different parts of it. The question is, is there a common agenda? And for me, that common agenda is the question of whether or not our organizations and institutions can function where power is shared. So those of us who are kind of working in a more narrow way on, how do we run elections? You know, how does Congress operate? Those are fundamentally conversations about, is power shared? Can we empower people by making sure they have access to power? And is power shared? Can we protect people from arbitrary power?
Danielle Allen
Those are the two kinds of questions that we have to ask in designing mechanisms at the same time, though, then those governance mechanisms are going to be used for policymaking across all domains, the economy, health, education, you name it. If you're going to invest all this time and build a democratic governance you sure want to be sure and that the policy you're making reinforces democracy and doesn't undermine it. So that's where you know, we need policymakers to learn how to do democracy supported public policy, to know the difference between an economic policy choice that will undermine democracy and one that will support it. You can sum that particular area up by saying we all know, which is that a middle class economy is a much stronger foundation for preserving democracy over time. So if you care about freedom, therefore democracy, then you need an economic policy that's going to steer in the direction of reinforcing the middle class, not eroding it.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, easier said than done. Maybe in all my time doing the show, I'm not sure anybody has ever so succinctly said something that is, that is easier said than done. But thank you for for naming that as we come to a close here, I want to touch us talk a little bit about the future. And you know, in in in many ways, the declaration was, was visionary, kind of imagining a world that did not yet exist. And there's an organization that one of your colleagues at the renovator just wrote about called democracy 2076 that is trying to do something similar. They call it world building, right? Like imagining what our democracy could look like in in 2076, and so, I guess I wonder, how you think about the sort of the Futurism and, you know, looking ahead, but without. Without losing sight, perhaps, of all of the things that we need to do right now, as we've been talking about for the past 30 minutes or so.
Danielle Allen
Well, I admire the future oriented vision and that effort to kind of really think forward and imagine a future democracy. That's a powerful and impressive thing, and I think, very inspiring for a lot of people. I think a challenge of doing that work is it can be very tempting to do that visioning by focusing on specific policy domains where one says, Okay, there's a problem here with help. There's a problem here with criminal justice. Let's reimagine those things. At the end of the day, democracy is the sort of two things I just named it, is protecting freedom, first by empowering people to share power, and then secondly, by protecting them from arbitrary power. And I'd sometimes worry that as a field, we don't actually have enough focus on those two core constitutional questions. If we can't get that right, then, honestly, from my point of view, like nothing else, kind of much matters. And it it just there's sort of kind of focus on institutional design that has existed at various points in time in this country, but has waned over the last 25 years, I would say, and which I'm really trying to help make the case for reviving.
Jenna Spinelle
Say more about that. What do you mean by focus on institutional design and how has it waned?
Danielle Allen
Well, I just mean, so, if you like, if you read the Federalist Papers, you know, 83 papers, or 85 papers, or whatever it is, they just, they're, it's so full of, I mean, like a science of democracy, right? They're very clear. They want to make sure that power is dispersed. And then it's like, well, this mechanism dispersed power? Will that mechanism disperse power? They want to make sure that the center of gravity for power is with the people. They call that Republican safety. That's their sort of name for it. And so again, it's like, well, will this mechanism, if we build a presidency this way, will that keep this integrated? People would have to build it that way, and so forth and so this, it feels very minute and in the weeds to people. People get bored with that kind of thinking very quickly. But for me, that's actually where the future democracy work fundamentally lies. And then, yes, you also need to vision the answers in every policy domain. So they too are reinforcing that sort of orientation towards empowerment and freedom for all people. But lots of times, I think it can be attractive to sort of spend time on the latter part and not on the more wonky, maybe technical, mechanism to design in the former part, right?
Jenna Spinelle
Well, and you know that that begs the question of, you know, who supports that design thinking? How is it funded? How is in the in the private sector, that's very easy to do, but much more difficult in a mix of, you know, nonprofits and government or quasi governmental organizations.
Danielle Allen
Well, for me, this is where the conversation about future of higher ed comes in. I think that the future of higher ed has to involve reviving the science of democratic design. Basically, we basically haven't taught it for generations, a little bit in law schools, but even there only a little bit actually, and otherwise we just don't teach it. So it's sort of no surprise that we're struggling. We there's a kind of core capacity. I mean, Washington called it science and government actually core capacity. That's not political science. Political Science is a descriptive discipline at this point in time. It's a design discipline that's that's where the gap is.
Jenna Spinelle
Well, we've covered a lot here, some for our history buff, some for our academics to think about, some for our reform minded folks. Just as we come to a close here, Dr Allen, I wanted to just give you a chance to talk a little bit more about the work that you're doing at the renovator I know it's still a fairly new project you launched on sub stack, but what, what kinds of writing, what kinds of conversations are you hoping to have there to continue to advance this work of democracy reform?
Danielle Allen
Thanks so much. Jenna, well, sort of like you and your podcast, I think you're out there trying to tell stories about positive work in democracy, and that's what we're trying to do, too. I mean, you know, there are lots of voices out there that are giving us the vent and the critique and the rage, and I understand that it's all important, powerful stuff, you know, and we need those positive answers about what we can do in this moment. So I'm lucky to work with a huge network of people advancing civic education for democracy, advancing structural, analog institutional reforms for democracy and advancing tech and democracy interfaces. So because those worlds, they've been sort of three separate worlds in my life, historically, they are starting to merge in terms of where the people are.
Danielle Allen
And I kind of wanted to make that sort of story. Of there being a single world that was all three of those things visible to people. So the renovator is trying to do that and show people there really is a path forward. There is an alternative governance approach that can give us a different kind of policy making landscape, but we got to build sort of coalition and solidarity around that if we're going to crack through the dynamics of that moment.
Jenna Spinelle
Danielle Allen, thank you so much for your time today, and we will look forward to seeing you at Penn State.
Danielle Allen
Thank you. Jenna, appreciate it. That was a fun and helpful conversation .
Chris Beem
Well, I think you kind of got the sense of just how impressive. Danielle is, as you know, scholar activist, a democratic activist, civic educator, etc. And, yeah, it's just, it's, it's all worth your time the sub stack. What's it called resonator? Yeah, that's, that's, you know, worth your time as well. But, you know, in keeping with the grumpy old man theme, you know, I just, this is an argument that I have with Jenna. I mean, it's like we set our calendars, okay, it's about time to have an argument. But, but, you know, she's, she's talking about these green shoots, positive energy at the grassroots level. And, you know, I'm, I just worry that we are, you know, green shoots are almost by definition, fragile, and it's really hard.
Chris Beem
There's a lot of acorns that start. There are not as nearly as many oak trees. And I just worry that we are not sufficiently aware of the precariousness of those grassroots, especially right now in this climate. And, you know, we can, it's all it's very good to be hopeful, you know. And we, the McCourtney Institute, puts out, we send students, undergraduates out to organizations that do this work throughout the nation. So I'm not disparaging it. I just I want to be clear about the stakes associated with that hope and and how difficult the climate is right now.
Candis Watts Smith
I think that two things can be true at the same time. Green shoots of grassroots work are fragile, but also all of our Christina's fragile. And you know, we've had across history. It's not like we've ever had a perfect democracy? No, of course not. And I remember when I moved back to North Carolina from Massachusetts, from Williams to Carolina, and my friends were like, Are you sure you want to move to North Carolina? And at that time, one of there was a poli sci colleague, Andy, can't remember his last name, was writing that North Carolina was not a democracy at that time, that if they were going to use the same kind of measures for democracy as we use across the globe, North Carolina at that time, would not have been a democracy.
Candis Watts Smith
My point is, that, you know. And then we can think about across history, that there are some points in history when some people see and get the benefits of what we understand democracy to be, and other people get the other side of the state, the prerogative state, where they are exposed to state sanctioned lawlessness and the arbitrary use of violence and power and force. So, you know, I mean, I think that what we're seeing now is unprecedented in some ways, I think, in some ways and not in other ways. And so, you know, I don't, I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree that green shoots of positive energy at the grassroots level is fragile, and that there's a lot to there's a lot of force against those from growing.
Chris Beem
It's impossible to argue with anything you're saying. I mean is, I think it was Adams who said there wasn't a democracy yet that hasn't committed suicide. And that is a fairly, you know, dark prospect, you know. But he was saying it in 1770 whatever. And, you know, we'll see if he's right or not. But I just what I would want to, you know, I was, what I wrote down when you were talking was the word retrograde, retrograde. I just wonder if we haven't, you know, come back in some. Or taking a step backwards in a lot of dramatic ways, including violence, you know, exhibited on people who were marginalized in our society, right? That's, that's happening again, and you know, whether or not it's, you know, I don't know. I mean, you know, the same place where you know the two white people were shot is also the same place where you know George Floyd was killed. I you know, I don't want to understate the the, you know, difficulties, or the fact that we are we have never come close to anything idyllic in terms of our democracy, but I would say that there are key prerequisites that we are losing touch with and and, and one of them is the ability to see each other in as part of a common enterprise. And you know, in spite of our disagreements, profound, deep, abiding disagreements, that we still see ourselves, as, you know, working towards a common good.
Candis Watts Smith
And there's still examples of when people come together that would otherwise disagree and get things done. So, John Gastil, who studies juries, shows that you know, you bring a group of people together and they need to look at the evidence and that they understand that the states of their decision can change a person's lives, and they do the work, or, you know, when people feel like, oh, the elections are rigged, and then they go and do the poll worker training, and then They're like, Oh, it's really hard to read election or I mean, so there are these, there are these examples of places where there is that prerequisite set of values. I think what you're pointing to is the way that you know when, like your car is not working. That's when you learn the different parts of your car, you know. And a good analogy, you know, we live, and we're living in an era where there are things that are going wrong. It's giving us an opportunity to see like, well, what are those things that are broken or need to be replaced or retooled?
Candis Watts Smith
And then there's just kind of the fact that we live in a information rich environment whereby most of the information that we're getting is like the stuff that goes viral, like Trump saying that he's glad that Robert Miller is dead, but there are also Democrats and Republicans who are like, Come on, my guy, that is absolutely unnecessary. It's wrong, and we shouldn't be doing that. But that's not the conversation that we're having. We have a conversation about the viral moments, not the things that happen before or after that try to fix it or smooth it over, or the places where things are working fine, because those aren't newsworthy. And I'm not saying that, like these big moments aren't important. They are because they do signal to people what's okay and what's not okay. But I guess I would say that there are deeply rooted seeds. It's just a matter of seeds of empathy, seeds of wanting to do more, seeds of wanting to make sure that your neighbors are doing well, but they need to be cultivated and watered and cared for and talked to, and we haven't seen that in a while.
Chris Beem
I'm not going to argue with you Candace. I mean, these are things that need to be nurtured. But I just want to just insist nurturing is a discipline, either in our children through civic education, in higher education, in the family, in our society at large, we just have to be committed to that and to in a way that transcends cheap partisan politics. It's an acknowledgment of our mutual humanity. And that is that seemed a long way to me. You know, the one thing I would say that Daniel mentioned was, it's appropriate to think about a division of labor here. Nobody has to be responsible for everything. And, you know, I had. Thought that, you know, in civil rights movement, you had some people marching while other people were working through the courts and working through legislatures and and so.
Chris Beem
And there was nothing about, oh, she also talks about the spying metaphor, right? Like there's, there's vertebrae that we need to have to be all working together if the spy is going to to be operative and to support weight and all that and and that is a good metaphor, too, I think. And so, you know, none of us are responsible for everything, but all of us have a certain responsibility. And you know, if I'm going to bring this in for a landing, I would say that. That is, if you're looking for how to do that, you could do a lot worse than look to Danielle Allen as a as a model. And, you know, subscribing to our sub stack and reading her work and and, you know, reading our common purpose. And for that reason, again, it's worth mentioning that that it was, it was a real privilege to bring her to campus. So anyway, I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
And I'm Candis Watts Smith for Democracy Works. Thanks for listening.