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A
That means the project of democracy is just always and perpetually to be undoing the challenge of oligarchic capture.
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And now the Good Fight with Jasia Monk. One way to think about this moment is that philosophical liberalism is facing a serious external crisis. This has happened a number of times before in the history of liberalism. In the mid late 19th century, liberals didn't quite know how to deal with transformation of the economy with a rise of factories in the north of England, with industrial capitalism and the immiseration of big parts of a new proletariat. In the middle of the 20th century, liberals didn't quite know how to deal with the threat from totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism. And in each of these moments, liberals reinvented their political tradition, refurbished their ideas in a way where the basic values remained, but they were able to speak to this political moment. That is some of the intellectual work that I'm trying to do in my own writing on this podcast at Persuasion. And I thought that I would invite one of the most prominent political theorists at work today in the United States to think with me about some of these issues. Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University professor at Harvard University. She holds a number of other roles at the university, and she is also the founder and publisher of a substack called the Renovator. She also had a recent piece in Persuasion about why we should abolish partisan primaries. We talked about how to renew the liberal tradition. We talked about the importance of civics education and her concrete work on on trying to get a form of civics education that liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, can agree on rolled out into more places around the United States. We talked about the importance of participation and whether or not participation will always skew the political debate in favor of the ideological extremes in favor of professional managerial class. We have a little bit of a disagreement about that. And finally, in the last part of this conversation, I asked Daniel what success would look like if we look back in 25 or 50 years at this political moment and we feel like things have actually gone okay in the end, what is it that we will have done? What would have made that difference? To listen to that part of a conversation, please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamung.substack.com. Daniel Allen welcome back to podcast.
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A
Thank you, Yasha. It's nice to see you. Thanks for having me.
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B
So we speak regularly. You know, it seems to me striking that we've now been in this crisis of democracy or whatever we want to Call it for at least 10 years, at least since Donald Trump was elected in 2016. And at least for me, it feels like with each passing year, we sort of have fewer answers about what to do and get out of this moment. At the beginning, there is these confident prognostications that this is just a temporary thing, that demographic changes were going to make sure that somebody like Trump could never get elected again, or those sort of confident policy prescriptions about the three clever tricks we have to adopt in order to get through this moment. And it seems to me that as Trump got reelected and as rather similar political movements are now leading in the polls in Britain and France and some polls in Germany, that just doesn't really seem realistic anymore. Where's your head at in terms of understanding this moment and thinking through how to respond to it?
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A
Sure. No, thanks. I appreciate that framing Yasha. And it's true you and I have been in conversation about these themes for nearly a decade at this point. Yeah, no, I mean, I think we live in a new world. And so in that regard, I think the most important thing is to understand the world we live in and then to figure out how we're going to navigate it. There are a lot of features of that new world. I mean, one is I talk about the end of neoliberalism, and I mean that in a purely descriptive fashion. I mean, one might also mean it from an evaluative point of view. But what I mean is just literally that a set of sort of status quo policy frameworks involving trade liberalization, globalization, relatively speaking, open borders, market based solutions for essentially nearly all social problems, that sort of status quo policy package is no longer with us. Both in the U.S. the Biden administration and the Trump administration have moved into completely different policy territory. We're also seeing dramatic policy shifts in other countries as well. And of course, there is this just technologically fueled rapid transformation of economy and society. And in that context, then the sort of third thing we're seeing is a real struggle on the part of legacy democracies to govern effectively in turbulent and rapidly changing circumstances. So that's sort of the situation. I believe in freedom. I believe in self government for free and equal citizens. So for me, the question is not really, you know, how do we preserve x old thing, but rather how in these conditions do we win the institutions of free self government? That is to say, I think, I take it, we have the job of winning them from a set of circumstances that are fundamentally eroding the opportunity for free self government.
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B
Yeah. One thing that I'VE been thinking about a lot is that the worldview that I, to some extent, had when I was 18 years old and to some extent was raised into as I went through my university education has sort of fallen apart in some quite remarkable way. You know, you and I have some ideological differences and some differences of approach. You also are a trained classicist, which sadly, I'm not. But, you know, we were raised in a somewhat similar academic environment, both political theorists. And it just seems to me that the world, even as it looked when I entered graduate school in 2007, certainly when I entered college in 2000, has just fallen apart. But some of the most fundamental assumptions, not about the sort of normative debates we used to have in the government department at Harvard, but some of the underlying assumptions about what the trends of the world were have just not stood the test of time. The idea that nationalism would be the ideology of the 20th century and that it wouldn't really shape the 20th century, 21st century in the same way. The idea that international trade would bring democracy to the world and liberalize China, the idea that meritocracy would give everybody opportunity. And as the share of people going to college increased and increased, people would be really optimistic about the future. And I could go on and on and on. To me, the task of this moment is trying to think about how do we preserve some of the values that I'm still committed to, and I continue to be a philosophical liberal, but while freeing ourselves from the kind of constraints of a worldview that clearly just doesn't speak to this moment in a way that actually makes us incapable of political battle, incapable of taking on these illiberal forces that, for their many flaws, sound more like they're speaking to the year 2025 than my friends sometimes do.
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A
Yeah. No, it's funny. I often make a point like one that you've just made with reference to the work of your collaborator, Frank Fukuyama, you know, his important book, the End of History. And I sort of joke that, you know, when he published that book, the End of History, in the early 90s, I don't remember the year of publication, there was this idea that liberalism, Western liberalism, was sort of triumphant and that the, you know, big conflicts of politics had ceased, and now we knew what world we were going to live in. And my joke is that actually the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, was the beginning of history, not the end. It was like the sort of restarting of history. The Cold War had frozen things in place, had frozen geopolitical realities in place and with its end, suddenly sort of jockeying for power position could begin again. And really that is history. When I was a kid, I used to sort of read books of history and wonder what was it like to live in big history. And I feel like, well, now we all know, right? This is what it's like to live in big history. So rather than being the end of history, it was the beginning of big history again. And so then the question is, how do you handle that condition? How do you navigate it? Like you, I'm an advocate of liberalism. I'm though an advocate for a very specific variant of it which I call power sharing liberalism. This is the theme of my book justice by Means of Democracy. And that variant I've developed based on a critique of where I think the liberalism of the sort of 70s, 80s, 90s went wrong.
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B
So tell us about those things. Where did the liberalism of the 70s and 80s and 90s go wrong? And how is power sharing liberalism in response to that?
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Yeah, no, I'm happy to. So yeah, no, it went wrong in the sense of taking sort of liberalism rests on a package of sort of two sets of rights or freedoms, right. You know, philosophers talk about negative liberties or freedoms from governmental interference, so freedoms of expression and conscience and religion and so forth. And then there are also the sort of positive liberties, the freedoms too to participate, to be a voter, to run for office, to help steer and shape your own community. And liberalism for the last few decades has really prioritized the former and I think established a sort of approach to policy where as long as the kind of technocrats deliver sufficiently high material well being and protect those negative liberties, then those participation rights don't really matter that much. Right? We've technocrats, we've got it under control. I think that was a fundamental mistake and produce real blind spots about the operations of the economy. So for example, blind spots to the impacts of globalization impacts to the erosions of dignity and empowerment that people have been experienced, which have been the wells of resentment and toxicity. So power sharing liberalism is simply an approach to liberalism that takes both bundles of rights completely seriously, considers those participatory rights sort of non sacrificeable. And then I spend my time sort of looking around our structures, our institutions and our organizations, trying to revive their capacity to actually empower people to govern themselves. So it means different ways of organizing civil society organizations. It means needing to rethink the institutions of representative government. It means looking at policy domains and making sure that they're not only connected to appropriately participatory governance processes, but also actually in their outcomes that they're supportive of people's empowerment. So, for example, for me, that puts housing at the top of the list of economic policy questions, because if people don't have stable housing, then they're not empowered in essentially every other dimension of their life. And that changes the balance after sort of decades where growth and taxation were the kind of key economic concepts. Housing is the single most important kind of economic theme. And if we can't get that right in liberal democracy, then it doesn't really. The growth question doesn't matter.
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B
So how do you square this emphasis on participation with another concern that a lot of people have had in the last years, and to which I think you're generally sympathetic, which is the sort of dominance of a professional managerial class in a lot of our supposedly neutral institutions and in our culture more broadly. Right. So when you create more opportunities for participation, a lot of the time the people who are most likely to take those opportunities are those that have the most financial means, those that have the most education, those that have the most free time, and are likely to be comparatively privileged people rather than comparatively unprivileged people. I always think of a lovely text by another former political theorist at Harvard, Michael Walzer, a lovely text that he published in descent of the 1960s called a day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen. And it starts with a famous quotation from Marx where you fish in the morning and you hunt in the afternoon to critical critics in the evening. And he says, but if we believe in basis democracy, if we believe in participatory democracy, what's actually going to happen is that we're going to be giving out fishing licenses in the morning and we're going to sit in the hunting commission, deciding when we are and aren't allowed to hunt in the afternoon, instead of writing beautiful poems in the evening, we're going to be sitting on a horrible literary prize committee fighting with each other about which poems should win. That's a little bit of a parody, but I guess I just wonder to what extent these two things can come at cross purposes. So we take the case of housing. I agree with you that housing is incredibly important. That one of the reasons why people are very pessimistic, including relatively affluent young people with relatively good jobs, is that they feel like I'm never going to be able to afford a nice apartment in New York, Boston, la, the centers of economic opportunity in the United States. But of course, a lot of the reason why we're unable to build housing is forms of participation that get every building process bogged down. Environmental review and where neighbors can always complain about the changes in the character of a neighborhood that are going to come from any housing project. So do you feel that in some way here, participatory democracy of a kind that for good reason you're emphasizing, may actually strengthen rather than weaken the kind of overrepresentation of one stratum of society and decision making that already has been able to concentrate quite a lot of benefits in their own hands?
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A
Yeah, no, I understand those critiques and they're important critiques. And so it's important, I think, to look at two things. So first of all, there's a question of the science of democratic design. I think that our intellectual resources for doing that work are not at their highest point or strong point. I think we have neglected this science. If one digs into the history of it, then a key feature of the science of democratic design is that you're always trying to optimize for multiple values. Participation or inclusion is one value, but so too is energy. And you have to actually find designs that are able to kind of align these two values. And so I think in the 90s and 2000s, there was a lot of embedding of participatory processes into decision making mechanisms, but without concern for this question of energy. So in that regard, it is important to find alternative designs that can bring those two values together. And I think people are experimenting with that sort of much more efficient ways of doing sense making, also ensuring that the kind of impacted community and the participatory community actually align with each other. Right now we have a lot of misalignments between those things. Where you have, for example, a suburb makes decisions about housing, those decisions impact a much broader surround. And so in that regard, the kind of decision making location has been put at the wrong jurisdictional level. And so I think you can make jurisdictional adjustments as well as process adjustments to align incentives better and increase the efficiency of those participatory elements. So my lab spends a lot of time looking at that and trying to figure out array of possible participatory mechanisms, which ones are going to be more efficient and give you more energy in your decision making process. That's one thing. But another thing is that, yes, the idea that we need to take the positive liberties seriously is a sort of strong alternative model for how we think about society and economy both. I mean, at the moment, I think in our economy we are watching an, I think, ever increasing extraction of people's time from them and monetization of people's time. I don't know about you, but I know I feel like I have much less control over my time than I did even 10 years ago. And I also have a very strong sense of awareness that technology is a big part of that, because with calendaring systems and digital systems and so forth, we can literally control time down to, you know, the last millisecond. And in other words, I think that even the concept of like the protected work week, the kind of protections that were gained in the wake of the industrial revolution is erading, is eroding and degrading. You know, I'm not sure how many people actually can keep bounds around a 35 hour work week any longer. At any rate, in that context, against that background, I think we have to actually revisit the question of the work week, how we bound it, how we control it. And I also think that employers have gotten used to the idea that as a part of being a decent employer, you should support work life balance for employees. I think we have to turn the crank on that. And really the framework should be to support work life civic balance. And that can mean things like actually giving people the day off on election day, or it's okay if your employees decide that they want to run for a municipal office and that might mean they have to work 3/4 time for 3 years instead of full time, but they shouldn't lose their jobs. Employers should accommodate people taking on some of those local responsibilities. We do have a challenge at the moment of even at the most kind of local level of municipal governance, having insufficient people able to stand for roles and offices. So the point is that I think the fact that people have made badly designed approaches to participation doesn't delegitimate the value of participation, but it really signals we have to rebuild the science of democratic design sort of thing one, and then thing two, there is a big kind of economic framework that we have to intervene in to, yes, give people control over their time.
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B
Again, one area in which this trade off becomes very obvious is in electoral mechanisms. You recently published an article on your subsecondent persuasion arguing that primaries, as they're currently designed, are a really bad idea. And that seems to me to be exactly a case of this, where if you have 5 to 8% of people participating in a congressional primary, that feels like a democratic advance relative to what the situation was in the 1950s and 1960s when it was the famous smoke filled backrooms where deals were being hashed out, but actually those 5 to 8% of the population are quite likely to be unrepresentative of a population as a whole. And we know from all kinds of studies that they're likely to be much more ideologically extreme. That's compromising, more angry than the average voter. And so by the time that the average American shows up to the polls in November, they have two choices, both of which can in some circumstances be quite extreme, and both of which they feel don't really represent them. One of the results of that is that the number of Americans who affiliate with either the Democratic or the Republican Party is at record lows. So how do you think about solving, squaring that circle? How do we increase participation in a real way while changing the system, which gives us kind of this fake simulacrum of participation in a way that actually allows for political parties to exert tremendous ideological discipline over their members?
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A
I think one of the things that's really important in thinking about the future of democracy or the future of liberalism is to recognize that there is no static end state. And even past reforms that were democratizing, liberalizing, and so forth themselves, they're not static end states. The reason for this is I agree with Iron Law of Oligarchy, the argument that every form of human social organization tends over time to oligarchic capture. And if that's correct, I think it's correct, then that means the project of democracy is just always and perpetually to be undoing the challenge of oligarchic capture. Oligarchic capture can take different forms. In our current moment, we have the capture by small voting blocs within the parties, formal parties who have more extreme views. They've captured our political institutions. There's also the issue of corporate ideological capture, et cetera, as another part of the story. So both of those things are relevant. And so when political party primaries were introduced, they were a positive democratic reform. They were expanding the conversation beyond smoke filled back rooms, exposing things to public accountability and transparency. But over time, the process has been captured again through gerrymandering. And then that has combined with reduced participation in a more captured process, a less legitimate process, to give us the problem that we now have to undo again. So in other words, I do think that being committed to the project of freedom is actually about being committed to renovating political institutions, you know, every couple of generations, essentially. And that's one of the sort of messages I'm really trying to communicate to people. So when people feel very despairing about our current moment, my response is like, you know, no, don't bother despairing. I mean, it's just the price of freedom, which is that, you know, over time, your institutions will cease to deliver for the project of freedom, and you're going to have to renovate them again. It just happens to be our job, our time, in this particular moment.
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B
So I agree with that. I guess I wonder whether the kinds of institutional changes that we've been talking about are going to be enough. And that's, you know, it's a hard challenge to ask you to present something that's going to be enough, because I don't think anybody really has the answer to that. You know, one concern I have is that, you know, some of these reforms are responding to specifically American ailments. But we see that democracy is under significant threat in all kinds of countries with all kinds of different. Now, arguably, Switzerland, which is the most participatory democracy in the world, perhaps has done relatively better than some other countries. So I can see how you could make a comparative case for how participation strengthens democracies. But certainly, I think one pitfall that this conversation often falls into is to look at specific American ailments, suggest fixes to them. And I often agree both that those are ailments and that the fixes make sense. But when I look at the fact that moderate political forces are sort of on the decline everywhere, I worry that that may not quite be enough. And the other point I want to make is that liberalism has been in deep and serious intellectual crises a number of times in history. You can place those crises at different moments and have different accounts of them. I think the two most obvious ones are with the rise of industrial capitalism and a large, readily immiserated working class in the factories of Manchester and, you know, Midwest and United States and so on in the second half of the 19th century. And then the second one, you know, was obviously the period of real ideological competition from fascism and communism in the. In the middle of the 20th century. And each time, it seems to me that liberalism responded in part by reinventing the tradition, by figuring out how it is that we can take certain forms of social rights and integrate them within a basic liberal framework. How it is that liberals could come to favor rather than oppose universal schooling and limit on how many hours people could work and restrictions on child labor and all kinds of other things. The response to communism and fascism was more complicated, but it was a set of thinkers from Sudesck to Ramon Rond and others, who were trying to think through how liberalism can persevere under this threat from These totalitarian. What strikes me is that I don't see a similar set of attempts to reimagine our tradition going on today. And there's many people doing good work. And perhaps these things only ever become evident in hindsight. But it's not clear to me where the fundamental rethinking of our tradition is at the moment. That could rejuvenate it in the way that, you know, Mill and Hophouse and Aaron and Schklah and others rejuvenated the liberal tradition in past moments of crisis. Am I being too pessimistic here?
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A
Well, I mean, it's tough, Yasha, because I'll be honest, that's what I think of myself as doing. So I guess my question would be, you know, back to you. So take my book justice by Means of Democracy. Why does it not count as an example of that?
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B
Well, I think it does count as an example of that. I just wonder whether we're still too stuck in a paradigm to have gone far enough in reinventing the tradition. And then, of course, that's sort of more straightforward problems, which is in a moment where we don't have very much political power, how do we actually make some of those changes? But I guess it feels to me like the anger that people have at the political system at the moment. The sense of the political system is not responsive to what they want. The sense that there is a kind of cognitive elite that gets to determine how we live, and anybody who's not a part of that is excluded from political participation also in cultural representation is pretty palpable. And while I agree with many of the things you say and you write in that book, I'm just not sure that we collectively have been able to come up with responses that so far that I have to carry the day. But perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.
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A
Well, I mean, let me. I'll try to. I want to go back to your first question, too, which was one about the US context versus the comparative context and how can minute institutional solutions in one place be pertinent to the larger global systemic change that we're seeing and so put these pieces together. So, you know, pushing you on my book partly because, you know, it's only one book, and obviously to your point, there needs to be sort of a field of intellectuals sort of working in the relevant space. I do think I've made a proffer in that space, and I would love people to take it seriously as a proffer. I, too, are frustrated in certain sense, like why the proffer's not being taken up and why there isn't, you know, a bigger, richer conversation already. I mean, I do think there are some, I think Anton Barbaque is doing fantastic work from another kind of point in this spectrum. So I do think that there is actually real work emergent and I think it would be nice if we could collectively figure out how to maybe accelerate that or make some of that conversation more visible. But at any rate to the prior question. So I think from my point of view, a lot of the work of sort of reanimating and transforming liberalism is about not. It's this kind of proverbial thing like don't give a man a fish, teach a man to fish. And in that regard I think that the transformation of liberalism is actually about teaching people to live in self governing ways again. And that can only be done in place. So in that regard, I think any given sort of citizen person who carries a sort of spirit of citizen, who cares about these traditions, needs to figure out how to bring self government into existence in the place where they live. And then presuming they can achieve that, then there will be lessons for others to, to do the same thing. And it may be that over time the particular approach to resuscitating self government in the US will have institutional solutions that other people also pick up and use. But I think that's how things move. When liberalism grows and spreads, it's not that somebody has a blueprint for the whole world, it's that a particular political community finds some solutions. So you take abolition of slavery or take universal suffrage. Neither of those things were things that sort of like spread as like here's the solution for the world. Rather particular political communities figured them out. Or take achieving legislative supremacy, that is to say, making sure that the executive acts within bounds and that the will of the people is actually channeled through a legislature to steer the direction of the society. In the American case, it took a revolution, a constitution, a president, a presidential structure to solve that. In the British case, it took 50 years of fighting corruption in the monarchy, Burke's economical reform and so forth. And then the move towards suffrage reform and electoral reform. Completely sort of different set of institutional solutions, although both directed at achieving legislative supremacy. Now the US doesn't have legislative supremacy, the UK does have legislative supremacy. And so then there's different kinds of lessons that you can learn in the contrast between those two countries. So I spend a huge amount of work here in Massachusetts. To be honest, my theoretical work's in a book, but my practical Work is on the ground.
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B
And you ran for governor of Massachusetts.
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A
I did, but that was like a million years ago at this point in time. I mean, what I'm talking about now is for me, this sort of work of democracy renovation is always culture as well as institution. That means it's civic education as well as institutional change. The civic education work that I do is at this point, we're serving 100,000 kids in the state of Massachusetts, for example. There's also a set of ballot initiatives. Democracy is on the ballot in Massachusetts November 2026, in ways that would really change how our electoral system operates and how it contributes to shaping the electoral system of our national government. So I'm quite confident that here in Massachusetts we are going to find a path to our sort of resuscitated version of energetic, participatory self governance. And then the question will be, can that be a model for other states and can we help the whole US Federal structure reorient and reorganize itself? And you know, my hope would be that if we can figure that out, other countries can also learn from that. But I would never pretend to have answers for any other country in that regard. You know, I am absolutely a kind of place based worker, you know, period. That's just. And I'm completely bounded by place.
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B
Let's talk about civic education a little bit. It's obviously very important. You've done a lot of work also on uncovering just what the state of civic education is in the United States. My understanding is that to a striking degree, how much civic education we give middle school kids and high school kids has declined. Of course, that calls for an easy solution, which is to engage in more civic education. But the moment you do, there's been pretty deep ideological battles about what we should teach and how we should teach. And there's going to be some people on the political right who will want to present the United States as the best country that has ever existed on earth with no blemishes. And there's going to be some people on the left who want to portray the United States as the worst country that has ever existed on earth with no redeeming features. How do you, in a deeply polarized political environment, think about designing a curriculum for civic education that people on different ends of ideological spectrum can accept and that hopefully builds commonality rather than polarizing teachers, students, the general public?
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A
Well, the answer is in your question, just exactly as you said. Polarization is the single biggest obstacle to rebuilding the infrastructure of civic learning. And therefore, if you Want to rebuild the infrastructure of civic learning. The first thing you have to do is solve for polarization. I was a part of a huge collaborative effort, 300 people from across the country that was cross ideological network of scholars and practitioners that created, created something called the Educating for American Democracy roadmap. And we agreed from the get go that we were coming from different parts of the political spectrum. But we shared a sense of urgency about the need for kids to have access to rich civic learning opportunities. And so we knew we would hit things we disagreed on. And we agreed when we started that when we did, we would just stop and wrestle them through until we came up with solutions. And so over a period of about 18 months of work, we did that and we produced a kind of consensus framework for excellence in history and civic learning. So the short answer is you solve polarization by getting people from different parts of the ideological spectrum into the same conversation, committing to staying in the conversation, and then learning how to compromise with each other. And we did it, and we're growing and we're implementing curricula that are aligned with that roadmap all over the country.
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B
One of the main obstacles to this is the people who just say, look, it's more important to read, to teach reading and writing and other basic skills, or to give people business classes or shop classes or something like that. Or is it people who are opposed to this on ideological grounds? What do you think makes it so hard to spread civic education further than when you're doing an excellent initiative?
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A
Well, I mean, you're right, that sort of polarization is a challenge. And so for decades, people haven't been able to rebuild civilization civic learning infrastructure because of the problem of polarization. So we did this work from 2018, I guess, or 2019 through 2021, when we released the roadmap, and then have been building implementations ever since then. So we kind of got through one of the obstacles, namely the polarization obstacle. And then you get through that one and then you hit the next one. The next obstacle is just the level of resources that are available for civic education. And there you're exactly right. That is educational policy for seven decades has prioritized STEM education. And that shows up in dollars, but it also shows up in volume of requirements and things like where testing is required versus not required and so forth. So civic learning continues to operate in an environment that's sort of largely outside of the funded, tested part of the educational system. And as a result, it's short on time, it's short on access to resources so that's really the kind of problem that we have to solve next.
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B
And what did you find in terms of the substance of the content? I mean, I'm relatively heartened by some studies like the one that Morin Common did a number of years ago, which show that the number of people who hold these relatively polarized views about American history that I briefly sketched one or two questions ago are actually quite few. Right. But most Republicans do want the history of slavery to be taught in schools and do recognize that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are great American heroes. And most Democrats recognize that despite the moral flaws and the fact that they're enslaved people, the founders of United States are great Americans who contributed a lot to the development of our country. And so actually majorities of the population can probably agree on the broad outlines of what we should be teaching about our history. But does that hold for the Republican state legislature in Alabama? Does that hold for the elementary school teacher, the secondary school teacher that has to actually deliver that material in Newton, Massachusetts?
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A
Yeah. No. I mean, so that's a good and a complicated question. You're right about sort of where the super majority of opinion is and also, you know, a heck of a lot of the sort of swath of practitioners, whether in classrooms or in state legislators. That doesn't mean that there aren't conflicts and contestations. I mean, yes, there are very much everywhere we look. And so you sort of see a landscape where you can get great cross partisan collaboration. Like take Arizona for example, where a Republican state legislature set up a new school for civic Economic thought and literature. School for Civic Economic Thought and leadership, sorry, attached to asu set up by Republican legislature. And then when the politics changed in the state, Democratic governor came in Democratic control. There was a decision to keep the school. There was no, you know, they did not decide to shut it down. And so it has become, you know, a sort of bipartisan project. Same thing is true in University of Tennessee. You see other states, you know, for example, Oklahoma, where you had a head of education in the state who developed a policy to put Bibles in every classroom and then was overruled by the Republican governor. Right. So things are definitely contested. But what I think we can say is that there is a good kind of critical mass of people who do take the broad view, who recognize that we can report on the good and the bad of American history, that actually engaging people in essentially inquiry about our past so that people are equipped to ask questions, come to their own judgments and understanding about it is really the important path forward, there is a critical mass of people coming from both sides of the political spectrum. And so, as with any other project, you try to kind of grow the coalition right, increase the number of allies who support that work.
- [36:22]
B
I think now I'm asking you and myself something that is probably unfair because neither you nor I are campaign strategists. We're not in the business of trying to help political candidates win. But there is an obvious question that's been in the background of my mind as we have this conversation, which is, in order to make any of those changes, you need political majorities. And at the moment, it doesn't feel like those political majorities are anywhere in the offing. Should political theorists play a role in trying to formulate the language, the rhetoric, the strategies, the ideas that can allow politicians who are committed to our basic democratic institutions, whether on the left or on the right or in the center, to win political power so they can actually put some of these programs into practice? Or should we content ourselves of sort of coming up with the reforms that would be great for somebody to implement? I know you're doing a lot of concrete work in states, et cetera, to get them off the ground as well, but what should we think of as our role? And I'm generally split on that Sometimes I think my comparative advantage is to think about big ideas and to envisage what a better set of institutions and norms might look like. And then I hope that somehow that influences the world and somebody takes that up. Other times, I think, well, but aren't we in our own bubble? If we sit there thinking, this is what a great system would be like at a moment when the ability to implement any of this depends on actually rejuvenating the political language of political parties that quite clearly are exhausted, and they're exhausted because they don't seem to have the right words and the right ideas and words and ideas is something that we, as political theorists should, in theory, be able to help with.
- [37:55]
A
I appreciate you asking that question in the vocabulary of what's the right role? Or what should we do in our role as political theorists? I really depend on Cicero, actually, for thinking about roles and his concept of the Persona. You know, there's a sort of Persona of the philosopher, there's a Persona of the politician, there's the Persona of the father, the mother, etc. And every role has its rights and responsibilities. So in my own case, I understand myself to have a political theorist role. I understand myself to have a citizen role, understand myself to have a mother role for Example. And so there are things I do as a political theorist that I don't do as a mother. There are things I do as a citizen that I don't do as a political theorist. Right. I think for me, that sort of separation of role and responsibility is really important. So I think the job of a political theorist is to, for example, ask questions about what is the general welfare. The Constitution puts a stake in the ground for the idea that we're trying to pursue the general welfare, or what is safety and happiness for a people, and then makes those answers available to everybody. All politicians, doesn't matter. I don't care what your party is. I mean, I'm trying to help figure out what the right answer is. And I hope I have something to offer you that will be of value to you. That's what I see as the role of political theorist. Now, as a citizen, it's a different question. As a citizen, my role is to help us self govern. And that means stepping up and trying to take steps that I think are important for that. So as a citizen, I consider it part of my job actually to help try to cultivate what I call a supermajority for a constitutional democracy. And I do that in small ways in my local community. I do that by being willing to share ideas with candidates. Again, I am willing to share ideas with candidates from all parties. And I think we see candidates from all parties who are doing good things. I think both Spencer Cox in Utah and Westmore and Maryland, for example, have some really powerful policy ideas, powerful narrative frames and the like. That would be, you know. Well, we'd be well benefited to elevate those things. So at any rate, the short of it is, I hear your expression of the need for two kinds of work. In my own life, I do that by quite self consciously having different roles that I inhabit, you know, different email addresses, etc. Different telephone numbers and so forth for my different roles.
- [40:12]
B
How many telephone numbers do you have? No, I'm joking.
- [40:15]
A
Exactly.
- [40:17]
B
That's great. That's really helpful. You've written movingly and very interestingly about the Constitution, about the Declaration of Independence. It's interesting to me that we seem to be in a political moment where there's a fashion for criticizing and perhaps rejecting some of those founding documents. I don't know whether that is a new departure in American history or whether, I mean, obviously during the Civil War that was the case. But how many moments in our past there were in which there was so much intellectual ferment around the idea that perhaps The Constitution is itself flawed or whether that's something that keeps coming up. And there's always some smart radicals in the academy who are making the devil's advocate case against the Constitution. But it is striking to me from your colleague Jill Lepore at Harvard, who does appreciate the Constitution very much, but he wants at least to become much easier to amend the Constitution to people who really blame the Constitution for the fundamental problems of the United States in a way that goes far, far beyond what Jill would say. How do you think about sort of the strengths and the weaknesses that the Constitution gives the American political system and how we should approach it with appreciation, but without perhaps blind reverence?
- [41:33]
A
Yeah, no, I love that. Appreciation without blind reverence. I mean, that's exactly. That's perfectly expressed. One of the design challenges of good civic education is being able to do both of those things at the same time. And actually, in the roadmap that we produced and disseminated, we name those design challenges, and that's exactly one of them. And always in our education, we're trying to appreciate without reverence, or sometimes, you see, criticize without falling into cynicism and appreciate without flying into adulation. So it's funny, I actually think that we have kind of turned a corner on that question as of a couple of years ago. And it matters that 20 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. So there is a welter of activity all over the country digging back into founding documents in a way that we actually haven't seen since 1976 and the bicentennial. So in that regard, you know, three or four years ago, I would have agreed with you about the sort of issue of cynicism. And I give talks about the Declaration and Constitution all over the place, and inevitably I would get a question about, you know, let's just scrap it, all right? Written by slaveholders, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not getting those questions, you know, these days. Like, I didn't get them last year. You know, I'm not getting them this year. So in that regard, I think that people are willing to take them seriously again, even while also recognizing flaws and limitations. So in that regard, I do think constitutionalism is important, hugely important, because at the end of the day, you know, this is sort of Montesquieu in the spirit of the laws, Right. I do think that free society depends on putting a priority on law and the stability of legal structure and on the attachment of the people's voice through a legislature to that legal structure. And so while we do need amendability, and I would agree with Jill Lepore that we need that revisability, we need that revisability against a backdrop of clarity, that the sort of anchor for our ongoing protection of freedom is lawfulness.
- [43:44]
B
Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, comparison just came to my mind, which might sound a little bit strange, which is that the desire to abolish the Constitution is a little bit like the desire for Britain to exit the European Union in 2016. And the structural similarity is that you're comparing a status quo which has strengthened also very genuine weaknesses against your imagined alternative outcome. One of the strange things about the vote to leave the European Union in Britain was that everybody could imagine what they wanted afterwards. There was people on the left who thought that this would allow Britain to become a socialist country that finally nationalizes the railways again and perhaps other industries as well. And there was people on the right who thought that this would allow Britain to become Singapore on the Thames and they could vote together to exit the European Union. Of course, the moment that they did vote to exit the European Union, they couldn't agree among themselves and everything turned into a significant mess. Which isn't to say that the European Union is not without flaws. And I think there's something similar around the Constitution. The Constitution has some things that I would ideally want to change. I can see the attraction of imagining my favorite constitution. But the idea that any process where we have, especially in our politics of today and the media landscape of today and the polarization of today, a Constitutional convention, come up with something that's significantly better than what we have is I think, quite unrealistic. And you know, I happened to be in Chile briefly before the Constitutional assembly there met for the first time. I believe it was in early 2020. And there are such great hopes that people put into saying the real root of our political problems is this constitution, which has a very complicated history In Chile. It was sort of decreed, or parts of it were decreed by the outgoing Pinochet government. There's good reasons to be quite skeptical of it. And they thought we're going to be able to refound the constitution. And then suddenly all of our problems are going to be going away. And of course what happened is first that there was a very left wing constitutional assembly that passed a rather absurd constitution that was then soundly rejected by the population. And then those elections for a new constitution assembly which produced a very right wing assembly and they produced constitution, those absurd in different ways and those again roundly rejected by the majority of population. And five years later, they're back to square one and they're still stuck with the same Constitution.
- [46:04]
A
Yeah, I mean, one of the remarkable parts of the American story that the declaration was unanimously signed by the people who participated in developing it, that the Constitution was unanimously voted on by the people who participated in the convention, and that then they gave themselves a super majority requirement for ratification and met that super majority requirement. And so I think when you think about wanting a new Constitution, you have to ask yourself, can I deliver that unanimity? Can I deliver a super majority? Do the conditions pertain where that's even a feasible possibility? And so if it's not, then probably what we need is revisability within the existing framework. And here I think it is important to say out loud that there's a heck of a lot that we can do that we can revise through federal law or state law that has constitutional implications. And I think people often forget about that. So, I mean, yes, I am very focused on the things in state law that control the federal superstructure, in particular laws about election systems and laws about campaign finance. But we really can state by state in legislatures that are totally functional and able to make decisions together, actually move through sets of laws that could give us an operating system quite different from the one that we currently know.
- [47:24]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Danielle tells us what success would look like. I ask her, what will we need to have done if in 25, 50 years, people say, you know, at the end of 2025, things were looking pretty bleak. But then at the beginning of 2026, we started to find our way out of a morass. People made some of the right choices. And look, today things are looking much better than they did a quarter century ago. What is that path up from the valley of concern in which we now find ourselves? To listen to Daniel's answer to support this podcast, to help us do the work we do here, please go to yashamonk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. Thank you for listening.