Harvard Political Theorist Danielle Allen on Unity

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, while so much of politics in America today is about winner takes all, our next guest makes the case for unity. Harvard professor, Danielle Allen, is director of the University Center for Ethics, and she spearheads their COVID-19 response initiative. Here she is speaking to our Walter Isaacson about that major roadblock to governance as we’ve heard, rampant factionalism.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Professor Danielle Allen, welcome to the show.

DANIELLE ALLEN, POLITICAL THEORIST, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Thanks so much, Walter. Good to be here.

ISAACSON: Now, we’re going through a hellacious period and you’ve written a concept called “Becoming Citizen Again.” What do you mean by that?

ALLEN: Well, I think for a long time many of us have sat back and sort of expected the powers at be to take care of our security and wellbeing. There’s been reductions in participation, voting, so forth, we all know those facts and details. And I’ve really been working hard to try to reinvigorate civic spirit and encourage people to rejoin the community of free and equal self-governing citizens and participate directly in as many ways as possible.

ISAACSON: And you’ve won the Kluge Prize at the Library of Congress and part of that is our common purpose. Explain what you are doing with that.

ALLEN: Sure. Well, I was really fortunate to serve over several years on a commission sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I was investigating the future of democratic citizenship in American, and it was an incredible experience. We interviewed people all over the country, really learned about the challenges and obstacles of participation and thought about pathways to solutions. One of the things that came to the fore though really was the fact that we do lack a sense of common purpose in this country. And that’s not a small thing. It’s not sort of an airy fairy thing, because at the end of the day, a democracy depends on a common purpose if we’re going to have effective governance. We have to be able to consolidate and converge and come together around some shared goal.

ISAACSON: And what is that common purpose in America?

ALLEN: Well, I think we have to make it. We have to get back to the business of making it. So, to take a very concrete example, when the COVID crisis hit, you might have thought that we would really have a strong common purpose that was about defeating the virus, really suppressing it. And to some extent, in the very early weeks that common purpose did exist but it fragmented really quickly. It got sucked into the kind of polarization and gridlock of fighting in Washington and we just short of watched the potential for a common purpose, you know, dissipate and fade away. That is an (ph) example of where we really needed a common purpose so that our federal governments, our state governments, our local governments could work in concert to suppress the virus. We could have achieved it. We could have really driven the spread back down to zero early on if we had the common purpose.

ISAACSON: I guess the evidence of common purpose is what the founders called factionalism. They kept warning against it. George Washington’s, I guess, farewell address talks about that. Tell us what we learn from the farewell address.

ALLEN: Exactly. It’s a really powerful speech. Washington warns about the dangers of faction. And his warning is really that once you have a situation where people aren’t willing to focus on a unity principle, on coming together, then people really are fighting to the death and they will hand their fortunes over to whichever figure which seems more powerful in a near-term moment for getting an immediate victory. And so, people will sacrifice the sort of preservation of kind of a long-term structure for making decisions together just for their short-term wins and victories over their adversaries.

ISAACSON: Do you think we’re seeing that now?

ALLEN: I do actually, yes. I think it’s the thing that most afflicts our politics is that we’ve all become much more focused on complete victory over our adversaries than on the fact that our flourishing, our participation in society of free and equal self-governing citizens actually depends on our preserving the tools we use to make decisions together, it depends on being able to govern together, to find compromises, to forge solutions that bring together different interest perspectives. It’s the ability to govern that way, again, with compromises, with some sympathetic solutions that make us free. That’s the thing that we’ve lost sight of. So, we think we want a victory on climate or we think we want a victory on guns or we’re pursuing those themes so aggressively that we’re losing sight of the fact that we can’t actually have any victories that matters if we’ve lost the freedom of sound, functioning constitutional democracy.

ISAACSON: But what do you say to Democrats who have, you know, faced four years of Trump with no compromise, no compromise? How do you tell them if Biden wins, you’re now going to go back to the principles of compromise?

ALLEN: So, Mitch McConnell really, I think, has conveyed the politics of our age and certainly, the politics of the Republicans that have been practicing for the last period of years, and he’s famously said, you know, winners make policy and losers go home. That’s exactly the wrong way to think about democracy. But at the end of the day, there is no point in participating in a democracy unless — even if you lose out in a particular vote, you’re still incorporated in the overall decision-making. So, the right attituded is that winners get to chair the committee meetings where decisions are made but losers are still on the committee, and it’s that orientation that we have to have. It’s a big ask at this moment, I agree, when the Democrats have suffered under that incredible (INAUDIBLE) adversarial perspective driven by Mitch McConnell. It’s a big ask not to turn around and want to do it right back. And I honestly think we have to summon Lincoln’s spirit in this moment and, you know, try to embrace it with charity to all, malice towards none. We’re going to lead. You know, we’re going to take these chairmanships of every committee and we’re going to lead and shape the agenda. But, yes, you know, losers, you’ll be in the conversation, too.

ISAACSON: You talk about compromise and, you know, you’re a great historian. Benjamin Franklin at the end of the constitutional convention sort of conveyed the message that compromisers may not make great heroes but they do make great democracies. I know in your report you quote the wonderful speech of Franklin, too. So, what do we learn from that?

ALLEN: So, the Franklin quote is really powerful. For me, in all honesty, it really cuts two ways. I mean, he stands up in the last day of the convention and says basically, it’s time for us all to commit to this, whatever reservations we may have had about it will die here. We will never share them in the public. We’ll all stand in full consent behind this. We use that in our commission when we’re trying to develop recommendations for democracy innovation, democracy reform. We wanted to achieve consensus. People had different levels of preference or affirmation for the different proposals on the table, but we collectively agreed we would bury our reservations there in that committee room. So, Franklin does set a model for what you need in a democracy. I said his quotation cuts both ways and it does because, of course, in that context with the constitution, he was burying reservations as were others about the compromises around enslavement, for example, The Three-Fifths Clause that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a free person, and there were people already, at that point of the convention, who did object to enslavement. You know, abolition had already been achieved by the time of the constitutional convention in both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. So, the reservations were real and serious yet they accepted that compromise. For me, that really means you have to kind of bear down on the question of what makes a difference between a good compromise and bad compromise. Why would the slavery compromises be out of bounds? What counts as a good compromise?

ISAACSON: As you push back against the forces of faction and divisiveness, you talk about the need for unity. Is unity just a practical thing or is there a moral component to unity when it comes to the United States?

ALLEN: There is a moral component, and it comes back to this word I often use, human flourishing, OK. Now, there’s probably a long distance of people wondering (ph) and how do you get from unity to human flourishing, Danielle? Explain that one. It comes back to the idea that human beings thrive to their fullest when they are empowered, when they are empowered to chart their own life course, or as we sometimes say, pursue happiness. And when they are empowered as decision-makers in their communities, contributing to our collective decisions. So, from my point of view, human beings thrive, again, they flourish when maybe well when they are empowered. That then leads to a puzzle. How do we maximize our chance for empowerment? The answer there is free self- government in a constitutional democracy. And the problem is, of course, you always have, in any given decision, people who win and people who lose, right? That’s the problem. So, the number one problem that democracy has to solve is, what can make it worthwhile for the losers to continue to participate? Otherwise you start to fragment and break up. So, a commitment to free self-government is the thing that motivate people’s willingness to go along with decisions even if they are not what their first choice would have been.

ISAACSON: You talked, too, about civility, but civility is not an indent of itself, right? Sometimes you need heavy pushback.

ALLEN: So, civility is not actually a word I use too much. I would separate unity from civility. So, I take unity to be that commitment to maintaining the institutions of free self-government among free and equal citizens, the institutions of constitutional democracy. You can fight hard in the context of maintaining that commitment. It’s great when you can fight civilly, when you can have civil disagreements. But sometimes, there’s a need for social movements or taking to the street as part of the element of fighting. So, it’s more the commitment to the project of constitutional democracy, being able to convey that commitment through articulating, expressing what the vision for common purpose is, for being willing to tap into a personal love of country, share that love of country with the others. Those are the kinds of things I think that are important for anchoring common purpose.

ISAACSON: Senator Mike Lee said something a few days ago about democracy is not the objective, he said. He said liberty, peace and prosperity are. We want flourishing, as you put it, but rank democracy can thwart that. Is democracy simply a tool or is it actually an objective?

ALLEN: So, this is an important conversation. It’s an objective, in the sense that democracy is a thing that we do. It’s an activity. We are fulfilled in the activity of participating in constitutional democracy. Now, I have to, though, say a little bit more about Senator Lee’s comment, because something really important is happening there. At the dawn of our country, at the dawn of our constitutional democracy, the founders used both the vocabulary of a republic and of a democracy. So, Hamilton in the Constitutional Convention in New York referred to what had been designed as a representative democracy. Madison, in the Federalist Papers, spent a lot of time saying it’s a republic, not a direct democracy, like those ancient Athenians had, right? So, the vocabulary was all over the place. They did use both terms. But, in the 20th century, among Republican circles in particular, there’s become a habit of saying that the country is a republic, not a democracy, that the founders chose a republic, not a democracy. And what people have meant by that is that the founders chose a hierarchically structured entity, not something that focused on universal suffrage, universal participation. This used to be a kind of pedantic red herring argument, but it is actually becoming an ideological argument. And this is the thing that I’m concerned about. So, I think, when Senator Lee said that, he is actually positively embracing a view that we should roll back the development of a robust commitment to universal suffrage, that we should roll back a commitment to egalitarian participation. So I think it was not a trivial comment. We have to pay attention to it. We should hear it. And it’s a funny thing, where a red herring pedantic argument about, are we a republic or are we a democracy, has, I think, begun to turn into an actual ideological position.

ISAACSON: And do you tie that into voter suppression even?

ALLEN: This is my concern, yes. My concern is that, on the right, there is beginning to develop a proactive argument that is undercutting the hard-won commitment to universal suffrage.

ISAACSON: You’re an African-American with, as you want to put it, a complex family history. How does that give you insight on what I would call our nation’s complex family history?

ALLEN: Well, Ralph Ellison is one of my presiding spirits. We all have our few spirits who live in our heads and hearts every day. And Ralph Ellison was somebody — he’s got this beautiful essay. What would America be like without blacks, he said, and it’s this incredible account of everything that exists in this country, and the ways in which African- American experience has given it meaning. And one of the things the African-American experience has given the deepest meaning to is the concept of freedom, OK? So, insofar as this is a liberty- loving country, well, African-Americans know that in a deeper and truer way than anybody. And that is, we — it’s universal. Everybody is part of that story, is in it, and welcome, and shares it absolutely. Others have their own stories of oppression and domination and escape that give them too that deep connection to the story of freedom. But it’s just important to say that, because, sometimes, we think that these sort of ideals we have kind of came down on high from young men in white wigs, so that looked older than they actually were, but, in fact, it’s the lived experiences of people in this country who struggle to achieve their own empowerment that have given us collectively our deepest understanding of the value of freedom.

ISAACSON: There’s been a pushback on some of the historical American narrative, especially from progressives. Do you think, in some ways, that can go too far?

ALLEN: I think it has gone too far. So, the story about race, racial domination in this country, and its — the depth of its impact is absolutely real and accurate. At the same time, however, the story of abolitionists and their hard work, which started already in the early 1700s, has disappeared from view. And it’s really important to recognize that the voices of abolitionists were actually fundamental to the Declaration of Independence, to the Constitution. Their voices were already working at that point in time. And they gave this country gifts of vision that we’re still working on achieving the full result of.

ISAACSON: You’re teaching a course at Harvard this semester called After the Pandemic. And I guess we’re all hoping for that. But what are we going to try to build after the pandemic to make it better than it was before?

ALLEN: Well, I hope we can achieve a new social compact. I was really personally shocked, at the start of this pandemic, by how quickly people were willing to abandon parts of our population, so, for example, the language about elderly Americans, maybe we should just let them go, it’s their time, or the slowness that we had in terms of getting PPE and so forth with essential workers, this kind of thing. And so, from my point of view, a healthy society depends on a first principle being we don’t abandon anybody. In a moment of crisis, we don’t abandon anybody. We do the hard work of figuring out how we can maximize well-being, the health and safety of the people, for all. So, I think we need, honestly, articulation of a moral vision. We need leadership and doing that at all levels of our society. And then we need policies that make real that concept of not abandoning anybody, rebuilding a public health infrastructure. We have let that erode in this country, finally building a viable health infrastructure broadly for individual health and well-being, rebuilding foundations of educational opportunity, which have eroded significantly.

ISAACSON: So, how do we turn ourselves back to the right direction?

ALLEN: Well, so leadership at all levels matters, but every citizen can be a leader. That’s the important thing. And so this is where I do think that, in every decision-making context, it’s really important to be a bridge-builder, to find people who have different kinds of social experiences or different political perspectives, and try to figure out how to build a conversation in which you can participate together on decision-making. How can you rebuild, for your community, a sense that you want a social compact that really is good for all, where nobody’s abandoned? What does that mean? I have had the pleasure of speaking with a number of mayors over the course of the last few months who are engaging their communities in exactly this kind of discussion. They’re staging workshops and fora on the question what kind of social compact their cities want. And that feels to me like the work we have to do. We need to be in the same space, look at one another, and ask the question of how we can achieve well-being for all of us.

ISAACSON: Professor Danielle Allen, thank you for being with us.

ALLEN: Thank you, Walter. Thanks so much.