I listened to the podcast with Danielle Allen on Achieving Democracy’s Ideals. Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She is also the leader of two large-scale projects that look at the future of American democracy: Our Common Purpose from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Educating for American Democracy. Keep in mind this podcast was recorded in March 2021, which marks a year into the Covid pandemic, two months into President Biden’s term, and two months after the January 6th riot.
There is a common theme in Allen’s reports that American democracy is at inflection points, but now is the time for big change. Our Common Purpose focuses on reinventing American democracy for younger generations of the 21st century. Both of her reports have a core premise that we are at a turning point in the country. Therefore we need to achieve something that hasn’t been achieved before.
Our two elite parties are fighting for control of these broken institutions. That fight has turned into a fight over the degree of access to the ease of voting. Thus, one of the Our Common Purpose report recommendations is universal voter duty, making voting mandatory as it is in Australia. While everyone is hoping the solution to polarization may come from a magic pill or silver bullet, that is not how it works. We lost more than half a million people over the Covid pandemic, and that could have been avoided with better leadership. South Korea and Australia were able to avoid mass deaths yet hold the stability of the economy, but the U.S. failed to do that. A large cause of that was the depths of our polarization.
The desire to tackle our hardest problems should motivate us to start forming relationships, even with people we disagree with quite intensely. The hard thing to do is to actually recognize that the people who are operating in bad faith are a very small minority. The first step is to start by presuming good faith on the part of others and then work hard to discern the difference between those who truly are acting in bad faith and those who are acting in good faith but have a different perspective. Making those distinctions include asking yourself if this person is intentionally producing disinformation or are they merely passing it along and if they are producing disinformation, are they advocating neo confederacy points of view.
Allen believes we need a decade of serious work to find new solutions that will yield a broad national picture. LGBTQ rights and alike emerged from experimentation and municipal and state levels and we are in a similar phase in regards to democracy work. It is a national project: every college and university in the country should be running professional development for the educators to provide content support and expertise. “Failure is not an option,” Allen says, so people need the tools and help of a healthy democracy to craft their own lives and continue to impact their community. This provides empowerment, and empowerment is crucial to human flourishing.
It is simply not efficient for us to only be thinking about ourselves and not others. We have to be thinking about US and how the nation is dealing with these challenges and times of crisis. We all have to pitch in and come to some sort of agreement together. We need to prioritize civics and history if we want to improve democracy. History is essential, but it is not sufficient. We have to take seriously our responsibility if we want our children to be future citizens. Building relationships with people that have differing opinions but shared values helps us work towards the same goals.