If you think the coronavirus pandemic is simply a health crisis,
or a crisis of leadership in Washington, it’s time to wake
up.
This moment is nothing less than an “existential crisis”
that will reshape American society, says Danielle Allen, head of
Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics and co-author of the
university’s “Roadmap
to Pandemic Resilience.” “It is a moment where societies
are forced to answer the question of who they are. And I think [the
U.S.] didn’t answer that question terribly well.”
The reasons why are plentiful. Yes, Trump plays a role in
this—in Allen’s estimation, “he cares about politics and he
cares about his own popularity, but he doesn’t care about
governance”—but the problem is much deeper, a window into the
shortcomings of the kind of democracy America has turned into.
“The democracies led by populists—the U.S., the United
Kingdom, Brazil—have done poorly, and the democracies led by
institutionalists have done well—[German Chancellor Angela]
Merkel being a prime example of an institutionalist,” Allen
said.
“Then there’s a separate cut, which is ‘old democracy’
vs. ‘young democracy,’” she continued. “Basically, if you
look at Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan — those are all
young democracies. Whereas the U.K., the U.S., France, those are
older democracies.” The older ones have more “bureaucratic
buildup” and have trouble responding in an agile way, she
says—and are also less in agreement on social rights, and more
built around 18th-century ideas about political and civil rights.
In a crisis, they struggle to rally around the public welfare
without getting in fights about it.
It might seem like a stretch to invoke 18th-century political
principles to discuss a 21st-century pandemic, but Allen’s work
goes even deeper than that; she’s a scholar of democratic ideas
reaching back to Athenian times, whose modern interests include not
just the pandemic response but strengthening participatory
democracy. And in a moment this unique and historic, the long view
is precisely what can help.
So what does the pandemic tell us about what a revitalized
American democracy might look like? What specific reforms are
needed? In addition to her coronavirus reports for Harvard, Allen
recently co-authored a major report
for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on exactly what needs
to happen for America’s civic life to be reborn. On Wednesday
morning, she spoke to POLITICO about all of this. A transcript of
the conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.
Zack Stanton: On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that if
the coronavirus trajectories continue, we’re looking at possibly
around 100,000 new cases of coronavirus a day in the United States.
If testing doesn’t rapidly expand and we continue with this sort
of partial reopening, where masks aren’t mandatory in some
places, where travel is continuing and so on, what are we looking
at here in the next few months?
Danielle Allen: I think it’s important to recognize
that human beings are adaptive, and as numbers go up — and deaths
go up alongside that—people’s behavior will change. We will
look at increased compliance with stay-at-home practices, and as a
result of that, we will see a real bumpy patch for the economy. So
to the degree that the disease continues to spread, it will be a
drag on people going about their lives. It will affect people in
socio-emotional ways, it will affect the economy, etc.
In the early days of the pandemic, when we couldn’t really see
what was going on, we didn’t really know what was happening yet.
We talked a lot about “flattening the curve.” And the idea of
flattening the curve is that you slowed the spread of the disease,
and this was to give hospitals space to get their capacity up and
so forth. It’s not enough to slow the spread; we actually have to
break the chain of spread. The goal we’ve been arguing for
consistently is suppression — getting to zero, or near-zero, case
incidence. Policies to flatten the curve [are] mitigation policies.
Our road maps have always been about suppression—using testing
and contact tracing and supported isolation of individuals to break
the chain of transmission rather than depending on stay-at-home
orders to do that.
Stanton: Your coronavirus reopening road map initially
came out in April, and you released a major supplement in May. What
surprised you about the way things have gone since then? In what
ways has the U.S. responded either better or worse than you
expected?
Allen: I’ve been surprised at just how slowly we’ve
responded. It is extraordinary to me. A country with this much
intellectual capital, this much know-how, this much wealth, and
we’ve responded this slowly? That’s a big surprise.
Stanton: What do you think accounts for that?
Allen: Well, the argument I’ve been making is that
it’s a governance problem. [It’s] a combination that, in general,
our governance structures are weaker—they’ve been significantly
weakened by polarization—and the fact we have a president who
doesn’t actually care at all about governance. He cares about
politics and he cares about his own popularity, but he doesn’t
care about governance, where that is understood as building
consensus and converting consensus into concrete actions through
institutions.
Stanton: Has the federal government’s response to the
pandemic changed the way you think about government’s capacity to
respond?
Allen: Well, for me, the silver lining is that the
absence of a national response has required us all to think
through, in really detailed ways, how we can make the federal
structure achieve what we need. I’ve always been a supporter of
the value of federalism and its flexibility. But I do now see our
capacity as a federal structure in a way I couldn’t previously,
and I have 100 percent conviction in our collective ability to
activate our federal infrastructure—all its layers—to achieve
what we need. That will be a positive benefit that comes out of
this. There will be other problems that require real clarity about
how the federal layers should interact with each other that will
benefit from the learning we’re now acquiring.
As a concrete example, New Orleans is one of the places in the
country that’s done better than others. They managed to suppress
the coronavirus really fast in April when they first got hit by it.
And one of the reasons, actually, is because Hurricane Katrina
forced their different administrative jurisdictional levels to
collaborate. So they had a kind of built-in structure for
harmonizing responses. The rest of the country hasn’t had that,
but we will by the end of this.
Stanton: So in some ways, this could be sort of a great
blossoming of these systems?
Allen: I do think it’s a turning-point moment, yeah. I
think we should look back and see a dramatic transition in the
capacity of different jurisdictions to function together.
Stanton: You mentioned federalism. One of the curious
things about this moment is seeing how the characteristics of
American democracy and politics collide with the realities of a
crisis. Do you see this as a moment when we see federalism’s
strength, as states take different approaches, or as a time to
question whether federalism works?
Allen: Often, when people invoke the concept of
federalism, they immediately think it means leaving the states to
do their own things. That’s not actually what federalism means.
If you go back to The Federalist Papers, the vocabulary they
use is about the importance of harmonizing the interests of the
states. Successful federalism has a role for every layer. There’s
no such thing as successful federalism without the appropriate
activation of the national layer in harmonizing the interests of
the states. I definitely feel that I’ve seen the power of
federalism and its potential. I don’t think that we are
fulfilling its potential in the current moment, but this experience
has given me a new window into just how powerful and robust our
architecture is—if we know how to use it. And that’s where the
problem comes in: We don’t know how to use it. It’s like
sitting in your uncle’s Ferrari, and you don’t know how to
drive it.
Stanton: What would be different if we knew how to use
federalism?
Allen: Well, for one thing, the national government would
understand its role is to provide a supportive infrastructure with
regard to the macro economy. They’ve been doing that to some
extent, but they needed to do more of that with regard to the
supply chain and production questions. In addition, there is the
critical importance of the national government of disseminating
that sense of common purpose that you mentioned, and linking the
common purpose to stable, consistent bodies of knowledge. At the
end of the day, I do think that there should be a commission to
study what happened in the same way that we had a 9/11 Commission,
and I think the CDC should come under significant scrutiny. The
federal government didn’t do that combination of providing the
core infrastructure broadly needed for everybody and the
articulation of a common purpose. And then at the other levels of
government, we’ve seen a varying range of preexisting ability to
collaborate between cities and counties, which has been critical.
We really need those units to be working together to address this,
and then we need those units to be in really tight synchrony with
the state. And a big challenge to all of that has been data
systems. So we really need an upgrade of our data systems that
permits more integration across these levels and faster cooperation
and collaboration. The first thing Germany did was invest in a data
system upgrade across the local levels of their federal system.
They knew that what liquidity is to the markets,
information-liquidity is to cooperation in a federal system.
There’s a lot that we could do to improve the functioning, but
the machinery is all there.
Stanton: You mentioned Germany. They seem to have managed
the coronavirus quite well. The U.S. has not. What is the
difference between those democracies that have responded
effectively to coronavirus and those that have not? Does that tell
us anything about the underlying health of those democracies?
Allen: There are a couple of different ways you can cut
it, and I think it’ll take a little while for political scientists
to sort out which is the accurate one. There’s the obvious one
about populism: The democracies led by populists—the U.S., U.K.,
Brazil—have done poorly, and the democracies led by
institutionalists have done well—Merkel being a prime example of
an institutionalist. Then there’s a separate cut, which is “old
democracy” vs. “young democracy.” This doesn’t entirely
work because it doesn’t take the developing world into account,
but basically, if you look at Germany, New Zealand, Australia,
Taiwan, those are all young democracies. Whereas the U.K., the
U.S., France, those are older democracies. And I think there are
two features there: One, just a certain kind of aged sclerosis
comes with bureaucratic buildup over time, a lack of flexibility
and nimbleness. But another thing matters, too: The younger
democracies, simply by virtue of having their birth connected to a
later historical moment, have more fully embraced the concept of
social rights and consequently sort of went into this crisis
understanding that the social compact includes things like health,
and that the goal of a national response is, among other things, to
protect the foundation for social rights. Whereas the U.K., U.S.,
we have systems that rely—in their fundamentals—on 18th-century
conceptions of political and civil rights as the bedrock; social
rights are still a contested matter for us.
Stanton: In thinking through the potential of people not
really being able to go out and congregate in large crowds for the
next year, I’ve been thinking a lot about social atomization and
“Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam.
Allen: “Bowling by Zoom”?
Stanton: With participation being such an important part
of American democracy—and particularly of creating community on a
local level—how does that work in a time of social
distancing?
Allen: That’s a very hard question. I have obviously
spent tons of time on Zoom, and there’s a certain portion of our
society, 20 percent or so, who are in the privileged position of
being able to telecommute, and we have felt our lives transformed
in this way. There’s obviously been an amazing opening up of
possibilities, though also a great set of limitations. [As a
professor,] I can tell in teaching contexts, it does not work as
well. Retention is at a completely different level—like an
extraordinarily different level—than in person. I don’t really
think this distance-learning, telecommuting world is one that will
give us the kind of social connection that we need and which brings
a range of benefits, from cognitive to emotional.
Certainly in my own neighborhood, we’re all learning how to do
more things with six feet in between us. That learning will
continue. We understand that air circulation matters a lot; we’ll
focus on using the outdoors more. That’ll be a good thing. And
that’s how we’ll also start to get back social connections.
Though we have lost from actually being in space together, we
have gained something in time. So, in general, I think that despite
the stresses and pressures, more people have more time to do things
other than work at the moment. And so one can hope—and to some
extent, we’ve seen that with all the social action—that this
will give the opportunity for people to rebuild their civic muscles
that they haven’t used so much lately because of the dominance of
work in our lives.
Stanton: Speaking of that, you recently came out with
a report
on revitalizing democracy for the 21st century. What made you
decide this project needed to happen at this point in time?
Allen: It’s been a rumbling conversation for some time.
You look at Congress’ approval ratings. You look at the degree of
disaffection of young people in relationship to constitutional
democracy. You look at the rising level of distrust in government.
You look at the increases in polarization. It’s common parlor
talk, for years at this point, about things seeming to be on a
downward trend. The 2016 election was obviously a big deal for
everybody — it was such a surprise, a shock to the landscape. I
think that pushed a lot of people who had already been worried
about the state of our democracy into the desire to act. That’s
not specific to the president himself, but rather just a point
about having watched a dysfunctional election process, having
watched this incredible division and bitterness and things like
that. That became the moment for digging in.
Stanton: In researching the report, you talked to many
different people around the country. We think of this as a very
polarizing and very divisive moment in modern American history. Was
there anything that Americans believed that they shared in common
with one another, whether or not they agreed with each other’s
politics?
Allen: Well, the first thing that they all believed was
that nobody shared anything. So we share the fact that we believe
we don’t share anything. But then there was this kind of paradox.
If you asked them what they thought they shared with other
Americans, everybody said, “nothing.” At the same time,
everybody was using the same vocabulary. Everybody was talking
about rights. Everybody was talking about responsibilities. That
was consistent. So in this bizarre way, we think we don’t share
anything, but we actually do share a desire that our political
institutions secure our rights—in the language of the Declaration
of Independence. And we also share a recognition that we have
responsibilities to our communities and even to that broader
political structure, and that we are a part of making it work. What
we took away from that was a sense that there was this kind of
underlying belief in the value of a healthy democracy, but also an
underlying and powerful skepticism about our collective capacity to
deliver that for us now. So then we wanted dig into what people see
as those barriers to the success of our democracy, and what we can
do to address those things.
Stanton: This seems like an interesting moment to be
having that discussion, not only with the pandemic, but the mass
protests over the last month. Does this moment feel at all like an
inflection point for some of that conversation?
Allen: I think it does. One of the things that the
protests have done is make visible possibilities that people have
come to think were impossible. For example, the breadth of support
for police reform across race lines, across even party lines, I
think six months ago, people would’ve said was impossible. The
Colorado legislature voted—with only one dissenting vote—on a
package of reforms; it’s this kind of bipartisanship that I think
we all thought was just a dinosaur. And ditto public-opinion
surveys about Black Lives Matter. They’re at a level that again, I
think 10 years ago, would have thought was impossibility. We have
had this moment of rediscovering what it feels like to have a
common purpose, what it feels like to be able to see across our
differences to something that we need to do collectively. That is
the starting point for a transformation. We have to believe in that
possibility of a common purpose in order to want it and act toward
it.
Stanton: You are a classicist. What’s the very long
view on what we’re seeing in the U.S. right now? I ask that both in
terms of protests and political tension, with people on the street
asserting their rights, and with regards to the arguments coming
from the right against things like mail-in voting and other ideas
that would expand the franchise. Is there any historical model for
understanding this push and pull over representation, or is America
a different kind of experiment in pluralism with no real
precedent?
Allen: I do think we are a different kind of experiment
in pluralism with little precedent. But at the same time, even
though it’s true that the experiment in pluralism and inclusion
is unprecedented, the battle over representation is not. The
American Revolution is a pretty straightforward analogy to current
events. The American Revolution also was really kicked off by
arbitrary use of police powers. I mean, it’s just a
straightforward analogy. In Massachusetts, the writs of assistance
gave customs officers the power to search without cause, to search
indiscriminately. There’s a reason “search and seizure” is
important in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution:
It was sort of the “stop and frisk” of the day. Police power
started the American Revolution.
The thing that was articulated in the American Revolution was
that we invest our elected officials with power in order that they
secure our rights. That’s the deal—it’s the social contract,
the social compact. So when our public officials use their power to
violate our rights, it is, by definition, undoing the social
contract or social compact. In that regard, I think there’s a lot
of precedent for thinking through the relationship between power
and rights-protection, and the need to achieve alterations—in the
language of the Declaration— when those abuses of power are
happening.
The fight over representation is super interesting, too, because
people don’t realize actually that after the Declaration and all
the way up to the early 1800s, women could vote in parts of the
U.S. Free African American men could vote in some parts of the U.S.
So over the first 20 years of the life of this country, people
actually lost to the right to vote. We have this false narrative
that it started off in a completely exclusive way and became
inclusive over time. It actually started off somewhat more
inclusive than we realize, became more exclusive, and then we have
had to work really hard to make it inclusive again. That dynamic
fight between the inclusive and the exclusive has been with us from
the beginning. And so I think, with the folks who are trying to
restrict the franchise now, to me, they look like the people who
between 1787–1806 restricted the franchise. We’ve seen it
before. It’s a feature of our American history and life. And we
have to achieve inclusion against that—which means, from my point
of view, building a supermajority of people who are committed to
inclusion.
Stanton: In your paper on revitalizing democracy, many of
the recommendations, though not all, have been proposed in various
forms in recent years, and often get grafted onto the familiar
left-right partisan divide. It’s much in the same way that many
of the components of what a sufficient coronavirus response would
look like have been grafted onto the partisan divide, like
mask-wearing. Does the fact that these sorts of conversations get
consumed by partisanship that tell us something bigger about our
politics?
Allen: Lots of reforms we recommend have been out there
in one way or another. But if you look across the reform space,
you’ll see that people who work on institutional reform are in one
lane. People who work on civil society reforms—a la Putnam’s
“Bowling Alone”—are in another lane. And people who want to
work on civic culture are in a third lane. So the thing we did was
say, ‘No, these lanes have to work together.’ It’s about a
virtuous cycle, linking effective, responsive, empowering
institutions to a civil society that helps people bridge
differences to a civic culture that sustains commitment to
constitutional democracy and to one another.
The reason I’m saying all that is because right now, we have a
vicious cycle. We have institutions that themselves drive
polarization. Our electoral mechanisms drive polarization, and then
that polarization affects our civic and civil society, our private
organizations as people decide where to belong and how, and get
involved in media ecosystems and things like that. And then our
civic culture has a hard time working against that polarization
because there’s a sort of negative feedback loop.
So the point is just that it’s not as if partisanship is just
in our hearts or just in our institutions or just in how we
associate in our social life; it’s in all of those places. And so
we have to take it out of all of those places. We need things like
ranked-choice voting, which is an approach to voting that should
take polarization out. In our civil society organizations, we need
people to be intentional about saying, “I’m going to go find that
person I happen to know with whom I disagree politically, and I’m
going to try to work with them. And then we’re going to snowball:
I’m going to ask them to find two more friends, I’ll find two more
friends, and we’re going to build out a new kind of association.”
And if you start doing that, civic culture efforts to articulate a
common purpose get more traction because they can connect to
structures that can make use of the concept of a common purpose.
That work starts from rebuilding actual connections between people
across those lines of division.
And I will say, I’ve had a sort of interesting experience as
we’ve gone around talking about the report, where we’re talking
to elected officials and we’ll say to them, “Who on the other
side could you imagine having a conversation with about this
report?” And when we ask that question, the first time we ask it,
it’s clear they just haven’t asked themselves that question in
a long time. But then there’ll be this kind of expansive,
meditative conversation, and they’ll start actually coming up with
people they can imagine sitting down and just plain having a
conversation with. So it’s trying to reactivate those actual
relationships. That is part..
