Power Sharing Liberalism: Danielle Allen
April 11th, 2024
”We are living in a period of great innovation in democratic practice.”
Danielle Allen is the author of Justice by Means of Democracy. She is also the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. We discuss power sharing liberalism as a new paradigm in the practice of democracy.
Whether it’s through ballot measures to introduce ranked choice voting or open primaries, we are experiencing great innovation in democratic practice that make it more possible for us to bring our whole selves and to share political power within US democracy. Power sharing liberalism centers around the lived human experience, which needs foundations for flourishing. To that end, the economy should serve the ends of human flourishing. Allen envisions a “dynamic economy that supports people in their lives and to support people in their lives requires supporting their empowerment politically as well as supporting them materially.”
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Danielle Allen
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Danielle Allen Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like us the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:24] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport, so we're here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year and empower you to change the status quo.
We are democracy die-hards on this podcast. So of course, we've had many conversations about democracy reform, such as ranked choice voting, open primaries, deliberative democracy, and even a constitutional amendment to ensure an affirmative right to vote. In a time when it feels like democracy is on its last legs, and its legitimacy as a political system is in doubt, we can all agree that democracy needs a fundamental reorientation. True to our tagline of exploring big ideas, we're going to unpack an exciting new paradigm in democracy power sharing liberalism.
Our guest today is Danielle Allen. She's the James Bryant Conant University professor at Harvard University and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Her most recent book is Justice by Means of Democracy. Danielle is not new to Future hindsight. She joined us in 2022 to talk about her book, democracy in the Time of Coronavirus.
Welcome back Danielle. Thank you for joining us.
Danielle Allen: [00:02:03] Thank you so much, Mila. It's good to be here. I'm glad to be part of your die-hard democracy crew.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:09] That's us! So we know, of course, that for democracy to be legitimate, it needs to deliver on its promise of human flourishing, of delivering happiness upon its constituents and in the spirit of the ancient philosophers, render a virtuous society. We are undoubtedly in a time of unhappiness. But as a political philosopher and a practitioner who is deeply steeped in the work of democracy, how would you describe what is vexing American democracy today? Are the wheels falling off?
Danielle Allen: [00:02:37] So I appreciate your starting, Mila, with the concepts of happiness and flourishing. And I appreciate the fact that you've said out loud we're in an unhappy time. I think that's fair. There's a lot of malaise everywhere I go, every time I'm speaking to a group of people. So that malaise has a lot of different sources. I mean, there are the challenges of rapid change, whether that's because of technology or what we can perceive with rapid immigration. People have different sources of anxiety that are affecting them, for sure. Of course, there's also the economy, the huge housing challenges that so many people experience, especially young people. There's a long list of things that add up to the notion that we don't really have a sense of safety and well- being. At the end of the day, any society needs to deliver that for its people, a sense of safety and well-being. And our democracy is falling short right now. Are the wheels falling off? I don't think the wheels are actually falling off. At the end of the day, I do think there is enough in us as a people. Who we are in this country, as Americans, the way we care about our communities. There are resources to tap into, to revitalize, I think, our democratic institutions so that they actually meet that standard of securing our safety and happiness.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:56] Well, I first saw you speak at the opening event for the Eric Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, where the audience was wondering how to, quote, Save Democracy. And among other things, since then, you have been a co- author on a report called Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st century. And your latest book, of course, Justice by Means of Democracy, came out in 2023. I am personally excited to learn about a new paradigm for democracy, and especially since it is centered on humans. Or at least this is how I read your book. And when I was reading it, I was wondering how you came up with this framework -- power sharing liberalism -- to address the question of justice and democracy. I think when we hear the word justice,
most of us think of it narrowly in relation to crime. So to you, what is justice and why do we need democracy to get us there?
Danielle Allen: [00:04:46] Well, Mila, first of all, just thank you so much for reading my book. I really appreciate it. It's always an honor to have somebody spend time with one's writing. So thank you to you for that. The term justice in my book, I mean, I do in many ways draw from a long tradition of philosophy, and justice is a big word. In fact, Aristotle sort of said there's justice with a capital J and justice with a little J. And justice with a little J is that legal conception you mentioned that connects to the legal system and crime and rehabilitation and so forth. But justice with a capital J is about the whole of human well-being, and the question of whether or not a society is constituted to support human thriving. That's really what justice is fundamentally about. So I'm really writing about that big J justice, you know, the whole whole kit and caboodle of human well-being. And the argument I'm making is that well-being, for all of us, does depend on democracy. This is an argument that runs against the tradition of of philosophy in the sense that many have said, well, if democracy is really about majoritarianism, isn't it possible that the majority will often vote against what's actually in the best interests of all? And so I'm trying to argue against that by offering a conception of democracy, power sharing liberalism, where the way democracy functions addresses issues of power imbalances, and by addressing those issues of power imbalances increases significantly the likelihood that the decisions made by society will support broad human thriving. So that is how I'm trying to put the concepts of justice and democracy together.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:22] So let's dig a little bit deeper on power sharing liberalism. How does it improve the way we are practicing and living democracy today?
Danielle Allen: [00:06:31] Sure. No, I appreciate that. And I think you also asked with your last question how I had come up with the sort of framework and the concept, and maybe let me tell a little bit of the story of that here in this country, in the US in particular, a lot of us wrestle with the paradox of noble ideals on paper and harsh realities of oppression and domination in the world. And I'm just like everybody else. I also have wrestled with those paradoxes. I found, you know, as I sort of developing as a scholar that there were really sort of two approaches to this paradox. There was the approach that said, gosh, it was all just, you know, the ideas were perfect from the get go. It's just that we weren't able to realize them. And now we've been progressively
working to realize the vision that the founders laid out. That's sort of camp one. And then there's camp two, which says, no, you know, slavery was a fatal flaw. The whole thing was about racial domination. Everything was a mistake. And we really have to sort of scrap the whole thing and start over. That's camp number two. And I don't think actually either of those camps quite has it right. I think that the original ideals of self- government among free and equal citizens were sound. At the same time, conceptual mistakes were made in addition to the on-the-ground mistakes. And so I've really have zeroed in on those conceptual mistakes and I've been trying to correct them.
Danielle Allen: [00:07:50] So let me be really explicit about the conceptual mistake that I saw. So this is going to require my diving into the Declaration of Independence. So you'll have to forgive me for a minute.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:00] Go ahead.
Danielle Allen: [00:08:01] So the second sentence of the declaration is incredibly long. Everybody knows the first part, but we forget how long the whole thing is. So this is the famous "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." That very long sentence, which has a sort of theory of revolution in it, a theory of what government is in it, that is the sort of anchor conceptual paradigm for our institutions. However, and there's a lot that's good in it, but the place where the mistake crept in is at the very, very end of that. So just to remind at the very end what the drafters of that are saying is that there's sort of a two-part job for running a democracy. You've got to lay the foundation on principles. And then you also have to organize the powers of government, legislative, executive, etc. in order to deliver on those principles and secure safety and happiness. Now, that split between principles and how powers were organized was actually something that they took really seriously. And the way it came out was at the time of the drafting of the declaration, several people, for example, wrote to John Adams. John Adams was one of the drafters
of that text. It wasn't just Thomas Jefferson. The people who wrote to him included Abigail Adams. And she said, where was the place for women in this? And another colleague wrote to him and said, what's the place for working people? And what's the place for free, in the language of the time, free Negroes in this? And so Adams gave the same answer to everybody. His answer was basically the principles, the idea that there are these basic rights and we should be securing the safety and happiness of everybody, that is for everybody that applies to everybody, he said. But, he said, with regard to how we organize the powers of government for that, he said, we're going to preserve our masculine system. And by which he meant that power should be held by white men with property. All right. So that's where the mistake was, to think that you could put power in the hands of some and protect the rights of all. Power held absolutely corrupts. And they made an active choice to hold power absolutely at that time and place. So I consider my job to be to correct that error. In order for us, in fact, to have a set of principles, basic rights that do apply to everybody, and where we're working to secure the safety and happiness of everybody, it must also be the case that we put power in the hands of everybody. So that's where power sharing liberalism comes from. Abigail Adams recognized her husband's mistake. She said to him, you know, husbands have typically tyrannized their wives. They've abused that power. You know, maybe it'll be okay this time. But if not, she said, we women will have to foment a rebellion for voice and representation. And when she said that, right, fomenting a rebellion for voice and representation, she was naming the fact that power needs to be shared. If you're going to be able to deliver on securing everybody's rights and providing a foundation for their flourishing. So in that regard, I consider power sharing liberalism to have been invented by Abigail Adams. And I'm just, I'm just the, you know, 250 years later, sort of exponent of a conceptual discovery that she made. And it was a genuine conceptual discovery at the time. I believe she should count in the tradition of philosophical advances.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:48] Yeah. Hear, hear. Well, talk about power sharing liberalism. It's clear that requires civic participation. And you talk about this, of course, in the book. You know, it requires deep civic thinking, civic engagement, and the idea, obviously, that democracy is a practice that we get in there and share power. And we're totally into that here at Future Hindsight. But not a lot of Americans are civically engaged. I think, you know this. I just discovered recently that according to a survey by the Knight Foundation, among the respondents for why they didn't vote, 80% cited a lack of
interest. Um, they just don't care. And I just thought, oh, you know, we're doomed. But but really, I'm curious, how can we reactivate our appetite for civic action if it ever existed? How can we get people excited about wanting to share power?
Danielle Allen: [00:12:43] I think you've put your finger on the most important question, the question of motivation. Now we know what the best source of motivation is for wanting to share power, and that is having all power absolutely stripped from you. So when we look around the world and we see people who are living in repressive regimes, or if we read history books about people who lived under the thumb of domination, including, for example, African Americans in this country for much of our country's history. Those stories over and over again show us people expressing the value of freedom, the value of power, the value of access to self-government. So when one doesn't feel the the harshness of its absence, I think it can be easy to take access to power for granted. So the hard and challenging thing is that, you know, the worse things get, I think the more people are going to want access to power, but we don't want to let that happen. So we have to activate that motivation sooner so that we can protect these structures of self-government. For that, I think what works is actually participating in power sharing itself is very rewarding. People just literally enjoy it. It's fun. It feels good when you can see the outcome of a collective process that you've had some hand in shaping, and even sometimes, you know, it never comes out exactly the way you want. That's the sort of paradox of democracy. We all input our own wills, our own desires, and the thing that comes out at the other end, it doesn't match anybody's will or desires perfectly. That's sort of the definition of the thing. Despite that, there is great satisfaction, sort of at the level of just intrinsic feeling of sort of happiness and goodness that come from participating. So for me, my approach has been, I think that for any adult who's participating, it's sort of their job to identify 4 or 5, 6 young people, you know, not 1 to 1. It's got to be 1 to 4 or 5 or 6 or something like that, where it's literally your job just to invite them in with you, to join you in the work of participation. And it kind of doesn't matter really what it is, but all of us should be issuing those invitations and supporting the learning, because once people do it, they have a good time and then they're hooked. And that's really how we have to re-engage people.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:52] Yeah, that's a good idea.
We're going to take a break to thank our sponsor, Shopify. And when we come back, we'll discuss what difference without domination means, where we can find unity in our current politics, and more.
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Mila Atmos: [00:17:54] And now let's return to my conversation with Danielle Allen.
So it's popular nowadays to say that we're aiming to achieve a multicultural democracy. And I know a lot of young people are invested in this and they talk about it, and that's one of the things that they articulate all the time. But you actually articulate a different frame for including different voices. And as a naturalized citizen who came here alone as an exchange student, I was really struck by what you call difference without domination. I'll say here that as a teenage exchange student, it seemed like the whole point of the project is to assimilate and take on an American identity. So what is difference without domination? How does it differ from multiculturalism and from assimilation? And how does it fit into your theory?
Danielle Allen: [00:18:44] Right, okay. No, I appreciate that question. So at the end of the day, freedom generates difference. I mean, people have known this for centuries. And so the benefit of of being free is that we have the chance to shape our own lives. We have the chance to form bonds with the people that we choose, and that will generate cultural communities. And, you know, group affinity groups end up then being also kind of groups where difference emerges. This is a beautiful thing. It's one of the great rewards of freedom. It makes cultural vibrant and alive. So the question though, of course, the challenge is that historically difference has often also gotten connected with domination groups form and then they start to hoard opportunity or try to make sure that they have advantage in comparison to other groups. So the challenge for a happy, flourishing society is to support that emergence of beautiful diversity, but to hinder any development of a linked domination. So in this sense, I think the kind of earlier paradigm of assimilation didn't really bring enough appreciation for the value of diversity. I'm really asked people to sort of give up important parts of themselves, pieces of cultural heritage and so forth in order to have access to a share of political power. I am really trying to shift that to say, no, we can all bring our whole selves to this shared project of democracy and have our shared political power. And so that's really where sort of difference without domination comes in. I do often use the word multicultural to talk about the kind of democracy I'm trying to build as well. Although it's true that in the 80s and 90s, the sort of paradigm of multiculturalism was one in which group identities were very fixed, and so politics was really sort of thought of as a relationship among groups. And I am trying to move beyond that. I mean, our experiences of our own, you know,
lived senses of who we are, our own identities are very fluid. There is an awful lot of crossing and mixing across cultural lines, and we want to support that dynamism. We don't want to sort of bake in an expectation that, you know, specific group identities are fixed and rigid and the like. So I'm really sort of seeking to support kind of cultural dynamism as a part of this project of pursuing difference without domination.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:01] Well, you also translate that towards your economic philosophy within the construct of power sharing liberalism. That's, you know, another popular strand in some dinner party conversations that capitalism and neoliberalism are eating us alive and we need to abandon ship. So you make the case for what you call economic egalitarianism. What does that mean, and how does power sharing liberalism get us there?
Danielle Allen: [00:21:26] Sure. So in some sense, the basic idea undergirding the political economy in my book is that the economy should serve the ends of human flourishing. So we are not interested in the economy just for the sake of the economy. The goal is not just actually maximal accumulation. The goal is a dynamic economy that supports people in their lives, and to support people in their lives requires supporting their empowerment politically as well as supporting them materially. So that then provides a frame for thinking about economic policy. What approaches to political economy can provide a foundation for people to have that share of power in a constitutional democracy? And the answer is that, you know, we need a combination of the market of public sector investment to support and help solve some collective action problems and civil society engagements, or nonprofits, mutual aid associations and things like that. So in that regard, it really is about, you know, approaches that enable cooperation across those three dimensions market, public sector, civil society, private sector, with different combinations being necessary in some sense for different features of the economy. So in that regard, trying to sort of break through the kind of binary argument between, say, capitalism and neoliberalism on the one hand, and sort of big state picture of the economy on the other hand. I think each of those pictures gets something wrong. It's also important to remember that a market economy and capitalism are not the same thing. You know, a market economy where you're protecting property rights and free transactions is is absolutely a critical source of well- being for human beings. But there can be different rules of the road for market economies, some of which better support egalitarian results than others.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:18] You know what I was kind of surprised by is that when we think about neoliberalism today, or at least with the people that I've been speaking with, let's say, a lot of people blame libertarians. And, you know, we think about Hayek or Rothbard, but you actually you pointed at Rawls and I was very surprised by that. And I thought, oh, wait, it's, you know, to your point, it's been baked in all this time. And I'm curious as to why you didn't talk about libertarians in your book.
Danielle Allen: [00:23:51] So it's interesting. I mean, Hayek shows up a little bit in my book. I think Hayek gave us a lot of great value, in fact. I mean, I think lots of the work on information theory and prizes and so forth is really helpful. And he certainly understood how important it was to facilitate emergent coordination among human beings to solve collective action problems. And so that's actually something I would say I positively draw on, where for me, the later libertarian tradition goes wrong. So I'm thinking more sort of folks like Nozick, for instance, is to, at the end of the day, fail to see how important the well-being of a community is to the well-being of an individual. So often there's a sort of line drawn between the rational self-interest of the individual, and then there's sort of a limited sense of what that amounts to. You sort of want to maximize your economic benefit for yourself, for instance. And then anything other than that is a sort of designated as altruistic. I think that's the wrong formulation. At the end of the day, human beings are social creatures. We thrive in society. We are supported by healthy communities. We need foundations for flourishing beneath us, which are collectively provisioned so our infrastructure like roads, for example, national security and things like that. So I think the libertarian project inadequately recognizes that the good of the whole is actually baked into our own individual self-interest.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:20] Well, I mentioned at the beginning that I thought your ideas about democracy are human centric, and since it's really new or we're, you know, we haven't really been practicing democracy in this way. Is there a place where there is an example for us to emulate?
Danielle Allen: [00:25:39] That's a great question. I do think that actually we are living in a period of great innovation in democratic practice. I think it's worth people remembering that there have been ages of such innovation. So antiquity. Ancient Greece, they invented a lot of stuff that hadn't been done before, in terms of how human
beings can share power in some measurable way and make decisions together. They did that on a small scale. Then we get to the 18th century, and the founders of the US made some new inventions representative institutions, for instance, and empowered self-government at a larger scale. They, though, didn't actually fully tackle the question of how other power structures in society in the market interact with the allocation of power in the political system. Those challenges have come to the fore in the 20th and 21st century, as we look at the sort of histories of racial domination, the challenges around gender power allocations and distributions and the like. So I think we're really the first generation that has taken on the project of achieving full power sharing with universal inclusion, and so we're having to learn some new practices. I think it means in our democracy we need some institutional tweaks. I'm an advocate for ranked choice voting, as I think you are as well, because I think it does a better job of including the full electorate in decision making and in our organizations, our businesses, our schools, our churches. There too we have had long standing habits of very hierarchical structures often, and I think we can do better. I think those organizations, too, could adopt some of the concepts of power sharing and become stronger as organizations, because I think they'll learn better when they are structured to empower everybody to participate in appropriate ways in decision making.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:37] Well, one way to make decisions together is to vote in elections, and it's an election year. So of course, we are inundated in extreme partisanship right now, the year 2024. And in the book, you remind us that political philosophers and American politicians like Washington and Lincoln warned us against factionalism and recommended unity. Where can we find unity now? Where can we find an opportunity to choose unity in this moment?
Danielle Allen: [00:28:07] Mhm. That's a great question. Thank you for that. Well you know although we live in such polarized times we do actually see people choosing unity surprisingly frequently. The place we see this most often is at the state level. When we look at what happens with ballot propositions. And some of these can be surprising. So for example, Florida in I think, 2018, a supermajority of voters in Florida voted to restore voting rights to people who had completed service of their felony convictions. And in Mississippi in 2020, a supermajority more than 70% of voters voted for a new state flag that got rid of the old emblems of the Confederacy. Or if you look at recent decisions in Kansas and Ohio around reproductive freedom and reproductive rights, not quite a
supermajority, but high, high percentages of voters came together across partisan lines to establish and protect compromises around the issue of abortion in our policy landscape. So I think where we see positive forward movement addressing the challenges our communities face, we often find cross-ideological supermajorities or near Supermajorities behind that. So the short answer is, you know, where where can we have the chance to choose unity? I would say, you know, we can take a look at some of the things people are working on at the state level and pitch in there. There are some important ballot initiatives coming up this season Idaho, Nevada, Colorado. They're all pursuing, you know, the Alaska model for elections, where we get rid of partisan primaries. So I think anybody who wants to put their hand up and support that is choosing unity in the kind of way that I was describing.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:48] Oh, yeah, that's a good reminder that state politics matter. Danielle Allen: [00:29:51] Exactly.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:52] Yeah. I mean, we've had a lot of episodes on state politics and why we need to vote at the state and local level, where most people don't vote, you know. They... Like to what I mentioned earlier, most people, first of all, don't care. And if they do care enough to vote, they only vote in presidential elections.
Danielle Allen: [00:30:06] Yeah.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:07] Speaking of elections, I mentioned that you are a practitioner
aside from being a political philosopher. So notably you have recently. Danielle Allen: [00:30:13] Was.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:15] Yes.
Danielle Allen: [00:30:15] I may be done with that.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:16] You're done? Well, I wanted to know why did you feel it was necessary for you to run?
Danielle Allen: [00:30:22] To run for governor? When I ran for governor?
Speaker3: [00:30:24] Yeah, yeah.
Danielle Allen: [00:30:26] Uh, well it was the middle of the pandemic. And I had for many years already been working on democracy, renovation, trying to move forward policy reforms to help us achieve more responsive institutions. My motivation for doing that democracy reform work was a sense that our institutions were often failing to help us address our hardest challenges, whether that is sort of, you know, the epidemic of substance use disorder or issues around gun violence or issues around climate change. So for me, getting some of those important policy areas addressed requires actually more responsive institutions. I found myself during the pandemic doing a lot of Covid response work, and I was doing that here in Massachusetts, where we are the state with the biotech jewels of the world. Despite that fact, despite those resources, there were just also these incredible disparities unfolding before our eyes at Harvard. We were bubble wrapped during the pandemic. We had as much testing as you could possibly want. Just a couple of miles away in Chelsea, neighboring community, we had one of the highest mortality rates in the country, and this just should never have happened in Massachusetts. And as I was watching it unfold, as I was trying to contribute to policy making in response, I honestly I just got angrier and angrier and angrier at the sitting governor. And, you know, the general thought was that nobody was going to run against him. He was understood to be extremely popular. And so I thought, fine, I'm going to grit my teeth and eat my vegetables because somebody needs to run. So that's why I jumped in. And then the goal was really to try to help drive our state institutions in the direction of more responsiveness to really critical problems.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:08] While I do think that there's a lot of value in running and changing the conversation and, you know, move the Overton window, so to speak, among, on so many issues.
Danielle Allen: [00:32:16] Absolutely.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:17] And it helps to have multiple people in the race. And if you have ranked choice voting, you know, have open primaries, it's it would be so much better. We would have better voices. Maybe better voices is wrong. But you know.
Danielle Allen: [00:32:28] More more choice.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:30] More choice.
Danielle Allen: [00:32:30] More debates. We would have better debates for sure.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:33] Yes. More debates. Better debates! Debates about the ideas as opposed to a popularity contest.
Danielle Allen: [00:32:39] And debates about the direction that we want to pursue. And what is it, you know, as a society we actually want. We don't actually debate that very often these days.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:47] Yeah, we really don't. So normally I ask, what are two things an everyday person can do to take civic action? But I want to ask you a slightly different question. What is an experiment in democracy that you want everyday people to engage in?
Danielle Allen: [00:33:04] Okay. That's interesting, an experiment in democracy that I want everyday people to engage in. That's a great question. So okay, here's one for any committee that you have to be part of, whether it's at work or church or a social organization, try experimenting with having three chairs for that committee, not one, but three. Three people who differ from each other in some way, some element of background or perspective, and learn how to work as a trio to lead the group. That I think is a very productive experiment. I've been fortunate now three times to be a part of a trio of chairs in projects such as these, and it enables leadership that brings a diversity of perspective in from the very beginning. It means the sort of leaders are attuned to the challenges of bringing many different perspectives together in conversation, and the whole structure of the committee work that unfolds from there is different because of that tripartite leadership model. So there's a very direct example of sharing leadership, right. Sharing power. So I think any place that one has the chance to experiment with, you know, sharing of power such as that, I would recommend.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:21] Oh yeah, that's a great suggestion. So as we are rounding out our conversation here today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Danielle Allen: [00:34:31] Oh, that's such a nice question. Well, you know, I think I have the conventional answer. My kids make me hopeful as I look into the future. I watched them growing up. They're growing up in hard times, you know, they were so impacted by the pandemic. The world is at war all around us. Nonetheless, they're creative and imaginative and caring, and they care about their broader community. And I know what's true of my kids is true of so many kids. So I think what makes me hopeful is that we are also rebuilding civic education, civic learning. And so if we can connect those amazing kids with real understanding about the value of self-government and constitutional democracy, I think we'll be in good hands.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:17] Yeah. Hear, hear. I will say that my own children are also very interested in what's happening in the world, and definitely don't think that they should be sitting on the sidelines. I think they would very much embrace power sharing liberalism.
Danielle Allen: [00:35:33] Exactly. Yeah.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:34] Well, Danielle, thank you so much for joining us on Future
Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you back on the show.
Danielle Allen: [00:35:40] Mila, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. So thanks for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:44] Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard, Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the author of Justice by Means of Democracy.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Philip K Howard. He's the chair of Common Good and the author of Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society.
Philip K. Howard: [00:36:17] America is overdue for change. The ground is shaking and you can feel it. We are going to get change. The question is whether the change is against democracy. You know, there are all these polls that show that some significant percentage of Americans no longer believe in democracy. It's incredible. So the change against democracy, or is it to make it work better?
Mila Atmos: [00:36:40] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks so much for listening. If you like this episode, you'll love what we have in store. Be sure to hit that follow button on Apple Podcasts or the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, so you'll catch all of our upcoming episodes. Thank you! Oh, and please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:37:38] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.