Delivering Good Governance: Danielle Allen
MARCH 3, 2022
“We have a real challenge ahead of us to really reinvent our democracy.”
Danielle Allen is a MacArthur Fellow and the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She’s published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought, and is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship. Her most recent book is Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus. We discuss the promise of good governance, common purpose, and our moral compass in action.
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Democracy Works
Good governance bolsters democracy by delivering for people in real ways that improve quality of life. For instance, it lowers the costs of living, makes quality healthcare accessible, and addresses the climate crisis, racial injustice, and more. Effective government connects hope with getting things done.
Common Purpose
Finding a common purpose is what fosters action. If individuals and communities can unite over a common purpose, they will have a target to work towards. Shared goals make it possible for teams to work cohesively and effectively. If we know where we are going collectively, then we can apply this to any issue that plagues our democracy, from inequality to climate.
Moral Compassion in Action
Our moral compass is already in action across the nation. For example, working together for fairness is much more common than one might think. Ballot propositions often achieve super majority votes. In Massachusetts, more than 70% of voters in 2020 voted for a proposition that gave small auto dealers access to data in cars, so they could stay in the business of making repairs. It’s just one instance of solidarity in action.
FIND OUT MORE:
Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and is currently on leave as the Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. Her most recent book is Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus.
Danielle has worked tirelessly through her writing, policy work, and political advocacy to advance the causes of freedom and equality, and to lay economic and health foundations on which all can flourish. She is especially proud of her civic education initiative which is supporting teaching and learning in fourteen Massachusetts school districts.
When the COVID crisis hit, Danielle quickly assembled a Rapid Response Network of forty researchers and eight institutions to lay out a policy roadmap, The Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience, and led the development of influential data metrics and tools. Many of the proposals in that Roadmap and in the related work developed have been incorporated in the Biden-Harris Administration Coronavirus Response Plan, and Danielle and her team have offered technical assistance to local leaders at city and county levels throughout the country.
She is a former Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board, past Chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
You can follow Danielle Allen on Twitter at @dsallentess
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Danielle Allen
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Danielle Allen Transcript (Final)
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Native for supporting Future Hindsight. Native makes safe, simple, effective products that people use everyday with trusted ingredients and trusted performance. Get 20% off your first purchase by visiting nativedeo.com/Hopeful or using promo code hopeful at checkout.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:25] 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. Ever since I started the show, in fact, one of the reasons I started the show is because I'm really fascinated by people who make the decision to move beyond complaining about how the world is to taking action to actually change it. People who take big ideas and turn them into actions, and today's guest is kind of the definition of that. Danielle Allen's resume is pretty incredible. Macarthur fellow Harvard professor and nonprofit leader. She's published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology and the History of Political Thought, and is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship. Her most recent book is Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus, and until mid-February she was a gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts. I interviewed her a few days before she withdrew, so we talk a little bit about her campaign. But even though her campaign is over, I think some of her ideas about what good governance might look like and how her work in ethics and political philosophy informs her politics are really thought-provoking. So we wanted to share this conversation with you. Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University professor at Harvard University and is currently on leave as the director of Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. I was delighted to welcome her to Future Hindsight, fittingly, as we pass from Black History Month to Women's History Month.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:11] Danielle, thank you for joining us.
Danielle Allen: [00:02:12] Thank you so much. Great to be here with you. I'm looking
forward to the conversation.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:16] Terrific. So when you announced your candidacy last June, you said democracy isn't something to be studied. Democracy is something to do. So you
have spent a lot of time studying democracy. When did you decide to move from studying to action?
Danielle Allen: [00:02:33] So I've been doing democracy for my whole life and studying it really in support of efforts at action. I grew up in a very political family. I mean, my my dad was running for Senate and my aunt was running for Congress in the same year in 1992 in California. One as a Reagan conservative, the other as a member of the Peace and Freedom Party. So opposite ends of the political spectrum and we had incredible vigorous debates over the dinner table. So I have always been involved. I've worked on other campaigns and for other candidates, and I've always stepped in, especially in times of crisis, like the one we have now.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:05] And so you decided not to run for Congress. You decided to run for governor. Why that position in particular?
Danielle Allen: [00:03:12] So life hasn't been business as usual for me since 2009. I lost my younger cousin Michael in that year to mass incarceration and gun violence, and I have been deeply engaged in issue advocacy since then for cannabis legalization for democracy reform, for civic education reform, and just sort of putting every tool at my disposal to work and joining forces with others to try to put the world to rights for young people. And then the pandemic hit. And when the pandemic hit, I just had this huge sense of shock at how different impacts were for different communities and how slow people with power and authority were to see that and respond appropriately. And for me, in every dark time, I've always found light and hope in being part of a big team, you know, a team of guts and grit and heart and hustle. And so I put out a call and I was blessed to have people from all over experts and practitioners, mayors around the country and community advocates respond. And we formed a sort of COVID Rapid Response Task Force, and in April 2020, we put out the first national policy roadmap advocating a real ramp up of public investment in testing and contact tracing. And we did get policy into federal legislation, and President Biden signed one of our policies in via an executive order in his first few days in office. But while I was doing that work, it just drove home to me how much the heart of where our challenge lies in this country is truly at the state level. We have this sort of idea it's at the federal level because we're watching all this paralysis, this polarized politics and the like. But the truth of the matter is the basic building blocks of healthy communities, housing, health, education, justice.
You know, these are the basic building blocks of healthy communities, and the core responsibility is for all of them lie at the state level. So I had a real kind of profound reorientation in my COVID work, sort of away from federal politics and to state politics.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:01] The work that you did, first of all, is really amazing and I read your book, so it was really clear to me how you organized the steps to reopen and also to center education in a way that we haven't really as a society. And like you said, it actually, schools actually provide so much more than education for our communities. So it's a fairly well-trodden path from activist community organizer, which in a way, of course, you are, to legislator; or from lawyer or even law professor to lawmaker; but less common or perhaps unprecedented is apart from ethicist to governor. How does your scholarship feed into your campaign?
Danielle Allen: [00:05:39] I thought you were going to say ethicist to executive there as you were talking about how lawyers transfer into being legislators. So who exactly should become an executive? That's really the question. And why not an ethicist? I ask you. After all, executive work, executive leadership is about judgment. Fundamentally, I think this is one of the points we've lost sight of in our society. That executive leadership is about making hard judgment calls in tough moments. At the end of the day, you know, why not an ethicist? All of our toughest judgments should be oriented by a clear moral compass.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:10] That's what you said, right, in your announcement that your first priority is a moral priority. What do you mean by that and how does it connect to real concrete actions?
Danielle Allen: [00:06:20] Well, it just comes right back to COVID again. When the pandemic hit, we watched as all over the country, people with resources scrambled to protect themselves. You know, I am a part of a university that quickly built a bubble for itself to protect itself, and the MBA built a bubble to protect itself. And all over the country, little islands of self-protection were popping up. At the same time, huge numbers of people were going without the protection they needed and deserved. Frontline workers being pushed back in meatpacking plants without access to PPE and testing. Health care workers, educators really, who were put through the wringer, are trying to make pieces and parts fit together and the like. And I really saw that moment
as just at the end of the day, a moral failure. Instead of seeing ourselves as a whole and complete society where we needed to build an umbrella of protection for all of us, where we needed to start by prioritizing the least well-off and the most vulnerable, we let those with resources double down on their capacity to self protect and left everyone else hanging out to dry. So yes, my campaign starts from a moral priority as sort of reorientation of ourselves toward one another as a complete society. My core campaign theme in Massachusetts is that we need to be one Commonwealth. We've got to see each other. We've got to start again, seeing each other, recognizing ourselves as being in a shared endeavour.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:40] So this holistic picture that you paint is really important, and I know that you have a very extensive health plan. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Danielle Allen: [00:07:50] For decades, health has been a challenge in this country, and we all have family members or friends who've gotten trapped in the complexity of insurance or being between jobs, and then not having the coverage that you need or getting trapped in a job that's not a good fit because it's the only way to maintain health coverage and so forth. So that we have a lot of work to do has been clear for a long time. And then, of course, the pandemic drove home just what sort of different foundations for health different communities have. Putting it really starkly here in Massachusetts, we have life expectancy, lifespan of on average, 68 in New Bedford and 94 in Newton, one of the suburbs of Boston. And that difference in terms of basic health really factored in also to who was most vulnerable to COVID. So we have a lot of work to do. And so in our health agenda, we start by arguing we've got to put Health Equity First. Center our whole goal around health equity that everybody should have access to an excellent foundation for health. And then there are really two parts of that foundation for health. There are those basic building blocks that help people be healthy in the first place. That's housing security. That's food security. For example, access to a good job, able to put the pieces of life together for a good quality of life.
Danielle Allen: [00:09:05] And then the second thing is, when we do have illnesses and we need treatment, we all need access to a high quality standard of care. So across those two parts, the sort of foundations and then the access to care, health care, health access needs to be universal, simple and affordable. Those are my sort of North stars in
the space of health policy. Universal, simple, and affordable, and there's work we need to do on each. We have 97% of folks covered in Massachusetts. We've got to close the coverage gap by folding undocumented people into public programs, by building a public private partnership insurance approach for small businesses and their employees. So there's work to do to, to get to universality. For simplicity, we've got to really invest in community health centers, invest in the personnel for health, including behavioral health that we have in schools, so that we're building a true backbone sort of in the community that's easily accessible for primary and preventative care. And then we've got to use tools like reference pricing to bring the costs down for provision of that care that we need from our health system in response to illness.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:10] So I wanted to ask you, relatedly to that about drug policy, which then, of course, feeds into criminal justice and over incarceration and what can governors do to tackle these issues?
Danielle Allen: [00:10:21] When I started the process of running for governor, I started off with an exploratory phase of about six months from December 2020 till June 2021, and I ran a listening tour around the Commonwealth and it was just really powerful how deep the impact of the opioid epidemic is in Massachusetts. We have had five people dying of overdoses on average every day for the whole of the administration of the current governor. No improvement and things are getting worse right now. The pain felt by families is profound. Also, the sense of helplessness and in some sense, you know, the really terrible thing is that we don't actually have to be helpless in relationship to the scourge of opioids. There is a heck of a lot of evidence that a full embrace of harm reduction approaches works. So Oregon, you know, has really gotten to the place of the greatest ambition in this country for a full embrace of harm reduction. And so Oregon has worked to be building out recovery resources, supportive housing for people on a journey of recovery and the like, and has also reclassified simple use and possession of controlled substances as a civil rather than a criminal offense. So I am proposing that policy paradigm for Massachusetts that we decriminalize addiction by reclassifying those offenses as civil offenses that we expect to waive those civil fines if people are ready to participate in treatment, and that we ensure that treatment access to recovery resources is closely connected to the wraparound services around housing and food security and jobs.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:50] I want to pivot to some big picture questions. You argue that we are a constitutional democracy in crisis, in part because of the botched response to COVID, but also because we are already in the middle of a political legitimacy crisis. I think, of course, we have a sense of this, but it's almost too big to think about, too nebulous for everyday people, I think. And so how do you think about that crisis and how do you think about solutions?
Danielle Allen: [00:12:17] Well, you know, I think we all feel the crisis every day and visiting with folks and communities, you just hear people say over and over again how scared they are about the uncertainty and fragility of our democracy, how scared they were to watch the insurrection at the Capitol, how tired they are of all the anger and the hatred that's expressed and how confused they are about how on earth we can get out of this dark place. So those feelings are all over the place. And I think those feelings capture that sense of a democracy in crisis, and they're not new. Young people have been articulating a lot of these feelings for quite some time. There's the stunning data point that for people born before World War Two, about 70% of them consider it essential to live in a democracy. Whereas for millennials, which is, you know, not really that young at this point, it's, you know, 40-and-under not quite 30% consider it essential to live in a democracy. And if you've had that change of point of view across generations, it means, you know, we have failed at a fundamental level at generational transmission of a commitment to constitutional democracy. And when you sort of talk to millennials and other young folks, you know, they've got a lot of good reasons, right? They sort of stare at the climate crisis and say, I'm not going to have kids because like, why my future is too uncertain. There's lots that can be done. I don't want to just say it's all bleak, but I do think we have a whole lot of evidence around that's been building for years about a really pretty significant legitimacy crisis.
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Mila Atmos: [00:15:24] You wrote in your book really about, and obviously this is evident to all of us living in the United States, in fact, all over the world, right, that the pandemic has really shone a light on the frayed, threadbare state of our social contract. And I think it forced at least some people to see how America has abandoned so many people. And we've been talking about the social contract a lot on this show. We did a whole season of episodes on it last year, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the social contract, both as a political theorist and, of course, as a nonprofit leader. And it's another one of these big ideas that can be really hard to pin down. So when you think about the social contract, what are you thinking about? Is it something that we can repair or do we need to start over?
Danielle Allen: [00:16:10] So let me start at the end, I think we can repair it. I don't think we have to start from scratch. And in general, very rarely has anything ever been achieved starting from scratch. Even in the American Revolution, it was not starting from scratch. It was a matter of repurposing a lot of existing stuff. But in terms of what's the social contract, I think of a social contract as two things, fundamentally. So the first is a set of rights and responsibilities that we all have that are connected to also rewards and privileges. So, you know, we all work hard, we pay taxes and therefore we also have a right to a degree of protection. I mean, that's the whole point of investing in these things together. And, you know, we saw in the pandemic, you know, working people again. I mean, it's just for me, it's just a staggering thing. Working people, you know, taxpayers not getting protection, you know, like that is a completely broken social contract. And in principle, if a social contract is healthy and functioning, then in addition
to everybody pitching in and everybody getting back the protection and supports for well-being they need, we also have a sort of alive and kicking kind of culture of solidarity, a sense of recognition that there are things we do for one another because we're all better off if we pull together than if we pull apart.
Danielle Allen: [00:17:24] And that's the other thing that we really just have in very short supply. Here in the U.S., there is no golden age. There's never a point at which we had some just remarkable sort of store of social solidarity. Our racial divisions have always meant that there were some absolute limits to how what social solidarity existed worked. And so we have a real challenge ahead of us to really reinvent our democracy, repurpose what's good and transform and reimagine so that we can actually have functioning systems that call on each of us to chip in to play our part, but also deliver protection and the foundations for well-being to all of us. And that also invite us all to a sort of sense of mutual commitment, shared relationship recognition of being a part of a shared and worthy endeavor.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:10] Yeah, you know, this gets at the legitimacy question of the government. What do you think are like the first two things we should be doing or thinking about? Maybe that's a better way. What are the first two things we should be thinking about as we consider rectifying the legitimacy crisis of our government?
Danielle Allen: [00:18:27] Well, that's that's a beautiful, beautiful question, and I love it because it helps tie things together, and I think what the pandemic has really driven home is that for all of our hardest issues, so not just the pandemic but climate crisis and inequality and racial injustice, we can't actually address any of those unless we have a healthy democracy. So the challenge is, how do you both take your top priority items for fixing the health of our democratic institutions and tie them to top priority items for addressing those core needs for a foundation for healthy communities, healthy lives and healthy climate? Now what does that mean? That was all kind of abstract. What that means is in my platform running for governor, for example, I'm focused on basic building blocks, housing. We've got to commit to a roof over every head and we've got a housing agenda to deliver on that. And that's critical because our democracies have to deliver in real ways for people that improve quality of life, lower cost of living and have to be accountable in doing that. So then I also have a democracy agenda and in my democracy agenda, for example, I commit the executive branch of our government to
adhering to our Public Records Act. This is an act like the Freedom of Information Act, and so it's the kind of anchor for transparency and accountability. Our governor has been claiming wholesale exemption from this act. We require every town and city to abide by it. But the governor's been claiming wholesale exemption, so I made this commitment that the executive branch would abide by the Public Records Act. So the point I'm just really trying to make here is that it's not enough to work on housing, got to work on democracy too. But it's also not enough to work on democracy just by itself if you're not delivering for those basic foundations for healthy lives and healthy communities.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:11] You've talked about how common purpose is the most powerful tool and the democratic toolkit. So what do you mean when you say that?
Danielle Allen: [00:20:19] You know, I talk a lot about the need for teams to build common purpose, a shared purpose, a shared goal. The thing you're working toward, democracies need that just as much. And I know it can sound sort of airy and fairier, you know, sort of sentimental romanticism. But the truth of the matter is that a common purpose is a compass point, is sort of the the target on the map, what you're aiming toward. And if you know where you are going collectively, then it gets to be much easier to coordinate and organize around that goal. Again, just using COVID as an example. Part of the reason we had so much trouble with COVID is because, honestly, our national political leaders never actually directly asked and answered the question in March and April 2020. Were we trying to suppress COVID completely a la Taiwan? Where are we trying to mitigate COVID? A little bit more like the U.K.? Or were we going to let it run free? I mean, so basically there were three different possible goals that we could have been pursuing, and nobody ever bothered to say that out loud and say, "OK, let's let's convene around this goal of suppression," say. And had we been able to actually name a goal and convene around it, I think we could have actually just functioned much more effectively.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:31] Well, I think instinctively we know that common purpose unites us, right? But the challenge seems to be finding common purpose when we are living in a kind of split screen reality where we don't have a sense of what the shared set of facts are. You know, some people believe one thing and other people believe another thing.
And I think that makes it really difficult to have a dialogue about what our common purpose may be.
Danielle Allen: [00:21:57] Well, it certainly makes it harder, but not impossible. And the only question really is how you go about building the dialogue. So I have led in recent years to national commissions, one on democracy reform and one on civic education. And in both cases, we built very large cross ideological teams of people and found common purpose and found sets of recommendations that had consensus within the group. We did not require unanimity on any particular recommendation. We didn't want anybody to have a veto point in the conversations, but we did want to make sure that every single thing we recommended had support from across the political spectrum, so to speak. So consider it supermajority support for any particular recommendation. As long as that supermajority included some folks from both sides of the balance, that was our sort of working model for decision making. How did we actually get this all done? I mean, it really was just a matter of building the conversation. So you start out with a leadership group of, say, six people and you make sure you've got diversity of all kinds in that group. Demographic diversity, but also a viewpoint diversity.
Danielle Allen: [00:23:00] And then once you've got your first six, you tell everybody to bring five more. But you have to make sure that when you're at that next level of 36 that you still have that full spread of diversity and you do literally just keep building out. In the civic education work, we ended up as a team of 300 based on a principle of building in that fashion. And again, you know, coming back to COVID, the places that succeeded better did that kind of cross faction building of teams to make decisions much more effectively. So in Australia, for example, the government right from the get-go set up a national COVID advisory group, drawing from the party leadership from both parties, from every state in Australia. And that is basically unimaginable in the U.S. at this point in time that you would have a genuinely functional advisory group that was 50-50 bipartisan or whatnot. And so in that regard, there are clear examples of how to do the work of actually getting to shared purpose, even in context of great disagreement. Few people undertake the actual effort needed to do it.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:01] Yeah, it's hard work to do what you just laid out. Danielle Allen: [00:24:05] Yes,
Mila Atmos: [00:24:06] It's not easy.
Danielle Allen: [00:24:06] It's time consuming. I mean, so that is, you know, when we are riven by as much disagreement as we are riven by, everything takes longer and that is one of the biggest challenges, right? That's also I thing that was really hard about the COVID crisis is partly we were not going to succeed because we couldn't cross those boundaries and divisions in the amount of time at hand for decision making.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:28] Right, right. Well, you say that we need to break down the laws of politics. So what does that look like and how will it get us to the other side?
Danielle Allen: [00:24:37] Well, you know, we're running a campaign, we call it, think of it as sort of everyone's invited campaign. Everyone's invited. We welcome all comers. As long as you're committed to the idea that everybody's invited, that this is about an inclusive participatory democracy, you know, we draw a bright line at anybody who wants to pick up a position of, you know, supremacy or domination or anything of that kind. But if you are ready to be a part of an inclusive constitutional democracy where we do wrestle through hard decisions together and expect to achieve compromises, we would love to have you on our side so everyone's invited. I'm running as a Democrat for sure and have strong sense of affinity with the Democratic Party and try and help build up a stronger version of the Democratic Party. But at this point in time, we have a whole lot of unenrolled voters in Massachusetts, and I believe also we have a lot of Republicans who've just been abandoned by their national leadership. They have a national leadership that has legitimized insurrection that has legitimized the use of political violence for resolving disputes. And I believe that's an act of abandonment. And so they too are invited to join us in our work.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:38] So what have you learned so far from campaigning that has surprised you, something that's perhaps at odds with watching all these other campaigns, even even the ones of your family members like your dad, and and your aunt from the outside?
Danielle Allen: [00:25:53] Well, there's no more paper cuts anymore. That was my sharpest memory from, as a kid, my dad's campaigns was just, you know, all that
envelope stuffing, you know, you just lived with paper cuts all the time. That's gone. No more paper cuts, for sure. And then I think probably the other biggest surprise is how much I'm enjoying it. So when I started in December 2020, I had a sort of attitude of ya, I'll grit my teeth and do this. I'm going to be a big girl, eat my vegetables, basically, and I've got a responsibility to step up and that sort of thing. And instead, you know, honestly, I, just it's extraordinary. It's the most hope bringing experience. It's a powerful and replenishing and restorative experience. So I would truly recommend it to anybody. Everybody should be thinking about running for office because it's just an incredible privilege to go visit towns and cities all over Massachusetts and have people show you around and introduce you to what's best in their community, but then also show you what the challenges are. And and brainstorm with you about how to address them. It's extraordinary and just really again, just restores your hope in our power to come together and to build solutions from the ground up from every community.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:02] So I always ask this question in every interview. What are two things that an everyday person could be doing to advance our state of democracy?
Danielle Allen: [00:27:15] Well, you know, let me, let me return, maybe to the language of moral priorities. You know, I think we all need a world where we can be kind and curious, you know, and we need to make a transition and recognize that we have deeply held reasons for our own beliefs and commitments, but that so many others around us do as well, and that it's worth the moment to try to listen and understand, to try to say back to the person what you think you've heard from them and check whether you've heard them right before you jump in with a response and try to open up space for conversation among ourselves again.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:47] Oh, I love it. Kind and curious. That's, you know, really awesome. I am always curious, although I'm not sure I'm always kind. But certainly I, I strive to be kind. So you talked about this already a little bit, but I wanted to ask you this question explicitly. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Danielle Allen: [00:28:07] The people of Massachusetts make me hopeful and young people make me hopeful. I have been so just deeply moved and inspired by the work that young people have done on climate, and young people have completely changed the conversation and have changed the policy frameworks of what's possible for
climate, for issues of sustainability and climate justice. And I'll give you one other thing that really makes me hopeful. You know, people do often sort of point to national politics and say, "Look, how can you stand it? It is just a disaster zone, you know, it's just sort of just fire pit. Everything's burning." And I said, "Well, you know what? Let's look someplace else. Let's look at state ballot propositions." Because if we look there, we actually see a very different picture of who we are as a people. If you pay attention, you'll see that we actually surprisingly often achieve supermajority votes on ballot propositions that really kind of articulate a clear moral compass. In Massachusetts in 2020, more than 70 percent of us voted for a ballot proposition called the "right to repair" ballot proposition. This gave small auto dealers access to the data in cars so they could stay in the business of making repairs and not get closed out by the big companies. So folks were sticking up for people getting the short end of the stick. And Florida in 2018, supermajority vote -- more than 66% of people -- voted to restore voting rights to people who had completed their felony convictions. Again, you know, people from both parties voted for this, saying that was about sticking up for the person getting the short end of the stick. And even Mississippi. In 2020, Mississippi passed by supermajority a ballot proposition for a new state flag, removing emblems of the Confederacy and replacing them with a new symbolic vocabulary. And so there you have it. You know, we the people, we do have a moral compass, pointed towards fairness, pointed towards inclusion. And the real question is how we can open up the space for us to stand up and claim who and what we really are and what we believe.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:02] Yeah, that's wonderful that you're pointing out these concrete examples of where we really do have the moral compass right in our pockets and in our hearts as everyday citizens who vote. So what is one last takeaway yet that you would like to share?
Danielle Allen: [00:30:22] Oh, gosh. I think it would really come back to this. I know a lot of people have a really powerful sense of alienation from our politics right now. A lot of reasons to disengage. And a lot of reasons to say, no, you know, what's the point of even hoping that things can be different? Because, you know, we've been asked to hope before and politicians come through here and they tell us it'll be better this way. It'll be better that way, and then nothing ever happens. So the real challenge is we've got to connect hope and effectiveness, hope in getting it done. And so I think the other place I've seen real sources of hope, I'll come back to the pandemic again, are the way in
which community organizations have come together, have said things can and should be different, and then they've gotten it done. So one concrete example to conclude with. In Massachusetts, when our vaccine rollout started, it was a true disaster. The state government really did not get it well organized. I had one friend who went on the website to get an appointment for her older husband and literally got a 20,000 hour wait time. So anyway. But in Boston, the leaders of non-profit organizations in the city came together as the Black Boston COVID Coalition and built a process to get vaccines into people's arms using get out the vote techniques and setting up vaccine clinics and sites and locations that were near people and accessible and achieved one of the highest vaccination rates for a community of color in the country. And so, you know, that's what it's about. You know, name the problem. Say it can be different, it should be different and then get it done. And we do have lots of beautiful examples of that coming out of the pandemic that I hope we can tell the stories of so that we can start rebuilding hope and people's willingness to step up and engage.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:04] Terrific. Thank you for being on the podcast. Danielle Allen: [00:32:07] Great to be with you.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:08] That was Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University professor at Harvard University. She's currently on leave as the director of Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and was until mid-February gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts. Her team told us while Danielle has moved out of campaign mode, she's more committed than ever to her advocacy on democracy reform, justice and safety, climate, housing and a host of other issues affecting Massachusetts communities. I'm actually really interested to see what he does next, and we'll stay tuned.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:49] Next time on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Art Chang, candidate for New York City mayor in the 2021 election. Art's going to give us the inside scoop on what it's like to run for office if you're not a professional politician, share some of what he learned running for mayor to help those of us who might be thinking about running for office, or for us voters who'd like to know more about how the sausage gets made. That's next time on Future Hindsight.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:14] To hear all the latest on the show, you can follow us on Twitter @futur_hindsight. Also, our DMs are open! We'd love to hear from you; anything from what your civic engagement toolkits look like to suggestions for guests. Our Twitter handle again is @futur_hindsight. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:33:49] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.