Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Democratic Knowledge Project, a research lab focused on civic education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Danielle Allen discuss why the liberal worldview of the 1990s and 2000s has collapsed, how “power-sharing liberalism” can address the failures of technocratic governance, and whether participatory democracy risks empowering the professional managerial class at the expense of ordinary citizens.
This transcript has been edited and lightly condensed for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We speak regularly, and it seems to me striking that we have now been in this crisis of democracy, or whatever we want to call it, for at least ten years, at least since Donald Trump was elected in 2016. For me, it feels like with each passing year we have fewer answers about what to do and how to get out of this moment. At the beginning there were confident prognostications that this was just a temporary thing, that changes were going to make sure that something like Trump could never get elected again, or confident policy prescriptions about the three clever tricks we had to adopt in order to get through this moment. It seems to me that as Trump got reelected, and as similar political movements are now leading in the polls in Britain and France and in some polls in Germany, that no longer seems realistic. Where is your head in terms of understanding this moment and thinking about how to respond to it?
Danielle Allen: Sure, thanks. I appreciate that framing, Yascha. You and I have been in conversation about these themes for nearly a decade at this point.
I think we live in a new world. In that regard, the most important thing is to understand the world we live in and then to figure out how we are going to navigate it. There are a lot of features of that new world. One is what I talk about as the end of neoliberalism, and I mean that in a purely descriptive fashion. One might also mean it from an evaluative point of view, but what I mean is literally that a set of status quo policy frameworks involving trade liberalization, globalization, relatively open borders, and market-based solutions for nearly all social problems is no longer with us. That status quo policy package is gone. In the United States, both the Biden administration and the Trump administration have moved into completely different policy territory. We are also seeing dramatic policy shifts in other countries.
In that context, the third thing we are seeing is a real struggle on the part of legacy democracies to govern effectively in turbulent and rapidly changing circumstances. That is the situation. I believe in freedom. I believe in self-government for free and equal citizens. For me, the question is not how we preserve some old thing, but rather how, in these conditions, we win the institutions of free self-government. I take it that we have the job of winning them from a set of circumstances that are fundamentally eroding the opportunity for free self-government.
Mounk: One thing that I have been thinking about a lot is that the worldview that I, to some extent, had when I was 18 years old, and to some extent was raised into as I went through my university education, has fallen apart in quite a remarkable way. You and I have some ideological differences and some differences of approach. You are also a trained classicist, which sadly I am not. We were raised in a somewhat similar academic environment as political theorists.
It seems to me that the world, even as it looked when I entered graduate school in 2007, and certainly when I entered college in 2000, has fallen apart. Some of the most fundamental assumptions, not about the normative debates we used to have in the government department at Harvard, but some of the underlying assumptions about what the trends of the world were, have not stood the test of time.
The idea that nationalism would be the ideology of the twentieth century and would not really shape the twenty-first century in the same way. The idea that international trade would bring democracy to the world and liberalize China. The idea that meritocracy would give everybody opportunity and that as the share of people going to college increased, people would be optimistic about the future. I could go on.
To me, the task of this moment is trying to think about how we preserve some of the values that I am still committed to. I continue to be a philosophical liberal, while freeing ourselves from the constraints of a worldview that clearly does not speak to this moment, that makes us incapable of political battle and taking on these illiberal forces that, for all their flaws, sound more like they are talking about the year 2025 than my friends sometimes do.
Allen: I often make a point like one that you’ve just made with reference to the work of your collaborator, Frank Fukuyama, and his important book, The End of History. I sort of joke that when he published that book, The End of History, in the early 90s, there was this idea that liberalism, Western liberalism, was triumphant and that the big conflicts of politics had ceased and now we knew what world we were going to live in. My joke is that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union was the beginning of history, not the end. It was like the restarting of history.
The Cold War had frozen things in place, had frozen geopolitical realities in place, and with its end suddenly jockeying for power and position could begin again, and really that is history. When I was a kid, I used to read history books and wonder what it was like to live in big history, and I feel like now we all know. This is what it’s like to live in big history. Rather than being the end of history, it was the beginning of big history again.
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So the question is how you handle that condition, how you navigate it. You are an advocate of liberalism. I’m an advocate for a very specific variant of it, which I call “power-sharing liberalism.” This is the theme of my book, Justice by Means of Democracy. That variant developed based on a critique of where I think the liberalism of the 70s, 80s, and 90s went wrong.
Mounk: Where did the liberalism of the 70s, 80s and 90s go wrong and how is power-sharing liberalism a response to that?
Allen: It went wrong in the sense of taking liberalism as resting on a package of two sets of rights or freedoms. Philosophers talk about negative liberties, freedoms from governmental interference, freedom of expression and conscience and religion and so forth. There are also positive liberties, the freedoms to participate, to be a voter, to run for office, to help steer and shape your own community.
Liberalism for the last few decades has really prioritized the former and established an approach to policy where, as long as technocrats deliver sufficiently high material well-being and protect those negative liberties, participation rights do not really matter that much. We have technocrats, we have it under control. I think that was a fundamental mistake and produced real blind spots about the operation of the economy.
For example, blind spots to the impacts of globalization and to the erosion of dignity and empowerment that people have been experiencing, which have become wells of resentment and toxicity. Power-sharing liberalism is an approach to liberalism that takes both bundles of rights completely seriously and considers participatory rights non-sacrificeable.
I spend my time looking around our structures, institutions, and organizations, trying to revive their capacity to empower people to govern themselves. It means different ways of organizing civil society organizations. It means rethinking the institutions of representative government. It means looking at policy domains and making sure that they are not only connected to appropriately participatory governance processes, but also that their outcomes support people’s empowerment.
For me, that puts housing at the top of the list of economic policy questions, because if people do not have stable housing, they are not empowered in essentially every other dimension of their life. That changes the balance after decades where growth and taxation were the key economic concepts. Housing may be the single most important economic theme. If we cannot get that right in a liberal democracy, the growth question does not matter.
Mounk: You square this emphasis on participation with another concern that a lot of people have had in the last years, and to which I think you’re generally sympathetic, which is the dominance of a professional managerial class in a lot of our supposedly neutral institutions and in our culture more broadly. When you create more opportunities for participation, a lot of the time the people most likely to take those opportunities are those who have the most financial means, the most education, and the time, and they are likely to be comparatively privileged people rather than comparatively unprivileged people.
I always think of a lovely text by another former political theorist at Harvard, Michael Walzer, a lovely text that he published in Dissent in the 1960s called “A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen.” It starts with a famous quotation from Marx where you fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, and criticize critics in the evening. He says that if we believe in basic democracy, if we believe in participatory democracy, what is actually going to happen is that we are going to be giving out fishing licenses in the morning, sitting on the hunting commission deciding when we are allowed to hunt in the afternoon, and instead of writing beautiful poems in the evening we are going to be sitting on a horrible literary prize committee fighting with each other about which poem should win.
That is a bit of a parody, but I wonder to what extent these two things can come at cross purposes. Take the case of housing. I agree with you that housing is incredibly important, that one of the reasons why people are very pessimistic, including relatively affluent young people with relatively good jobs, is that they feel they are never going to be able to afford a nice apartment in New York, Boston, or Los Angeles, the centers of economic opportunity in the United States.
Of course, a lot of the reason why we are unable to build housing is forms of participation that get every building process bogged down in environmental review, and where neighbors can always complain about changes in the character of a neighborhood that are going to come from any housing project. Do you fear that in some ways participatory democracy of a kind, which for good reason you are emphasizing, may actually strengthen rather than weaken the overrepresentation of one stratum of society in decision-making that has already been able to concentrate quite a lot of benefits in its own hands?
Allen: First of all, there is a question of the science of democratic design. I think our intellectual resources for doing that work are not at their strongest point. We have neglected this science. If one digs into the history of it, a key feature of the science of democratic design is that you are always trying to optimize for multiple values. Participation or inclusion is one value, but so too is energy.
You have to find designs that are able to align these two values. In the nineties and two thousands, there was a lot of embedding of participatory processes into decision-making mechanisms without concern for this question of energy. It is important to find alternative designs that can bring those two values together. People are experimenting with more efficient ways of doing sense-making and ensuring that the impacted community and the participatory community actually align with each other.
Right now, we have a lot of misalignments where, for example, a suburb makes decisions about housing, but those decisions impact a much broader area. The decision-making location has been placed at the wrong jurisdictional level. You can make jurisdictional adjustments as well as process adjustments to align incentives better and increase the efficiency of those participatory elements. My labs spend a lot of time looking at that and trying to figure out an array of possible participatory mechanisms and which ones are more efficient and give more energy to the decision-making process. That is one thing.
Another thing is that the idea that we need to take positive liberties seriously is a strong alternative model for how we think about society and the economy. At the moment, we are watching an ever-increasing extraction and monetization of people’s time. I feel like I have much less control over my time than I did even ten years ago. I also have a strong awareness that technology is a big part of that because with calendaring systems and digital systems we can control time down to the last millisecond.
The concept of the protected workweek, the protections gained in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, is eroding. I am not sure how many people can keep bounds around a 35-hour workweek any longer. Against that background, we have to revisit the question of the workweek, how we bound it, and how we control it.
Employers have become used to the idea that supporting work-life balance is part of being a decent employer. We have to turn the crank on that. The framework should be to support work-life civic balance. That can mean giving people the day off on election day. It can mean that if employees decide to run for municipal office and need to work three-quarters time for three years instead of full-time, they should not lose their jobs.
Employers should accommodate people taking on local responsibilities. At the moment, even at the municipal level, there are insufficient people able to stand for office. The fact that badly designed approaches to participation exist does not delegitimize participation as a value. It signals that we have to rebuild the science of democratic design. That is one thing. The second thing is that there is a broader economic framework that we have to intervene in to give people control over their time again.
Mounk: One area in which this trade-off becomes very obvious is in electoral mechanisms. You recently published an article on your Substack and on Persuasion, arguing that primaries, as they are designed, are a really bad idea. That seems to me to be exactly a case of this.
If you have five to eight percent of people participating in a congressional primary, that feels like a democratic advance relative to what the situation was in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when it was the famous smoke-filled back rooms where deals were being hashed out. But those five to eight percent of the population are quite likely to be unrepresentative of the population as a whole. We know from many studies that they tend to be much more ideologically extreme, less compromising, and more angry than the average voter.
By the time the average American shows up to the polls in November, they have two choices, both of which can, in some circumstances, be quite extreme and both of which they feel do not represent them. One of the results of that is that the number of Americans who affiliate with either the Democratic or Republican Party is at record lows.
How do you think about squaring that circle? How do we increase participation in a real way while changing the system that gives us this fake simulacrum of participation in a way that actually allows political parties to exert tremendous ideological discipline over their members?
Allen: I think one of the things that is really important in thinking about the future of democracy, or the future of liberalism, is to recognize that there is no static end state. Even past reforms that were democratizing and liberalizing were not static end states. The reason for this is that I agree with the iron law of oligarchy, the argument that every form of human social organization tends over time toward oligarchic capture.
If that is correct, and I think it is correct, then the project of democracy is always and perpetually to undo the challenge of oligarchic capture. Oligarchic capture can take different forms. In our current moment, we have capture by small voting blocs within the formal parties, blocs with more extreme views, which have captured our political institutions. There is also the issue of corporate capture, which is another part of the story. Both of those things are relevant.
When political party primaries were introduced, they were a positive democratic reform. They expanded the conversation beyond smoke-filled back rooms and exposed things to public accountability and transparency. Over time, however, the process was captured again through gerrymandering. That then combined with reduced participation in a more captured and less legitimate process to give us the problem that we now have to undo again.
I think that being committed to the project of freedom is about being committed to renovating political institutions every couple of generations. That is one of the messages I am trying to communicate. When people feel despairing about our current moment, my response is that this is the price of freedom. Over time, institutions cease to deliver for the project of freedom, and they have to be renovated again. It happens to be our job in this particular moment.
Mounk: I agree with that. I wonder whether the kinds of institutional changes we have been talking about are going to be enough. That is a hard challenge because I do not think anybody really has the answer to that. One concern I have is that some of these reforms are responding to specifically American ailments. We see democracy under significant threat in many countries with very different political systems.
Arguably, Switzerland, which is the most participatory democracy in the world, has done relatively better than some other countries. I can see how you could make a comparative case that participation strengthens democracies. One pitfall of this conversation is to look at specific American ailments and suggest fixes. I often agree that those are ailments and that the fixes make sense. But when I look at the fact that moderate political forces are on the decline everywhere, I worry that this may not be enough.
The other point I want to make is that liberalism has been in deep and serious intellectual crisis a number of times in history. You can place those crises at different moments. The two most obvious ones are the rise of industrial capitalism and a large, relatively immiserated working class in the factories of Manchester and the Midwest in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, and then the period of ideological competition from fascism and communism in the middle of the twentieth century.
Each time, liberalism responded in part by reinventing the tradition, by figuring out how to take certain forms of social rights and integrate them within a basic liberal framework. Liberals came to favor rather than oppose universal schooling, limits on working hours, restrictions on child labor, and many other things. The response to communism and fascism was more complicated, involving thinkers like Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, and others who were trying to think through how to persevere under the threat of totalitarianism.
What strikes me is that I do not see a similar attempt to reimagine the tradition today. There are many people doing good work, and perhaps these things only become evident in hindsight, but it is not clear to me where the fundamental rethinking of liberalism is at the moment that could rejuvenate it.
Allen: Well, it’s tough, Yascha, because I’ll be honest, that’s what I think of myself as doing. My question would be back to you. Take my book, Justice by Means of Democracy. Why does it not count as an example of that?
Mounk: Well, I think it does count as an example of that. I just wonder whether we are still too stuck in a paradigm to have gone far enough in reinventing the tradition. Then there is the more straightforward problem of, in a moment when we do not have much political power, how we actually make some of those changes.
It feels to me like the anger that people have at the political system at the moment, the sense that the political system is not responding, may not be carried by the responses so far. Perhaps I am being too pessimistic.
Allen: I want to go back to your first question, which was about the U.S. context versus the comparative context, and how minute institutional solutions in one place can be pertinent to the larger global systemic change we are seeing, and how to put these pieces together. I am pushing you on my book partly because it is only one book, and obviously, to your point, there needs to be a field of intellectuals working in this space. I do think I have made a proffer in that space, and I would love people to take it seriously as a proffer.
I have also felt frustrated at times about why that proffer is not being taken up and why there is not already a bigger, richer conversation. I do think there is some real work emerging. I think Anton Jäger is doing fantastic work from another point on this spectrum. I think there is real work emerging, and it would be good if we could collectively figure out how to accelerate that or make that conversation more visible.
To return to the prior question, from my point of view, a lot of the work of reanimating and transforming liberalism is about teaching people to live in self-governing ways again. That can only be done in place. Any citizen who carries the spirit of citizenship and cares about these traditions needs to figure out how to bring self-government into existence in the place where they live. If they can achieve that, there will be lessons for others to do the same.
Over time, the particular approach to resuscitating self-government in the US may produce institutional solutions that others pick up and use. That is how liberalism grows and spreads. It is not that someone has a blueprint for the whole world. A particular political community finds a solution. Take the abolition of slavery or universal suffrage. Neither spread as a global blueprint. Particular political communities figured them out.
Take legislative supremacy, making sure that the executive acts within bounds and that the will of the people is channeled through a legislature to steer society. In the American case, that took a revolution, a constitution, and a presidential system. In the British case, it took decades of fighting corruption in the monarchy, Burke’s economic reforms, and then suffrage and electoral reform. Completely different institutional solutions aimed at the same goal.
The United States does not have legislative supremacy. The UK does. That contrast produces different lessons. I spend a great deal of my time working in Massachusetts. My theoretical work is in a book, but my practical work is on the ground, in the place where I live.
Mounk: And you ran for governor of Massachusetts.
Allen: I did, but that was a long time ago at this point. What I am talking about now is that, for me, this work of democratic renovation is always cultural as well as institutional. That means civic education as well as institutional change. The civic education work that I do is, at this point, serving 100,000 kids in the state of Massachusetts, for example.
There is also a set of ballot initiatives. Democracy is on the ballot in Massachusetts in November 2026 in ways that would really change how our electoral system operates and how it contributes to shaping the electoral system of our national government. I am quite confident that here in Massachusetts we are going to find a path to a resuscitated version of energetic participatory self-governance.
The question then will be whether that can be a model for other states and whether we can help the whole U.S. federal structure reorient and reorganize itself. My hope would be that if we can figure that out, other countries can also learn from it. I would never pretend to have answers for any other country. In that regard, I am absolutely a place-based worker. I am completely bounded by place.
Mounk: Let’s talk about civic education a little bit. It’s obviously very important. You’ve done a lot of work on uncovering what the state of civic education is in the United States. My understanding is that, to a striking degree, how much civic education we give middle school and high school students has declined. Of course, that calls for an easy solution, which is to engage in more civic education. The moment you do, there are deep ideological battles about how we should teach and what we should teach.
There are people on the political right who want to present the United States as the best country that has ever existed on earth with no blemishes. There are people on the left who want to portray the United States as the worst country that has ever existed on earth with no redeeming features. How do you, in a deeply polarized political environment, think about designing a curriculum for civic education that people on different ends of the ideological spectrum can accept and that hopefully builds commonality?
Allen: Well, the answer is in your question. Polarization is the single biggest obstacle to rebuilding the infrastructure of civic learning. Therefore, if you want to rebuild the infrastructure of civic learning, the first thing you have to do is solve for polarization.
I was part of a huge collaborative effort of 300 people from across the country. It was a cross-ideological network of scholars and practitioners that created something called Educating for American Democracy: A Roadmap. We agreed from the outset that we were coming from different parts of the political spectrum, but we shared a sense of urgency about the need for kids to have access to rich civic learning opportunities. We knew we would encounter things we disagreed on, and we agreed that when we did, we would stop and work through them until we came up with solutions.
Over about eighteen months of work, we did exactly that, and we produced a consensus framework for excellence in history and civic learning. The short answer is that you solve polarization by getting people from different parts of the ideological spectrum into the same conversation, committing to staying in the conversation, and learning how to compromise with each other. We did it, and we are growing, and we are implementing curricula aligned with that roadmap all over the country.
Mounk: What are the main obstacles to this? Is it people who say it is more important to teach reading and writing and other basic skills, or to give people business classes or shop classes or something like that? Or is it people who are opposed to this on ideological grounds? What do you think makes it so hard to spread civic education further than what you are doing with the next initiative?
Allen: Well, you’re right that polarization is a challenge. For decades, people have not been able to rebuild civic learning infrastructure because of polarization. We did this work from 2018 or 2019 through 2021, when we released the roadmap, and have been building implementations ever since. We got through one obstacle, namely polarization, and then you get through that one and hit the next.
The next obstacle is the level of resources available for civic education. You’re exactly right. Educational policy for seven decades has prioritized STEM education. That shows up in dollars, but it also shows up in requirements and in where testing is required versus not required. Civic learning continues to operate largely outside the funded and tested parts of the educational system. As a result, it is short on time and short on access to resources. That is the problem we have to solve next.
Mounk: What do you find in terms of the substance of the content? I am relatively heartened by some studies, like the one that Warren commented on a number of years ago, which show that the number of people who hold relatively polarized views about American history, like the ones I sketched a moment ago, is actually quite small. Most Republicans do want the history of slavery to be taught in schools and do recognize that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are great American heroes. Most Democrats recognize that, despite their moral flaws and the fact that they enslaved people, the founders of the United States are great Americans who contributed a great deal to the development of the country.
So a majority of the population can probably agree on the broad outlines of what we should be teaching about our history. But does that hold for the Republican state legislator in Alabama? Does that hold for the elementary school teacher or the secondary school teacher who actually has to deliver the content?
Allen: You’re right about where the supermajority of opinion is. A large swath of practitioners, whether in classrooms or in state legislatures, hold those views.
That does not mean there are no conflicts or contestations. There very much are, everywhere we look. You see a landscape where you can get strong cross-partisan collaboration. Take Arizona, for example, where a Republican state legislature set up a new School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership attached to ASU. It was set up by a Republican legislature, and when the politics in the state changed and a Democratic governor came in with Democratic control, there was a decision to keep the school. They did not shut it down, and it became a bipartisan project. The same is true at the University of Tennessee. You also see other states, for example Oklahoma, where you had a head of education who developed a policy to put Bibles in every classroom and was overruled by the Republican governor. Things are definitely contested.
What I think we can say is that there is a critical mass of people who take a broad view, who recognize that we can teach both the good and the bad of American history, and that engaging people in inquiry about the past, equipping them to ask questions and come to their own judgments and understanding, is the important path forward. There is a critical mass of people from both sides of the political spectrum. As with any project, the task is to grow the coalition and increase the number of allies who support that work.
Mounk: I think I am asking you, and myself, something that is probably unfair, because neither you nor I are campaign strategists. We are not in the business of trying to help political candidates win. But there is an obvious question in the background of my mind as we have this conversation, which is that to make any of these changes, you need political majorities. At the moment, it does not feel like those political majorities are anywhere in the offing.
Should political theorists play a role in trying to formulate the language, the rhetoric, the strategies, and the ideas that can allow politicians who are committed to basic democratic institutions, whether on the left, the right, or the center, to win political power so they can put some of these programs into practice? Or should we content ourselves with coming up with reforms that would be great for somebody to implement? I know you are doing a lot of concrete work in states to get these ideas off the ground as well.
How should we think about our role? I am generally split on this. Sometimes I think my comparative advantage is to think about big ideas and to envision what a better set of institutions and norms might look like, and then hope that somehow that influences the world and somebody takes it up. Other times I think that we may be in our own bubble if we sit there thinking about what a great system would look like at a moment when the ability to implement any of this depends on rejuvenating the political language of parties that are clearly exhausted. They are exhausted because they do not have the right words and ideas, and those are things that we, as political theorists, should be able to help with.
Allen: I appreciate you asking that question in the vocabulary of what is the right role, what should we do in our role as political theorists. I really depend on Cicero for thinking about roles and his concept of the persona. There is a persona of the philosopher, a persona of the politician, a persona of the father or the mother, and every role has its rights and responsibilities.
In my own case, I understand myself to have a political theorist role, a citizen role, and a mother role, for example. There are things I do as a political theorist that I do not do as a mother. There are things I do as a citizen that I do not do as a political theorist. For me, that separation of role and responsibility is really important.
I think the job of a political theorist is to ask questions about what is the general welfare. The Constitution puts a stake in the ground for the idea that we are trying to pursue the general welfare, or what is safety and happiness for a people, and then makes those answers available to everybody. To all politicians, it does not matter what your party is. I am trying to help figure out what the right answer is, and I hope I have something to offer that will be of value. That is what I see as the role of a political theorist.
As a citizen, it is a different question. As a citizen, my role is to help us self-govern, and that means stepping up and trying to take steps that I think are important for that. As a citizen, I consider it part of my job to help cultivate what I call a supermajority for constitutional democracy. I do that in small ways in my local community. I do that by being willing to share ideas with candidates. I am willing to share ideas with candidates from all parties.
I think we see candidates from all parties who are doing good things. I think both Spencer Cox in Utah and Wes Moore in Maryland have powerful policy ideas and powerful narrative frames that we would be well benefited to elevate. At any rate, the short of it is that I hear your expression of the need for two kinds of work in my own life. I do that by self-consciously having different roles that I inhabit, different email addresses, different telephone numbers for my different roles.
Mounk: That’s great, that’s really helpful. You’ve written movingly and very interestingly about the Constitution and about the Declaration of Independence. It’s interesting to me that we seem to be in a political moment where there is a fashion for criticizing and perhaps rejecting some of those founding documents. I don’t know whether that is a new departure in American history, or whether, obviously during the Civil War, that was the case, but how many moments in our past there have been in which there was so much intellectual ferment around the idea that perhaps the Constitution itself is flawed, or whether that is something that keeps coming up and there are always some smart radicals in the academy making the devil’s advocate case against the Constitution.
It is striking to me, from your colleague Jill Lepore at Harvard, who does appreciate the Constitution very much but wants it to become much easier to amend, to people who really blame the Constitution for the fundamental problems of the United States in a way that goes far beyond what Jill would say. How do you think about the strengths and weaknesses that the Constitution gives the American political system, and how we should approach it with appreciation but without blind reverence?
Allen: It’s perfectly expressed, appreciation without blind reverence. That is exactly one of the design challenges of good civic education, being able to do both of those things at the same time. In the roadmap that we produced and disseminated, we named those design challenges, and that is exactly one of them. In our education, we try to appreciate without reverence, or criticize without falling into cynicism, and appreciate without flying into adulation.
I think we have turned a corner on that question in the last couple of years. It matters that 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. There is a great deal of activity all over the country digging back into founding documents in a way that we have not seen since 1976 and the bicentennial.
Three or four years ago, I would have agreed with you about the problem of cynicism. I give talks about the Declaration and the Constitution all over the place, and inevitably I would get a question about scrapping it all, written by slaveholders, and so on. I am not getting those questions now. I did not get them last year, and I am not getting them this year. People seem willing to take these documents seriously again while recognizing their flaws and limitations.
I think constitutionalism is hugely important because, at the end of the day, this is Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws. A free society depends on prioritizing law, the stability of legal structures, and the attachment of the people’s voice, through a legislature, to that legal structure. While we do need amendability, and I agree with Jill Lepore about the need for revisability, we need that revisability against a backdrop of clarity that the anchor for the ongoing protection of freedom is lawfulness.
Mounk: Yeah, that’s very interesting. It just came to my mind, which might sound a little strange, that the desire to abolish the Constitution is a little bit like the desire for Britain to exit the European Union in 2016. The structural similarity is that you are comparing a status quo, which has strengths and very genuine weaknesses, against an imagined alternative outcome.
One of the strange things about the vote to leave the European Union in Britain was that everybody could imagine what they wanted afterwards. There were people on the left who thought this would allow Britain to become a socialist country that finally nationalizes the railways again and perhaps other industries as well. There were people on the right who thought this would allow Britain to become Singapore on the Thames, and they could vote together to exit the European Union.
The moment they did vote to exit the European Union, they could not agree among themselves and everything turned into a significant mess. This is not to say that the European Union is without flaws. There is something similar around the Constitution. The Constitution has some things that I would ideally want to change. I can see the attraction of imagining my favorite Constitution, but the idea that any process where we have, especially in the politics of today and the media landscape of today and the polarization of today, a constitutional convention to come up with something significantly better than what we have is, I think, quite unrealistic.
I happened to be in Chile briefly before the constitutional assembly there met for the first time. I believe it was in early 2020. There were great hopes that people put into saying the real problem, the real root of our political problems, is this Constitution, which has a very complicated history in Chile. It was decreed by the outgoing Pinochet government. There are good reasons to be skeptical of it. People thought that refounding the Constitution would make all of the problems go away.
What happened was that a very left-wing constitutional assembly passed a rather absurd constitution that was soundly rejected by the population. Then there were elections for a new constitutional assembly, which produced a very right-wing assembly. They produced a constitution that was absurd in different ways and was again roundly rejected by the majority of the population. Five years later, they are back to square one and still stuck with the same Constitution.
Allen: One of the remarkable parts of the American story is that the Declaration was unanimously signed by the people who participated in developing it, that the Constitution was unanimously voted on by the people who participated in the convention, and that they then gave themselves a supermajority requirement for ratification and met that supermajority requirement.
When you think about wanting a new constitution, you have to ask yourself whether you can deliver that unanimity and whether you can deliver a supermajority. You have to ask whether the conditions exist where that is even a feasible possibility. If it is not, then probably what we need is revisability within the existing framework.
It is important to say out loud that there is a great deal we can revise through federal law or state law that has constitutional implications, and people often forget that. I am very focused on things in state law that control the federal superstructure, particularly laws about election systems and laws about campaign finance.
State by state, in legislatures that are functional and able to make decisions together, we can move through sets of laws that could give us an operating system quite different from the one we currently know.
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