American democracy has gone more than a little awry. Nearly 300,000 Americans are dead in no small measure due to the failure of Congress to implement a nationwide testing and tracing regime. But this failure hasn't much hurt the incumbent Republican Party. The GOP gained ground in the House. They may hold their Senate Majority. Trump wasn't repudiated nearly as decisively as many of us wish, and he's still out there spreading outrageous lies about the credibility of the election he lost. 

I think there's a connection between the brokenness of our democracy and the deadliness of the pandemic. That's what I talk about in this episode with Danielle Allen -- though I never quite managed to put it that way. I got to know Danielle by working on pandemic response policy with a group she was leading. This is how I discovered that Danielle Allen is no mere mortal. She's a distinguished classicist, political philosopher, and theorist of democracy. I knew that already. What I didn't know is that she's also an exemplary practitioner of the art of collective self-government. Within weeks of the pandemic's onset, Danielle had assembled a working group of epidemiologists, economists, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy experts through the auspices of Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics, which she runs. Danielle seemed to immediately assimilate everything everyone else had spent a lifetime learning. She was able to get everybody to happily work together in complementary roles. And she motivated us to turn out a set of impressive practical pandemic response plans at an incredible pace. Her effortless intelligence, openness to others' views, easygoing but authoritative leadership, and inspiring level of energy and drive made me feel a little like I was in a pick-up game with LeBron James. I guess that's how you get to be the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, which is what she is. 

In this episode we touch on why we couldn't get the Senate to take up legislation funding the sort of testing regime that works,  what we can do to make our democracy more responsive and less dysfunctional, and why Danielle loves the U.S. Constitution, despite the concessions to slave states that continue to plague our political system. I regret that we didn't have time to go longer and deeper, but we should all be grateful that Danielle is working overtime trying to save our lives and democracy ... which means that she always has another meeting.     

Readings

Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience by Danielle Allen, et al.  

Pandemic Resilience: Getting It Done by Danielle Allen, et al. 

The best way out of this pandemic is to massively scale up testing. Here’s how to do it by Danielle Allen, Washington Post

The Brutal Clarity of the Trump-McConnell Plan to Protect Businesses by Will Wilkinson, New York Times

We Know How to Beat the Virus. This Is How Republicans Can Do It. by Puja Ohlhaver and Will Wilkinson, New York Times

Our Common Purpose: Reinventing Democracy in the 21st Century by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission for the Practice of Democratic Citizenship 

The Flawed Genius of the Constitution by Danielle Allen, The Atlantic 

Credits

Host: Will Wilkinson (@willwilkinson)

Audio engineer: Ray Ingegneri

Music: Dig Deep by RW Smith

Model Citizen is a production of the Niskanen Center  (@niskanencenter)

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