How can we best respond to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our political and civic life? A new report contains six core strategies and dozens of recommendations
On Wednesday, March 24th, the Ash Center and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) hosted a discussion of Our Common Purpose, a report issued by the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. The Commission, which was launched by AAAS, spent two years engaging with communities all over the U.S. to explore how best to respond to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our political and civic life.
Speakers included:
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Presenter: You're listening to AshCast, the podcast of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School.
Archon Fung: Hi, welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. My name is Archon Fung, and I'm a faculty member at the Kennedy School and I help operate the democracy programs at the Ash Center. And before we begin, I'd just like to, on behalf of the Ash Center, acknowledge the land on which Harvard sits. It is the traditional territory of the Massachusett people, and a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among nations. I would like to thank the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for co-sponsoring today's conversation. Today's topic is the urgent challenge of creating a more equal, inclusive, and robust constitutional democracy in America in the 21st century. We have two fantastic leaders and thinkers with us today, and they led in a very impressive and ambitious project that was based out of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that ran for a couple of years to accomplish this, meet this challenge of creating a more robust constitutional democracy. Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant university professor at Harvard University and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics here. She's a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. She's leading many projects. I've had the great pleasure, continue to have the great pleasure of working with Danielle on many things around the campus and beyond. In this space, she is leading the democratic knowledge project, among others, which seeks to build knowledge, skills, and capacities that citizens need in order to succeed at operating their democracy. Stephen Heintz is president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is a family foundation that advances social change for a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world. Stephen has devoted his career to strengthening democratic culture and institutions in the United States, but all over the world. He co-founded and was president of Demos, and was COO of the EastWest Institute in the 1990s. The commission also had a third chair named Eric Liu. Unfortunately, Eric cannot join us this afternoon, he was planning to do so, because he's had a death in the family. Eric is co-founder and CEO of Citizen University, and he also directs the Aspen Institute's Citizenship and American Identity program. Okay, so, Danielle, Stephen and Eric led the AAAS Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, which was itself composed of 32 prominent scholars, journalists, policymakers and citizen leaders. And after this event, you will be very compelled to read the whole report, and they are listed there, all of the members of the commission. The commission held some 50, a lot, listening sessions all across the country to understand the democratic experiences, hopes and frustrations of Americans from all walks of life. Based on what they've heard, a lot of research, their own deliberations, they produced a visionary and inspiring report titled Our Common Purpose that is chock full of bold ideas that we'll talk about this afternoon. They focused on six different policy areas that they called strategies. They were political equality, voter power, government responsiveness, civic bridging, information, and civic integrity, civic responsibility. Those are the six areas. And I'm just gonna read one sentence which captures, for me, the aim of their enterprise, which is to produce a virtuous cycle in which responsive political institutions foster a healthy civic culture of participation and responsibility, while a healthy civic culture, which is a combination of values, norms, and narratives, keeps our political institutions responsive and inclusive. So, it's this virtuous cycle that they would like to set into motion and strengthen. Okay, so why don't we have a little bit of kind of structured conversation and then go into the Q&A. For Danielle and Stephen, the first question here is that, about your favorite recommendation. So, Our Common Purpose is just really full, dozens and dozens of really interesting and ambitious ideas. So, my first question is a little bit like asking you who your favorite child is. But I'd like to ask both of you, each one of you, one at a time, to pick your favorite proposal from the report and explain why that one is particularly important to you and to the success of American democracy. So, which one? What's the most important idea? Danielle, why don't you go first?
Danielle Allen: Thank you so much, Archon. And thank you for hosting this. It's great to be here with everybody. Your center does such important work for helping us all think through democracy, recommit to democracy. It is super hard to pick one out of the 31 recommendations. The other interesting thing for me, actually, is the way in which my sense of which one is the most important one has sort of modulated over time. So, for me now, it is the recommendation that we adopt universal voting. So, this is the policy for mandatory voting, a la Australia. I believe that we've reached a point in the country where we no longer have certainty that the entire country is committed to universal suffrage. And I believe we have to call the question and that a way to do that is to say, okay, let's go ahead, just call it universal voting. Voter duty is the same thing as jury duty as a part of what is expected of us as citizens. And then the technical question is just how do we get ballots to people's hands and back safely. And it's purely technical, because the job is just to get all those ballots in there, because we have universal voting.
Archon Fung: That's fantastic. And it's, we'll certainly get into this later. But the idea that maybe your favorite recommendation at the moment of publication of the report is different now, and the voting wars that we're seeing all around the country, they're only gonna get worse in the next two to five years. I have very little doubt of that. And so, you're saying, let's, look, let's just take that off the table. It's not something that we should be fighting about in a democracy. Let's just take it off the table.
Let's affirm our commitment to universal suffrage. And here's the easiest, cleanest way of affirming that commitment. Yeah.
Archon Fung: Yep, fantastic. Good. Stephen, over to you. What's your favorite child of the 31?
Stephen Heintz: You're right, this is a nearly impossible question to answer. But first of all, Archon, thank you. You did a, that was a terrific introduction. That was one of the best short introductions of this work that any of us have heard or given. So, thank you very much. And thank you for organizing this. And I also wanna recognize and thank Miles Rappaport, who is a senior practice fellow in American democracy at the Kennedy School, who is a member of our commission, and I know helped to organize this event. So, thanks to your whole team. Well, like Danielle, my thoughts do shift. But I, you pointed out one of the most important elements of our work, which is this theory that to really get to the resilient, inclusive and effective democracy we need for the 21st century, we need reforms of our institutions and processes, we need a massive investment in civil society, and we need to really pay attention to the decline in our political culture. So, to kind of bring that to light, since Danielle picked one that's in the political institutions frame, I'm gonna pick one in the civil society frame. And that is a proposal to create what we're calling at this point a national trust for civic infrastructure. One of the things we learned as we traveled around the country in our listening sessions was A, how frustrated, disgusted, and disappointed Americans are with our national politics and many of our national political institutions, and B, how much good stuff is actually going on in American communities all across the country of citizens just working together across various kinds of difference, solving local problems, doing stuff for the common good. And, but that is underappreciated, undervalued, under supported. And what we hope to do through a national trust for civic infrastructure is create a vehicle to aggregate funding at a national level to start with from private sources, philanthropies and private sources, which then would be distributed to very local projects that are bringing citizens together in these civic spaces where people form relationships, they get to understand each other better, they do things together, they are actually living the values of democracy. And as we know from de Tocqueville right through to the present, that association of citizens together in civil society is, in some ways, the soul of democracy. And we need to nurture it and support it in some very real ways. You know, another one of our commission members, it is Yuval Levin, and Yuval talks about the fact that in our polarized politics today, we think of us versus them, and the us doesn't really know the them and vice versa. Because we're not meeting together. We're not listening to each other. We're not even arguing together. And we're certainly not, when we are arguing together, we're not arguing in a productive way. And it is these civic spaces, this civic infrastructure that give us the opportunities to come together and to know each other so that we're not just operating from some caricature in our minds.
Archon Fung: That's great, Stephen. Maybe if I could ask you a short follow-up on that, so, you know, our Ash Center events are a lot about institutional reform at the big political level. And we talked a little bit less, I think we should change this in the future, about the civic and community level things that your civic infrastructure fund would actually go to. So, I don't know if you have like one or two examples to highlight, to make it clear for people what the kind of activity is, what is this, what is this civic you speak of, Stephen?
Stephen Heintz: Yeah-
Archon Fung: What is the civic?
Stephen Heintz: No, it's a great question. And there are, you know, there are literally hundreds of examples. And we met people who were responsible for dozens of them. And I would also point to Jim and Deb's Fallows, book, "Our Towns", which is another great catalog of this kind of work. But let me pick one, which is in Akron, Ohio. Actually, a theater group came to see that the lake in that community, which is a beautiful natural resource, was actually a source of division between two parts of the community, one that was somewhat socially and economically better off than the other. And so, they started a project with residents and citizens from both parts of the community to think about how they might create a walking path that would track the circumference of the lake, and literally connect people together who weren't connected because of the separation of the lake, as well as their social and economic status. And so, they pulled this off, you know, just working together, getting the municipal government to join in. And now people have that opportunity to walk through each other's neighborhoods, sit on the benches, talk to each other, have events. So, it's, you know, that's just one of myriad examples. And they're so inspiring, you know. They really are. It's quite remarkable. It's a great antidote to our democratic despair.
Archon Fung: Yeah, thank you very much. And, Danielle, do you have any, I think it's really good to talk about these examples. Because the the noise, as we we're talking about right before the event, the noise of the fight just drowns out the civic signal, right? And so, I think it's good to talk about these cases. Yeah, Danielle.
Danielle Allen: I do have a favorite here too. And as Stephen said, it really is inspiring. And I mean, the example I'm gonna use, they'll hear about the laugh, because I love them so much, I'm always talking about them. It's called CivicLex in Lexington, Kentucky. And this is an effort to fill news deserts, local news deserts. We all know the way in which local news has dropped out and fallen away. We don't have coverage of city councils. We don't have coverage of county governments and the like, yet so many life changing decisions are made in those governmental contexts. They've done a number of things that are really visionary. So, in the first instance, they've just, they have gathered philanthropic resources together to find a base to start delivering news on digital platforms for their community, investigative journalism, explanatory journalism. But they've changed the frame of the news. They don't report on what has been done. They report on the agenda that's coming so that people have time to learn what the issues are, and get engaged and actually track the kinds of decisions that are being made. And then the other thing that they do, in addition to sort of forward reporting as opposed to backward reporting, is they bring public officials, whether elected or appointed, together with members of the community, but with the rule that they're never more than seven members of the community for every public official. And in that way, they're putting people's focus back on issues of relationality. What kind of relationships do we have with each other? So, I think of them as sort of taking a kind of social media concept of digital platforms news provision and sharing, and replacing it with a civic media concept. So, if social media is like permanent middle school where there's just like tons of both bullying and trolling, let's replace that with civic media where we've actually designed in intentionality about healthy relationships and the like. And that's what they've done. I think it's real service for their community. It's a model that could be spread all over the country. And as Stephen said, it's just, this was the joy of doing this work, was discovering that solutions are emerging out of our despair. People are coming together and finding pathways for hope.
Archon Fung: That is fantastic. Thank you. I was talking to, she might be actually in the audience and was on the commission, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, last week. And it's, she was just, like, kind of going through dozens and dozens and dozens of these groups that are doing this stuff in communities. But it's just hard to have visibility unless you do what you did, which is actually go out and listen to them. And which is fantastic. Good. Okay, so, this, I have a question for Danielle. And you know, we haven't gotten actually an opportunity to sit down to talk about some of the work that you've been invested in and are very passionate about. So, I'm gonna use this very public forum to ask you about some of that. So, the commission focused on civic and political culture, right, it is very important. And you've been very deeply invested for years now. And it feels like the commission work is an accelerant on that strand of your work in trying to strengthen education for democracy in the public schools of Massachusetts, and now all around America. And so, how's that going? What do you think are the real bright spots in that civic education and curriculum reform that you're working on? And what are some of the speed bumps and challenges that you're trying to navigate?
Danielle Allen: Archon, I appreciate that. It's good to get a chance to talk about it. No, it's going really well. And so, it's true. I have been committed to civic education for a long time. And then it had a few different accelerants. I mean, after the 2016 election, I was amazed how many adults sort of, you know, grown ups, so to speak, people over 40, even you were calling me and sort of saying, "Well, what can I do? How do I get involved?" And they really honestly didn't know where to start in terms of acting as a democratic citizen. Didn't know how to hold a community meeting. Didn't know just how to think about using a committee to move an issue forward in their community, and the like. And so, I just sort of acquired this deepening sense of the need to sort of plug a gap in our knowledge and learning around civic education. And then I had this aha moment, okay? This is a very university context story. But I was at one of those end of the year tea parties with fellow colleagues at Harvard, and it was one of those moments where some of us in the humanities were kind of gathered around to, oh, these kids, you know, they don't know anything anymore. They can't read, blah, blah, blah. The terrible things we do. And two other colleagues, a mathematician and economist wandered up, and they said, "What? Are you kidding? We're getting the best prepared students we've ever gotten in our careers." And that was like this light bulb moment for me, when I realized that all of our investment for last decades in STEM education has worked. It's worked. It's given us a student body that is prepared in STEM, and a student body that's not prepared across the fields that support civic understanding and civic learning. So, I really dug in then, and indeed discovered that it's currently the case that we invest $50 per kid per year federal monies in STEM education, and five cents per year per kid of federal monies in civic education. And so, yeah, so, I mean, we have been building some curricula here in Massachusetts. We were fortunate that in Massachusetts, people understood the need for this. And so, we have a new policy framework that requires a year along grade eight civics course. And the student response is really extraordinary. There is a huge hunger and appetite. Young people want to understand the world around them. It's challenging too when you bring current events into the classroom, much as you try to scaffold it, create spaces for civil disagreement and civil dialogue, it can be hard and challenging. And I think the hardest work to build out civic education again is really going to be helping schools engage communities and build up kind of comfort level with the idea that there's disagreement in the classroom. And kids are gonna talk about hard things. And they can have the space themselves to be authentic and make their own judgments about what matters to them, and that they need community support for doing that. So, I think that's where the challenge comes in, is really, again, building that commitment among families to let our kids have that space to make their own judgments, come to their own conclusions, and the like. But the learners, young learners have such an appetite for civic learning and understanding. It's really very moving, in fact.
Archon Fung: Wow, that's, the idea that helicopter parenting around disagreement probably isn't the best thing for democratic education . Right, yeah. That's important. Well, thank you very much for that. That work is just incredibly important, and where we're we able to, I love the analogy of extending the STEM success into our civic life and democracy, which we can put a rover on them on Mars, right? But we can't run an election. It's like, not so good, right? So, I wanna talk about a different area of the report now and ask Stephen a question, which is about one of the early recommendations that is very striking in its ambition, is to enlarge the size of the House of Representatives, right? And so, it falls under your first strategy of the report, which is around increasing political equality. So, why is that an important, I mean, given how difficult it seems like that would be, why do you rank it as an important priority? What would it accomplish? And then, how do you imagine support building for it?
Stephen Heintz: Yeah, well, thanks. I, you know, if I hadn't talked about the national trust for civic infrastructure, I might have picked this one as my favorite one for a variety of reasons. And Danielle is there too. First of all, it's not actually technically that hard to accomplish. In fact, it can be done by an act of Congress. Until 1929, the size of the House of Representatives expanded proportionately with the growth in American population. It was only in 1929 that Congress passed a law saying that the size of the House would be capped at 435 representatives. And it is now not what the framers had intended. When the framers constructed the US Congress as a whole, a bicameral legislature, they had two chambers, an upper chamber, which was to be the more aloof, deliberative, elite chamber, and the House, which was truly to be the people's chamber and to be close to the the people they represented. And in the beginning, each member of Congress represented roughly 35,000 constituents. Today, a member of Congress represents something like 770,000 constituents. So, the quality of representation declines, whereas that ratio continues to grow. And so, that is one motivation for expanding the size of the House, is just to make representation a closer relationship between the elected representative and her or his constituents. Second, it actually improves constituent services. Members of Congress spend a lot of time trying to help their constituents in their engagements with the federal government. And with that kind of huge population to serve, the quality of constituent services has also declined. And the other thing is that we have a growing problem of representation in the United States Senate that is fixed in the Constitution. And because each state gets two senators, as our population continues to grow more urban, by 2040, 70% of Americans will be represented by only 30 US senators, and 30% of Americans will be represented by 70 US senators. So, the Senate is a serious problem when it comes to a representative democracy, and a really tough problem to fix. The House, on the other hand, which was always designed to be the people's chamber, the more representative chamber, can be fixed by legislation. And there are a lot of different formulas that people are, we have a working group that the academy has pulled together to study this a little bit and to offer some more specific ideas about how it could be implemented, and they're doing some really interesting work. We have several members of Congress who are ready to introduce the legislation. And so, you know, is it gonna happen in this Congress? I doubt it, but is it one of those recommendations that is really great to get into the public discourse and get people thinking about? Absolutely. And it has one other really important benefit. We had a very diverse commission, including perspective diversity or ideological diversity, people from left, right and center. And getting a consensus on these recommendations was a task. It was a pleasure, but it was a task. And we didn't get consensus on everything we debated. And one of the things we didn't achieve consensus on was doing away with or restructuring the electoral college. But enlarging the House also changes the electoral college because the electoral college is based on the total number of members of Congress from each state. Your House members plus your senators. So, if you expand the size of the House, you will be adding electors. And you'll be adding electors in populous states. And so, it does, it has an effect of diluting some of the distortions that currently plague the electoral college. So, it's a winner, in my view, it's a winner all the way around.
Archon Fung: Oh, that's, can you elaborate on that just a little bit more? So, you were able to get some sort of agreement, if not unity of relative consensus within the commission, for expanding the House of Representatives, which obviously would expand the number of electors in the electoral college, but not for electoral college? 'Cause it seems like at the level of kind of presidential politics, the implications for the enlarged House would be obvious. And so, if I were really concerned with preserving the electoral college, that seems like it would be enough reason for me to object to the expansion of the House as well. But you're saying a bunch of commissioners didn't think that.
Stephen Heintz: Right, because it doesn't either do away with the electoral college or completely eliminate the original purposes of the electoral college. It just dilutes it somewhat to create a more contemporary, I think is the way I would put it, a more contemporary iteration of the concept of an electoral college that was originally designed in the 18th century.
Archon Fung: Oh, that's really interesting. And I just wanted to highlight for the audience, Stephen, what you said at the first that the commission, and Danielle was nodding in vigorous agreement, I think, was very concerned with just the sheer ratio of citizens to representatives, right? And, you know, it's not just that you elect something, somebody to represent you, it's how many people are in your unit. And if I had thought earlier, I would have done a Zoom poll about how many people have met their member of Congress in this Zoom room right now. And my guess is it would be vanishingly small. And your suggestion for the reform of the House of Representatives would change, would likely change that. It would just make it easier for us to, substantially easier, right, 20 times easier, you know. By the ratios, 35,750 to actually know our member of Congress, at least a little bit.
Stephen Heintz: Right. Now, you know, if you take it to its fullest expression and say, well, let's go back to the ratio that existed in the beginning, you end up with a Congress of 10,000, or something huge. And some people take that seriously, and they think, well, in a digital age, I mean, here we all are debating these things on Zoom, there are ways that you could manage that. I'm not advocating it. I'm just exploring it. There are ways you can manage it. And your member would actually then be in the district more than they would be in Washington. And that too would be an advantage. So, some blend of all these things is actually very exciting to contemplate.
Archon Fung: Yeah, good, good. I wanna shift a little bit now to talk about how to move these reforms forward. And we've only skated the surface of a handful, a small handful of the really interesting ideas in the report, and everybody in this event should go and look at all of the many recommendations. But kind of moving now to getting it done. And maybe Danielle first, and then Stephen, you might have some additional thoughts on this. Who do you see as the agents of change in addition to the commission members themselves for the ambitious reforms that are in the report? So, some of the reforms that you recommend, like citizens redistricting commissions are a non-starter for many legislatures, but they've been successful in some states through direct democracy. So, is it direct democracy? Is it legislative leaders? Is it democracy reform advocates? Some other force? Like, what's the engine that's gonna move these very important pool balls that you've put on the table?
Danielle Allen: Well, this is where the hard work comes in. Because the answer is it's and, and, and, and, right? It's that entire list you just named. And the question is, can folks be activated and pull together and share directions across different jurisdictional levels and with access to different kinds of levers of change? So, one of the things we've worked to do is to map out what would count as meaningful progress towards these recommendations by 2026, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country. And now we have been recruiting champions who are working on advancing one or another of the recommendations. But there are a few important things that come from that recruitment of champions. These champions are, for the most part, civil society organizations, advocates of various kinds. And often they have not worked across these kind of buckets of political institutions, civil society and culture. So, what we're trying to help people do is more or less take lots of little boats that were sort of sailing around working in their particular area and turn them into a gigantic flotilla sailing in the same direction. So, we believe that coordination around common purpose, that incredibly important phrase that Stephen helped us all to, will really generate energy and forward movement. And so, it really is about that kind of coordinating effort. It's really important to say that decision makers of all kinds are relevant here. So, secretaries of state are relevant around so many of the different voting provisions, for example. State legislatures are relevant as well. And there are some provisions that can be addressed at a federal level or at the state level. And probably we wanna see them move at both. But in all probability, we are more likely to see them move forward first on the state level. Or take, for example, the single constitutional amendment that is in our mix. We worked really hard to find things that were simultaneously bold and feasible. So, in each case, we wanted to figure out how to achieve the maximum impact with the sort of least need poll needed in order to get there. So, only one constitutional amendment, that one would undo the impact of citizens united by establishing that corporations in effect are not natural persons. And so, there's room to to regulate campaign finance with regard to corporate expenditure. And this is moving forward via ballot proposition, right? So, in Massachusetts in 2018, there was a ballot proposition that moved this forward, sort of a citizen's commission, and now there's text of an amendment that's actually being mooted in different states around the country. So, it really is about actors of all different jurisdictional levels. Again, trying to get that flotilla sailing in the same direction with an orientation toward common purpose.
Archon Fung: Yeah, very good. Great, Stephen.
Stephen Heintz: I don't really have much to add. I agree exactly with what Danielle has said. You know, we are, as part of our effort to advance these recommendations, we are briefing members of Congress on a pretty regular basis, Republicans and Democrats, both senators and representatives. We are meeting with local and state officials. But I think the real change is gonna come from the citizenry itself, from the people, and from the bottom up. And that's why we're really trying to work hard to nurture this community, this kind of movement for a more resilient, more inclusive democracy.
Archon Fung: Yeah, good, good. I wanna ask now about some of the challenges that come from political polarization, both kind of at the A, leadership level, but also in the population. And this is like something that I just, I'm having a really hard time thinking through. And so, maybe you can help. So, as we know right now, we're in a moment of increasing polarization. And an additional feature of like the last two years polarization has been polarization around many of the basic features of civic life and democracy's very building blocks, right? So, maybe I'm romanticizing the recent past, but I guess I do think like five or 10 years ago, if you'd asked a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle and and most ordinary Americans, do you think it would be a good thing if all Americans participated in our elections? I think the vast majority would have said yes. But now I think that's less true. And there's vicious fights, as you know, in Georgia, Texas, many other states to pass laws, as Danielle pointed out in the very first kind of exchange, that would shrink the franchise and political participation. So, polarization is not just around issues anymore. It's about the basic building blocks of civic life and democracy. And then so how do you move the common purpose agenda forward? It seems like do you do it in a partisan way? Or do you still try for some trans partisan strategy? And so, like, it comes to a head in HR 1, right? It's like some of the provisions in the commission's report are also in HR 1 or there's some shared overlap, and like, do you eliminate the filibuster to get 50 plus one votes through that, and then all over the country, maybe 55% of the population supports HR 1, but 45% feels like it's being jammed down their throats? Do you have to temporarily destroy commonality for the sake of future commonality and democracy? Or is that like, I don't know, it's just really hard for me to think through that problem. And I wonder what you, if you have thoughts about that. Either, yeah, Stephen or Danielle.
Danielle Allen: Well, I mean, this is one of the hardest questions and we've wrestled with it constantly. I mean, it's really important to say again that the work of our commission was, as Steven said, a group of people who are diverse across dimensions of demography, geography, and viewpoint without any question. And we worked incredibly hard to achieve a consensus vision. We inspired ourselves with a quotation from Benjamin Franklin at the end of the Constitutional Convention, who said, more or less, this may be imperfect, but I can't think of anything better. And so, I'm gonna bury all my reservations and I'm gonna go ahead and assent. And I think we should all do that and we should never sort of speak a word about what our lines of difference were in these discussions. So, that's the sort of spirit that we've brought to this work. And indeed, I think in addressing polarization, a lot of the work that has to be done is relational, that you actually have to gather around specific problems, as Steven said, and build relationships with people who are ready to solve them together. This is what we've done in the civic education work, for example. And so we really did 300 people in that instance, again, achieving viewpoint diversity as well as all kinds of other diversity. And honestly, we fought about all kinds of stuff. We fought in the very beginning for two weeks over whether we should describe the country for which we are trying to build an education as a democracy or a republic. We're split on that basic question. It's a red herring. Both terms were used in the founding. Madison called the place a republic. Alexander Hamilton in the New York ratifying debates called it a representative democracy. So, both terms are reasonably valid from a historical point of view. Those who embrace the democracy term prioritize popular engagement, popular sovereignty. Those who prioritize the republic term prioritize order, structure, rule of law, et cetera. So, we compromised on the phrase constitutional democracy. That was a way of capturing the substantive point of view from both sides, and we were able to move forward. But we literally had to work that issue through. And so, we have worked relationally for two years in that civic education work to keep moving the ball forward on that, and we were able to release this sort of national roadmap about a month ago. Now, that's just one aspect of the work. And so, there, we have been able to achieve some sort of joint purpose, common action. You know, in my ideal world, if I could wave a magic wand, we would be sort of taking each tranche of this work and trying to build that same kind of coalitional effort to move it forward. I think the reality is that politics is moving too fast and it's gonna get way out ahead of us on that, in all honesty. And so, then, I think all the different members of our commission are gonna be making their own calls about which way to engage or not in the particular sort of political unfoldings. But for the work of the commission, we presented something that is bipartisan in its nature. We continue to work in ways that are building coalitions and trying to bring people together across ideological divides, and we are committed to that.
Archon Fung: That's fantastic, yeah. I think that constitutional, the democracy, republic to constitutional democracy is a really good example. And I mean, maybe we can think about analogs in these other spaces where we seem to, just seem to be at such loggerheads. Yeah, Stephen.
Stephen Heintz: Yeah, just quickly, 'cause Danielle covered it so nicely. You know, first, I wanna, I saw some comments in the chat and in the questions. We do not as a commission, and I certainly do not as an individual, think that there was any golden period in American democracy. When I talk about the decline of our political culture, it's a decline from a very sorry state, right, that you can you can have a democracy that does not have a golden period and still see decline. And I think that's what we're seeing. And on the issue of polarization, I think that most of the political science that is done, the data that is collected and analyzed, there's a lot of consensus that things really started to change in about 1980. And the polarization really began to increase, and it's only accelerated. And it's really focused at the national level. And that's the, that, again, is why thinking that we're gonna get real progress at the national level in that environment is not all that encouraging. But I also draw on the research that a group called More in Common has done when they looked at the hidden tribes of America, and I recommend this report. They came to the conclusion that, I think was 67% of Americans fit into the tribe that they call the exhausted majority. They're exhausted with our national politics. They're frustrated. They're despairing. And we heard this in our listening sessions. It was a constant theme. I mean, it was just absolutely true. But they still believed in the ideas. And they still want to be a citizen in a democracy, a constitutional democracy, where they have a place where they are respected, where their voice matters, and where the institutions are responsive. And so, to me, that's the source of hope. It's the source of the change. And that's how we are gonna work through this period of increased polarization. But we really have to do the work. It's not gonna happen automatically. And unfortunately, as we have seen, things can get worse, take January 6th as an example.
Archon Fung: Yeah, no, that's good. And I wanna take up some of the questions now. And there's a question, there's several people wanna know more about rank choice voting, which we haven't talked about yet. It is a recommendation of the report. And I think some of us, certainly me, and I know a lot of people find rank choice voting really appealing because it loosens up the first past the post, and it's no longer just two horses in the race. And so, maybe it allows for more complexity in politics. And that institution would help out with the civic project by allowing people to politically discover more commonality. But, like, either Danielle or Stephen, do you wanna, like, could you spend a minute or two talking about how your deliberations were on rank choice voting?
Danielle Allen: Happy to, or Stephen, do you want to?
Stephen Heintz: No, go ahead, go ahead.
Danielle Allen: No, this, I mean, I think there was a lot of enthusiasm and energy for rank choice voting. The way I tried to drive home its significance is by pointing to the discrepancy between the portrait that we get about ourselves as a people, we the people, when we look at federal election results, versus looking at state level ballot propositions. When you look at federal election results, we are this bitterly divided people on this razor's edge of difference of opinion. But astonishingly, if you look across the country at ballot propositions, actually, you very often see super majority votes. You would never guess that about us, right, from looking at federal electoral results. So, what is different then between how our federal elections run and the sort of ballot proposition? Just to give some examples on that, you look at drug legalization, 15 states across the country have done that, often with super majority votes. The campaign finance ballot proposition I mentioned in Massachusetts with a super majority vote. Florida voted to re-enfranchise people who had completed service of felony convictions with a super majority vote. Right, so, even surprising super majorities. So, there's something about the electoral mechanism that's actually yielding this division in our federal electoral context. Now, think about the primary process in 2016. You know, we, in a ranked choice voting situation, Donald Trump, for instance, would have had to actually get over 50% of the votes. Votes would have cycled through until somebody has built up the kind of pebbles to get to 50%. But because we have a plurality system, a very divisive position that attracts a minority of support out of the whole electorate can get all the way through. So, when you have that system relying on plurality voting, you have people who are winning primaries who haven't necessarily consolidated a level of support beyond 50%. As a result, what that means is when you come to the general election, the electorate is presented with an agenda that is more extreme than would be likely to be the case in a rank choice voting situation. And in that context, of course, we look super. super polarized, right? So, everybody conveys a sense of two bad options that sort of make sense of my vote when I'm choosing. So, rank choice voting, when you give people a chance to rank first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice means people have to campaign in ways that are getting to that above 50% level of support. They want to be people's second choice as well as first choice. They have to build coalitions out rather than seeking to drive wedges and inspire division and fragmentation of the electorate. So, it's the way the mechanism changes how campaigns operate that's so fundamental to giving us better choices in our politics. It does also open up pathways. There's more likely, there, we have evidence that if more diverse candidates who enter the the process in rank choice voting and then also make it all the way through to the end. So, it brings us a chance to sort of renew and rejuvenate our political agenda and who's participating in running for office.
Stephen Heintz: Yeah, it, none of these individual recommendations is a silver bullet by any means. And that's part of the reason why we ended up with 31 recommendations, and we not only focused on political institutions, but also civil society and culture. But I think RCV has the potential to be an extremely important one of the recommendations for all the reasons Danielle has mentioned. And I would just note that we are going to get perhaps the biggest stress test of rank choice voting this year in the mayoralty elections in New York City. Here we are in this huge, diverse, complex city, where there are 600 languages spoken by New Yorkers. And we're gonna do RCV. And if it fails, by the way, it will set RCV back for a very long time. So, we are working with some of the champion organizations to really try to help make RCV in New York a success.
Archon Fung: That's a great point, right? I mean, you can win RCV at the state level or at the city level. But whether it's a success or failure depends on 95 other steps other than getting the public policy itself, right?
Danielle Allen: Absolutely.
Danielle Allen: No, execution is important. You know, I mean, the election officials have a whole lot of work to do to make this system easily understood and easily executed by the voter. And so, this is a critical period.
Archon Fung: Yeah, very good.
Danielle Allen: And, I mean, to add on to that too, I mean, so, think about Maine as well, right, where there was a challenge after the first round, and then the challenge was beaten back. And then there was a second round of elections. And the interesting thing is that public opinion in Maine just continues to build in support of RCV. So, it's important that we recognize that elections are technology. And sort of human use practices have to evolve around the shift in technology. So, it's definitely not like a one shot and done thing. And honestly, I know people talk about RCV sounding complicated or something like that, it's hard to understand. The experience of people who have gone through the transition is that by your second time through, it makes as much sense as the previous system did. And in truth, I think for people in RCV systems, the idea of switching to ours doesn't make any sense, right? So, there's this kind of mental model issue where you do have to make a transition. But once you make it, then it gets to be built into practice and the like, and smooths out.
Archon Fung: Yeah, similarly, on the universal voting, you've talked to people in Australia or Brazil. They don't understand why everybody doesn't have it, right? It's a kind of similar dynamic. I have a question that comes from a much different direction and I think fresh in that way, which is how, I don't know if you know, Danielle, and if you can't speak to the particular case, maybe more generally, like, for the Kentucky, Lexington, Lexington, Kentucky, excuse me, example that you pointed out, how do they get funded? How do they get resources to do that? And then for Stephen, some of the other civic initiatives, how do they get the wherewithal to do the good work that they're doing?
Danielle Allen: So, CivicLex is a good example of the impact of private philanthropy. I believe it was a Knight Foundation initiative initially. And in that regard, it's similar to ProPublica, which has built out a new model for investigative journalism based on philanthropy. So, people have been experimenting with business models for news. I do think, and one of our recommendations is that there should be targeted, there should be taxation for targeted advertising on digital media platforms that could then, that revenue could support local news as well. So, I think there are potentials for public sources to support local news, but it has been philanthropic in the most recent time.
Stephen Heintz: Yeah, and the point you're making, Archon, is exactly what the purpose of this national trust for civic infrastructure would be, to really, you know, manage a campaign to raise a lot more money to go into this kind of work, and to demonstrate, to actually really do this carefully, and to monitor and evaluate the projects over, let's say, a five year period, and then to report back to the donors with the hope that at some point, this is something that we might even get the US Congress to appropriate funds for. You know, the US Congress every year appropriates $300 million, some years more, some years less, for the National Endowment for Democracy. But the National Endowment for Democracy is actually an international endowment for democracy because it cannot spend its funds in the United States. And we have no equivalent to support democracy in this country. And so, we need to help these groups. We need to give them additional resources. We need to leverage resources so it brings in local capital, both public and private. And we are, as we're developing this concept of trust, we are meeting with community foundations and local philanthropists, local governments because we want local government to have some skin in this game too. And I think there's a way of pulling this together in a way that can really stimulate the funding base, the economy of civic activity.
Archon Fung: Right, that would be great. And maybe now people will feel a greater need to invest in democracy at home than maybe they did a decade ago, perhaps.
Stephen Heintz: Yeah, right.
Archon Fung: Yeah. This is, maybe, I suspect that this was maybe Eric's domain a little bit more of the report than Stephen and Danielle, but I wanna ask, maybe you have thoughts on this, it's on the universal civic duty voting brings in a little bit of this flavor. But what we should have to do as citizens, like, affirmative, like we've been talking about a lot about institutions and some supply side things. But I think both of you believe that each of us needs to do more for the republic, for the constitutional democracy. And one piece of the report that I found innovative and interesting was combining two different ideas, right? One is a baby bond idea, which is that there should be a certain amount of money funded through the tax base that everyone gets when they're a baby, and maybe they can cash it out when they're 18 or 21. The proposals vary. But the idea is that you'd have a stake and you could pay for a couple years of college, or start a business, or whatever it is, at the beginning of your adulthood, right? So, there's the baby bond idea. And there's the national service idea, which is that all of us should have to at 18, or 22, or whatever it is, go to a community and do some good work for the community or for the nation. And the commission says, well, let's put these two things together. Let's not make national service mandatory, but let's create a baby bond for everyone. And you get the baby bond if you do the national service, which I thought was, like, kind of a cool idea. And how did those discussions go in terms of individual should be, do more for the public good. And here, we're creating an incentive for them to do more. There might be incentives. There might be requirements, like jury duty. But could you talk a little bit about that, like, the stuff that we need to do that we're under doing for democracy and for constitutional democracy?
Stephen Heintz: Sure, maybe I'll start on this one. You know, interestingly enough, as I think back on the deliberations of our commission, this was one of the ones that wasn't very contentious. Part of it is that we are, I think, all of us looking for ways to build a sense of community, that we are citizens of the same country, that we share a same set of aspirations and a story about ourselves that we have never achieved but wanna believe and wanna work toward achieving. And, sure there are outliers and extremes. But the core of us still want this country to be the country of its promise. And, but we've lost these spaces and opportunities to work with each other in very diverse settings. And in fact, we've become, because of geography and socio-economic conditions more separated from each other than we were before. And so, when we had a draft, when people had to serve in the military, a lot of people felt that that was one of the most enriching experiences they had because they met people they never would have met, and lived with people they never would have lived with, and heard from people they never would have heard from. And national service is another way of accomplishing this mix and bringing people together around a common purpose that contributes to the common good. And we know that thousands of young Americans are doing this every year at the national level through national programs, but also through state and local programs. Many of them are doing it almost as volunteers, if not entirely as volunteers, and that means, again, it tends to advantage people who are economically better off because people who are not economically well off can't afford to give a year to service. So, the idea was why not use this vehicle of a baby bond where every infant has a $10,000 contribution from the federal government in a tax advantaged savings account that is only available to the individual after they complete a year of service so that it both in a way compensates not in real-time during the year of service, but compensates after the year of service. It may be a little bit of an incentive. But it also just makes it more accessible to people because they know that they're not doing it at a financial sacrifice. They're actually doing it with some financial gain. I don't think it erodes the overall ethos, which is really the service ethos. But it does recognize that there are economic realities in our society that we can't overlook, and that they and the economic realities are a source of polarization and division too. So, this was one where there was just a wellspring of support.
Archon Fung: That is so interesting.
Stephen Heintz: Yeah.
Archon Fung: That it was like, okay, it's not a fight. We love this idea.
Stephen Heintz: Yeah.
Archon Fung: Yeah. Danielle, any further thoughts?
Danielle Allen: No, Stephen's got it exactly right. I think the only other thing I would add there is that that bringing up that recommendation makes, brings us back to the lovely point you made at the very beginning about how the first gift the report offers is this concept of the virtuous circle, linking healthy institutions, a civil society that supports bridging and healthy information ecosystem, and then our culture. So, the universal service recommendation is really about that culture. Do we have a culture of service and duty? And that, you need that to sustain something like, right, let's review universal voting from institutional change or transition. And by the same token, if we get that opportunity to build out that culture of service, then that also gives us the sort of human energy and engagement in all those civil society initiatives that are about forming bridges and connectedness and rebuilding some of that civic infrastructure. So, it's really important to see how the recommendations work together. And we really did, as we worked on the report, we were very clear about the sort of synergies across these categories. And we really hope that that comes through to those people digging into the report.
Archon Fung: That's great. So, just one last question, which I'll combine a couple from the audience. First, a brief answer. So, Donna asks, Donna Cantilo in the Q&A asks, in a nutshell, to define universal voting. I assume that it is not requiring all to vote. Yes, Donna, it is requiring all to vote with a, the proposal is for a small penalty, two things, a small penalty for not voting. You'd have to make it very, very easy for everyone to vote. And then finally, you'd have to have lots of options on the ballot, like none of the above, write in, I'm just showing up, but I think the system is, you know, whatever, a bunch of options that allow people to express themselves and their duty is to actually show up, not necessarily to vote for one of the two major-party candidates. So, it is indeed requiring all to vote.
Danielle Allen: Just as we do with jury duty, right? That entire structure is exactly how jury duty operates. There are penalties for failing to show up if you've been called to serve. And we educate jurors on what it means to be a juror. You go your first time though, most states show you a video about why we have juries and what the role and responsibility is. And then yes, then you're, there's a service to fulfill.
Archon Fung: Yeah, good, good. And the last two questions I'll combine as the last, and then you can please offer any concluding thoughts because we're running out of time. These both have to do with trust in bridging. So, I think it's very much in line with the concerns and deep passions and motivations of you and the other commissioners. The first is about the commission itself. And the second is about society. So, Adam asks, I love the idea of bringing people from across the political spectrum together to work on projects. For The Common Purpose report, how did you recruit participants from the left, right and center? And was it easy or difficult? And how did you choose participant, right, just like that very exercise of, like, who's gonna be able to have this conversation in this moment? And then the second question, which I can't find the person who asked it, but basically, it was a question of how do you move forward with the commission recommendations, and anything actually, in areas in which trust between government and citizens has been broken, in which there's an environment of distrust? And so, I know that both of you are deeply concerned with, obviously, trust in your organizations and in the commission, but then also more broadly. So, maybe those two questions as the wrap-up.
Danielle Allen: So, maybe I'll start on the recruitment piece, and then Stephen, you can take the trust piece.
Stephen Heintz: Oh, you're gonna give me the hard one, huh?
Danielle Allen: Exactly. So, it's, honestly, it's pretty basic, that is, we started out, first there were two people, then there were three, then there were four, then there were eight. And each step along away, we said, who's not here? Who's not here? And that mattered for demographic diversity, it mattered for geographic diversity, it mattered for a professional point of view, it mattered for viewpoint diversity. So, each time, okay, who's not here? What do we need? And then thinking about, okay, well, who are the folks we need? Or if they're not available, who do we know who's the best conservative thinker on X? Who do we know is the best at this? You know, talk to them. Who do they know? Who do they know? And if they're not available, who do they know? So, it's just that snowball work. I mean, it's what in social science people called snowball sampling. You just keep building your sample out until you have enough in it. And that's what you have to do. And you always have to ask who's not here, who's not here, who's not here? And then keep repeating the process tapping into everybody's social networks 'cause none of us have a social network big enough to bring in all the perspectives that we need.
Stephen Heintz: Yeah, exactly. And it took us, by the way, it took us about four months. We started the planning process in the late summer of 2017, and we didn't have the first commission meeting until the very beginning of 2018 because we really had to work at this. So, on the issue of trust, clearly, this is the, in some ways, the fundamental problem in our democratic society at present, is that we have lost trust in our institutions. We've lost trust in our processes, and more disturbing, at least in my own estimation, it's pretty clear that we've lost trust in each other as fellow citizens, especially when it comes to national politics. I mean, the the polling data about how people don't trust each other, don't trust their neighbors to make the right decision on questions of national politics. And that we increasingly don't treat each other as political opponents if we're in one party versus the other, we treat each other literally as enemies. And that this is getting to be visceral, as well as political. And it's very deeply disturbing. And it's not gonna be, you know, we're not gonna turn this around in a short period of time, but it is the kind of work we need to be doing, and it's why the reforms are necessary, why the community bridging work is essential, why the work on the culture is essential, the way we communicate with each other, what we communicate to each other. All of these things are really, really important. And we need to be building new norms and values and narratives that overcome this lack of trust. And we have to make government institutions work effectively and deliver to the citizenry in ways that earn the trust. So, there's just a huge amount of work to do. And I think in many ways, the whole kind of core goal of Our Common Purpose and its 31 recommendations is really about establishing a new culture of trust in our constitutional democracy and in one another.
Archon Fung: Thank you very much. That is an excellent way to close this afternoon. And thank you very much for your wisdom, and your ideas, and all the work that you did to put this huge challenge of changing our political culture to a more civic one, and how it needs to be institutions, and cultures, and values that change all at the same time. In this moment, I think that the importance of your report is probably even more significant in this moment, in 2021, than you imagined when you were embarking on the enterprise in the first place. And it's important because the civic mission and objective is important. And it's important because so few other voices are really articulating this need and how to get there. So, on behalf of the whole audience, thank you very, very much for the work that you've done, for sharing it with us, and for helping us to understand and helping us to join with you in this enterprise. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, Danielle.
Danielle Allen: Thank you, Archon. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it.
Stephen Heintz: Yeah, thanks very much. This was a great discussion. Really appreciate it.
Archon Fung: Great, thank you very much.
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Presenter: You've been listening to AshCast, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation's podcast. If you'd like to learn more, please visit ash.harvard.edu or follow the Ash Center on social media @harvardash.
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