[Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen discusses the US’s
founding, prison abolition, and the future of democracy.]
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THE RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION — AND ITS LESSONS FOR
TODAY   [[link removed]]

 

Ezra Klein
July 3, 2020
Vox
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_ Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen discusses the US’s
founding, prison abolition, and the future of democracy. _

Danielle Allen will change how you think about the Declaration of
Independence, Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

 

My first conversation
[[link removed]] with Harvard political
theorist Danielle Allen on _The Ezra Klein Show_
[[link removed]] in fall 2019 was one of
my all-time favorites. I didn’t expect to have Allen on again so
soon, but her work is unusually relevant to our current moment.

Allen has written an entire book
[[link removed]] about
the deeper argument of the Declaration of Independence and the way our
superficial reading and folk history of the document obscures its
radicalism. (It’ll make you look at July Fourth in a whole new way.)
Her most recent book, _Cuz_,
[[link removed]] is
a searing indictment of the American criminal justice system, driven
by watching her cousin go through it and motivated by his murder.

Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, which Allen
directs, has released [[link removed]] the
most comprehensive, operational road map for mobilizing and reopening
the US economy amid the Covid-19 crisis. And to top it all off, a
two-year bipartisan commission of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, which Allen co-chaired, recently released a report 
[[link removed]]with more than 30
recommendations on how to reform American democracy — and they’re
very, very good.

This is a wide-ranging conversation for a wide-ranging moment. Allen
and I discuss what “all men are created equal” really means, why
the myth of Thomas Jefferson’s sole authorship of the Declaration of
Independence muddies its message, the role of police brutality in the
American Revolution, democracy reforms such as ranked-choice voting,
DC statehood, mandatory voting, how to deal with a Republican Party
that opposes expanding democracy, the case for prison abolition, the
various pandemic response paths before us, the failure of political
leadership in this moment, and much more.

An edited excerpt from our conversation follows. The full conversation
can be heard on _THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW_
[[link removed]]_._

Ezra Klein

What do we get wrong about the Declaration of Independence?

Danielle Allen

The first thing we get wrong is the notion that we should focus on
Thomas Jefferson as the author. He put on his tombstone “author, the
Declaration of Independence.” That was a real self-aggrandizing
gesture. In fact, he was just the scribe. The intellectual work of the
declaration was driven significantly by John Adams and Benjamin
Franklin.

That’s an important thing to say out loud because Adams is someone
who never owned slaves and Franklin was somebody who was an enslaver
earlier in his life but repudiated enslavement and became a vocal
advocate of abolition. Both Adams and Franklin were in a different
place on enslavement than Jefferson was.

That matters. The Declaration of Independence fed straight into
abolitionist movements and efforts. It was the basis of a text that
was submitted in Massachusetts in January 1777 moving forward
abolition, and abolition had been achieved already in Massachusetts
and Pennsylvania by the early 1770s and 1780s.

When we focus on Jefferson, we get one part of America’s story —
the story of the slaveholding South. We don’t get the part of the
story which was about how abolitionism was developing already, even in
the 18th century. That’s part of our story in history, too. We
should see it and tell it.

Ezra Klein

That’s a corrective to something that I’ve bought into myself,
which is that the central story of the Declaration of Independence is
one of hypocrisy — at the same time these beautiful ideals were
being written, they were being betrayed. What you seem to be saying is
that this story is only partial — that feeding into the Declaration
Independence was conscious abolitionist intent.

Danielle Allen

Yes, there was already conscious abolitionist intention by the 1770s.
The person who is famous for having coined the “no taxation without
representation” argument, James Otis, had already in 1760 written a
powerful pamphlet against enslavement. So there was a strand of
revolutionary thought that worked its way all the way through to
seeing the need for the end of enslavement. Thomas Paine was another
figure of whom that’s true.

That’s not to say that they were awfully egalitarian. John Adams was
also explicit that while he thought that the sort of universal rights
[in] the declaration applied to everybody — men, women, poor people,
people of color — he also was convinced that nonetheless, power
should be left in the hands of white men with property. He had this
paradoxical view that the institution should secure well-being and
rights for everybody, but that the responsibility for securing those
rights should lie with white men with property.

So there is a sort of bifurcation between this notion that rights
pertain to everybody and the question of who would actually have
access to political power and be able to control political
institutions.

Ezra Klein

What do you mean when you say the declaration is “best read as an
ordinary memo”?

Danielle Allen

At the end of the day, human life and human organization depends on
people being able to coordinate around a shared plan. And in order to
coordinate around a shared plan, you have to make that plan memorable.

That was the job of the Decoration of Independence. They had this set
of colonies with extended lines of communication where it could take
weeks for a message to travel from the north to the south end, and
they needed somehow to be able to move together. So they had a moment
of punctuation that memorialized for everybody what their purpose was:
What were they trying to do together?

That’s the sense in which it’s a memo. Memo is short for the Latin
word memorandum, which is the thing that must be remembered. That’s
the sense in which it’s just like any other ordinary office memo
that’s seeking to coordinate the actions of disparate people.

Ezra Klein

In your view, what does the memo say? What is the argument the
declaration actually makes?

Danielle Allen

It’s pretty straightforward. It’s a group of people who look
around and say, we don’t like this world. So it starts, “When in
the course of human events.” It’s a diagnosis of a problematic
state of affairs.

The problematic state of affairs is that the British government is not
securing the rights of the colonists as they understood them. They
understood their rights through a long history of thinking about the
rights of Englishmen. Specifically, they thought the crown was
violating those rights, and they sought an alternative. They had
pursued petitions for change internally to the system for a long time,
and after 10 years of efforts, they’d reached the point where they
thought it was time to start something new.

So it’s a diagnosis and a prescription of a forward path based on
independence. It’s also a justification of that self-governing
action, that choice of their own, on the grounds that human beings are
best off when they can govern themselves.

Ezra Klein

One of the arguments you make in the book is that the declaration is
often read as an argument for freedom over equality, but, in your
view, its fundamental point is that there is no freedom in the absence
of equality. Can you talk about how one of those views came to
predominate over the other and why you hold the one you do?

Danielle Allen

In the 18th century, when people thought about self-government, they
often described it as a product of free and equal self-governing
citizens. Free and equal always went together. In order to be free,
you actually had to be able to play a role in your local institutions.
You had to have equal standing as a decision-maker. So freedom and
equality were mutually reinforcing.

That concept of self-government predates the 19th century and the
Industrial Revolution, and the remarkable transformations of the
global economy achieved by industrialization and modern capitalism. As
the economy transformed, as you saw the immiseration of populations in
industrial centers, the question of equality came to have a different
balance. There was a new question on the table: How does economic
structure interact with freedom and with equality?

So with the 19th century and early 20th century, you began to have a
sort of refashioning of the concept of equality primarily around
economic concerns and conceptions and castes. That way, there seems to
be a tension between a market economy defined as somehow rooted in a
concept of freedom and equality based on equal distribution of
economic resources. The Cold War brought that to a really high pitch,
with the Soviet Union characterized as the political structure in
favor of equality and the United States characterized as the political
structure in favor of freedom.

But what that debate between those two physical systems did was
obscure the fact that at their core, freedom and equality have to be
linked to each other. You can’t actually have freedom for all unless
most people have equal standing relationship to each other. That’s a
political point in the first question. And then you fold in economic
issues by asking the question: If we need to achieve equal political
standing, then what kind of economic structure do we need to deliver
that?

I think it is possible to have market structures that are compatible
with egalitarian distributive outcomes. I think you need an
egalitarian economy. You don’t need, strictly speaking, an equal
distribution of material goods in order to support the kind of
political equality that gives people equal standing and of shared
ownership of political institutions.

Ezra Klein

Let’s hold on that idea of political equality versus economic
equality. When people hear “we’re all created equal” or “we
all are equal,” the mind naturally jumps to the places where we’re
not. Some people are taller than others. Some people are born into a
different station than others. The list goes on.

Your argument in the book is that equality here means something
different — it’s a way of relating to one another, not a way of
equalizing against each other. Can you talk about what that difference
is?

Danielle Allen

We’re all not the same, but we are equal in some fundamental
respects. The most important way in which we’re equal is that we are
all creatures who proceed through our day trying to make tomorrow
better than yesterday, and seeking to shape a life course that
delivers to us a sense of well-being. So we’re all equal in being
judges of our circumstances and seekers of a pathway to a more
flourishing tomorrow than we had yesterday. That in itself — the
fact that we can judge our circumstances and diagnose them and see
solutions to a better future — makes us political creatures and
makes us people who want to control our surroundings. That’s what we
all share.

In order for that to be activated for all human beings, we need an
opportunity to participate in political institutions that tap into
that human capacity. As we participate in our shared institutions,
will bring a variety of different kinds of resources to that process.
We have different interests. We have different capacities. We have
different experiences that build out different perspectives. So
there’s this huge diversity of what we can all bring to the process
of judging together about the shape of our future. But it is that
judging that we all have the capacity for and that we all have a right
to participate in.

Ezra Klein

Do you see any parallels between the protests in the aftermath of
George Floyd’s murder and the American Revolution?

Danielle Allen

The American Revolution was massively fueled by resentment of the
arbitrary use of police power on the part of the British. The writs of
assistance, for example, in Boston were rules that gave British
customs officers the right to search people without any specific
reason for searching them. It was stop-and-frisk in the 18th century,
basically.

In other words, arbitrary use of police power was at the core of the
American Revolution. Arbitrary use of police power and excessive
penalty in our criminal justice system have been at the center of many
people’s attention for quite a period of time now.

In the declaration, they say, all of our petitions have just been met
by repeated injury. Such has been the experience for the last decade
too, I think, for people who’ve been working on police reform and
reimagining of our justice and public safety system. So I think
there’s a lot of continuity. There’s a really strong sense of what
rights should be protected and what it means not to have basic rights
protected.

There’s a strong sense of what it means to have invested public
authorities with power. Why do we invest them with power? Mainly so
they can secure our rights. So when the power is turned around and not
used to secure our rights, then the social contract itself, the
original compact, has been breached.

So I think everything we’re watching is fully recognizable and
understandable in the original terms of the revolution and the
declaration and Constitution.

Ezra Klein

Is there a tension in the way America views itself in terms of how we
celebrate the moment of revolution and the ultimately violent
uprisings that met the abuse of British power against Americans —
and the fact that there is intense pressure to keep the protests today
peaceful, and any deviation from that is seen as inherently
illegitimate?

Danielle Allen

I think there’s a necessary tension that comes out of being a
society born in revolution. At the end of the day, to be a successful
society is to avoid revolution. So we have to celebrate as our origin
something that every society also wishes to avoid.

In the Declaration of Independence, there’s this distinction drawn
between altering the government and abolishing it and establishing a
new one. That distinction in the declaration is used to justify a
full-scale revolution, but it simultaneously points to the idea that
the sustainability of constitutional democracy is going to have to
focus instead on this concept of alteration.

So the question really is, can you achieve internal capacity in your
institutions and social structures to make alteration a real
possibility from one generation to the next?

We should all know from the get-go that we live in a world that has
made an alteration one of its fundamental necessities in an ongoing
way. And I think that’s the kind of proposition being tested now.
It’s past due time for alteration in our administration of justice,
in our approach to public safety. So let’s figure out what capacity
for alteration we have.

_Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and founder of Vox. Before that, he
was columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at
MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg. He’s written for the New
Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and appeared on Face the
Nation, Real Time with Bill Maher, The McLaughlin Report, the Daily
Show, and many more._

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