A Preview of the New Democratic Agenda from a Harvard Thought Leader: “Military-Style Discipline” to “Fashion a Party Fit for Purpose” so that “Power is Forged and the World Changed.”
One recurring theme of this blog is that institutions, and operators in institutions, make moves when people on the outside aren’t looking. Often, because these institutions are so large and self-contained, the moves are hard to track: they show up in a small policy change or a stray news item. Mostly, they get justified with false rhetoric: either with muddled talk of compromise or with vague words that assert ideals but assume things that aren’t true. Almost always, these moves collect over time to take away power from Americans on the ground.
Last week this blog traced how the return of Disney’s Robert Iger, known as a compromiser, promises an acceleration of his earlier agenda which was anything but compromising. It followed him making quiet moves at Disney over fifteen years with lasting effects: creating a company that is trying to tell Americans how to think, catering to China and cornering the media market at the expense of smaller firms and of the consumer. This week the example isn’t so dramatic as a change in leadership; it’s smaller, an item in the Books Section of The Wall Street Journal. But it’s no less interesting or important.
The item opens a window onto the thinking of an influential figure in academia who is also a prominent Democrat: the Philosophy, Ethics, and Public Policy scholar at Harvard and former candidate for Massachusetts governor Danielle Allen. Her mantra, unlike Iger’s, isn’t compromise; instead she talks about ideals in a vague way that asserts more than it lets on. She’s also nearly twenty years younger than Iger, which means she’s done less and has time to do much more. Her assertions and ideas are a warning about coming attractions from Democrats and their backers in the universities: one that should concern conservatives, educators, and anyone committed to freedom of thought and civility in public life. It should also concern anyone committed to fighting arbitrary power, the national institutions that push it, and the logic used to justify it.
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Prof. Allen is one of 24 University professors at Harvard, the highest honor that can be bestowed on faculty, occupying a chair named after the university’s longtime president James Bryant Conant, who presided over Harvard’s expansion during and then after World War II when the government pumped money into research universities to fight the Cold War. She is also the director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, which since 1986 has supported more than 800 scholars to help fill “the need for leaders who can make sound moral judgments in public and professional life…” In the summer of 2021 she announced her intention to run for Massachusetts governor but failed to get her name on the ballot and dropped out of the race in the winter of 2022.
In the December 8 issue of the Journal, Prof. Allen, along with other “big thinkers,” named the books that have shaped her thinking most this year. Here’s what she said:
My favorite books this year were David Herbert Donald’s 1995 “Lincoln’’ and Thomas E. Ricks’s recent “Waging a Good War.” Donald’s Lincoln begins as an old-school Whig, but by the mid-1850s his party is moribund. On May 29, 1856, the new Illinois Republican Party meets in convention, and Lincoln delivers a party-defining speech. His message, that “the Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts,” isn’t a geographical claim but a moral one—about the requirements of self-government among free and equal citizens. The need to end slavery follows from it. “Waging a Good War” is a stirring after-action report on the 1960s civil rights movement. Like “Lincoln” it honors (among a dozen others) a citizen-hero who sought to reanimate democracy’s moral core—Bob Moses, architect of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer.
The themes Allen draws from these works are vague, idealistic and assert a lot:
Is it worth tracing Lincoln’s efforts to fashion a party fit for purpose in his times? Is it worth scrutinizing how a military-style discipline was fundamental to civil rights’ success? Yes—these are means by which power is forged and the world changed. How can any American seeking a healthy democracy not wish to understand that better?
And they raise questions.
Wait, a philosophically-minded reader might say: does a “healthy democracy” really come from learning about how to “fashion a party fit for purpose” and “military-style discipline”? After all, these principles and tactics could apply to Lincoln and Dr. King, but they also definitely apply to Robespierre and Hitler.
A curious reader who likes history might decide that Prof. Allen gets the actual facts wrong. Wait, far from forging a party “fit for purpose” in 1856, wasn’t Lincoln a long-shot for the presidential nomination as late as 1860? And wasn’t his cabinet, far from having “military-style discipline,” a “team of rivals” of those he’d defeated? Come to think of it, wasn’t “military-style discipline” in a democracy exactly what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, both Democrats, were trying to avoid in WWI and WWII: going to war quickly to prevent a drawn-out arms race that they worried would make America into Germany? And wasn’t Civil Rights the organic outcome of many years of grassroots organizing and compromise by earlier Civil Rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Dr. King?
A reader who cares about writing style might be interested in the tone of the last four sentences, which ask “is it worth” reading these ideas, and then answer, at full volume, “Yes—these are means by which power is forged and the world changed. How can any American seeking a healthy democracy not wish to understand that better?” Wow! this reader might think, Prof. Allen doesn’t seem to be leaving us readers much choice about taking a look. She seems defensive and aggressive, like she understands she’s introducing some strange-sounding ideas (“military-style discipline” in a democracy, power being “forged” here). But she wants to overcome their strangeness with rhetoric not reason, scolding us into agreeing with her.
Wait, these readers might ask at some point, is there an agenda being advanced here?
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There is.
Prof. Allen’s short comment in the conservative Journal is part of a longer set of theories she’s been developing at Harvard and applying in books, magazines, newspapers and her Massachusetts gubernatorial run. The first person to cite what she was doing was the Revolutionary Era scholar Gordon Wood, who, as this earlier post lays out, was one of the historians most responsible for unearthing the Founders’ true purpose of combating arbitrary power and dominion. Wood honed in on Allen’s approach reviewing her 2014 book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, where she argued that the Declaration should be read to promote “equal political empowerment”:
egalitarianism of co-creation and co-ownership of a shared world, an expectation for inclusive participation that fosters in each citizen the self-understanding that she, too, he, too, helps to make, and is responsible for, this world in which we live together.
This is an eyeful to read: high ideals that don’t mean a lot on their face. But Wood sorted it through: he called the book “strange” and “remarkable” and he also explained that its reading was off point when it came to what the Declaration was really saying:
Jefferson and many other revolutionaries in 1776…would never have agreed with Allen’s assertion that “human equality requires that each of us have access to the single most important tool available for securing our happiness: government.” Government for Jefferson, as it was for other liberals like Thomas Paine, was merely a necessary evil. It was society that Jefferson and Paine always celebrated….To Jefferson and Paine government was a plunderer. All the evils in society—inequalities, privileges, social distinctions, monopolies, even excessive wealth and property—came from connections to government.
What Wood didn’t do, since his specialty is the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is explain where Allen’s strange ideas were coming from and what they mean for our politics.
Allen’s reading of the Declaration comes not from history but from political ideas that have been floating around elite universities since the 1960s. They flowed from concerns of the first wave of Baby Boomer student activists who came of age to face a troubling reality: post-World War II government had taken so much power through funding universities, covert agencies, corporations and media companies that young Americans felt like pawns in a world outside their control. This fear was, word for word, what Founders like Jefferson and Madison had worried would happen a century and a half earlier. Their solution was to decentralize power through states and associations and use politics to protect people from arbitrary control. That solution is also what conservatives have spent the past forty years trying to accomplish.
But the Sixties’ student activists didn’t glom onto the Founders’ solution. Instead they doubled down on bigness: keeping the national government powerful but making it less alienating by creating communities of protest. Their plan was to take power back, but since they didn’t actually shrink the structures to make them manageable it didn’t have much chance of working. Mostly it meant sit-ins and demonstrations outside Sproul Hall and People’s Park in Berkeley; the founding of Students for a Democratic Society in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and students of Brown University advocating for curriculum to be put in their hands.
The people encouraging them in this line—professors, especially at Berkeley—took an even more idealistic, even spiritual, tack. Many of these academics weren’t much interested in American history, e.g. what had actually happened in this country. But they were very interested in ideas, especially the ideas of Hannah Arendt: a German-American philosopher who believed that politics was the highest expression of being human. Or, as Danielle Allen puts it in a foreword to a book of Arendt’s, writing another eyeful, Arendt saw “labor, work and action” as the three fundamental areas of life: “the project of politics is precisely to define the terms of how these three activities articulate with one another in each of our lives.” Politics, in other words, defines everything.
Arendt took her beliefs from the democratic practices of the ancient Greeks, which historians would say is a specific, a-historic case: Greek men had slaves to allow them to spend their days making political decisions, and Greek city-states were small enough that every free man could represent himself. Also, sometimes these assemblies turned into mobs. Still, historic or no, Arendt’s ideas did link up with what students wanted in the first place: authenticity in a society that was so big it felt alienating to them. As one of Arendt’s Berkeley acolytes put it, she saw “authentic politics as revelatory; the actor revealing himself to his peers by word and deed.” This wasn’t too far from the hope of a 1969 Wellesley graduate, Hillary Rodham, when she spoke in her commencement address about looking for “more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.”
Still, Arendt’s ideas didn’t matter much in 1960s universities, mostly because the majority of university administrators and professors were suspicious of them. After all, their universities had gained funding out of the fight against the Soviet Union after 1945, and everyone knew that it was Soviet totalitarians who forced their citizens to put politics first. Postwar leaders might have forgotten the Founders’ warnings about centralized power, but they didn’t want to make politics the highest calling. That started to change after the Cold War, when the Baby Boomers came to Washington, D.C. and former Sixties’ student activists brought a spiritual approach to national politics.
The earliest examples were two former activists turned corporate-politicians: Ira Magaziner and Hillary Rodham Clinton. As President Clinton’s point people on a Healthcare reform bill, they tried to take control of healthcare away from doctors and put it in a national government panel in the name of a more woo-woo version of the Sixties’ project: “a politics of meaning…that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.” But they did this using what they’d learned between the Sixties and the Nineties: management consulting tactics borrowed from government-backed corporations. In the case of healthcare reform, that meant secretly assembling a bill, resisting legal actions to open their deliberations to the public, and trying to ram the plan through Congress in the name of “an ethic of caring and community.” (See this endnote for more detail.)[i]
Fast forward to today, and this mode of politics is everywhere in the institutions. Arendt is one of the most popular thinkers in Ivy league and other elite universities, and many students, the children of earlier idealists like Magaziner and Clinton who are becoming corporate consultants and politicians and academics, have adopted versions of her views. Now they’re molding them, like “architect[s],” to use Allen’s word, into today’s Democratic Party.
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What does this architecture look like in practice? And what does it mean for the politics conservatives will have to confront?
Below is what Allen wrote in The Wall Street Journal about her failed gubernatorial bid in Massachusetts:
Our campaign foundered inside the Massachusetts Democratic Party ballot-access process, where candidates compete with one another to get their name on the ballot in roughly 600 winner-take-all local caucuses. Unlike the Iowa presidential caucuses, these aren’t proportional. During the caucuses, the path to ballot access disappeared….I would have liked to have had the chance to bring my message directly to primary voters, but the law of politics was that our campaign must, in such conditions, fail. What does this experience tell us? We the people are healthy, but our vehicles of political participation need some attention.
What this means concretely isn’t clear, because Allen doesn’t say, but it certainly means centralized reform of some kind at the expense of decentralized ways of doing things, all in the name of political participation. It wasn’t a coincidence that her campaign slogan was “knitting the state together.”
And Allen’s not the only one pushing this line: so are practicing politicians and former consultants with elite academic backgrounds like Pete Buttigieg. This is what Buttigieg, a Harvard graduate widely recognized by Democrats as one of their “ideas” people, told Ezra Klein in 2019, gearing up for his presidential run, about why America is great. Note the echoes of Arendt, along with other, more unsettling references:
…If we’re talking about American greatness I want it to be in terms of a way that we all come and interact in the public sphere that defines our culture, a culture defined by our politics in a way that maybe no other society other than maybe Soviet, you know some failed societies have done, but no successful society has been as closely aligned with its political system since perhaps Athens.
Concretely, he went on to make clear, that means limiting the powers of state legislatures and using the national government to open up routes for political engagement—e.g., giving it more power. As Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration, Buttigieg has had no problem pushing that line: giving national administrators more authority to shape how local communities (and businesses) operate.
But, in the past two years, Democratic “thought leaders” like Allen and Buttigieg have also upped the ante: arguing that their proposals for democratic participation are not just desirable but necessary. Allen’s use of the Civil War and Black civil rights in her Wall Street Journal entry show how: her argument is that race, like in those past instances, is driving our current political crisis. In this story, the crisis drivers are white nationalists who, as Buttigieg said in his 2020 interview, are empowering racist state legislatures. The solution to this problem is to give the national government power and take it away from states.
And, in this view, there’s a historical case for taking power away from states in the name of race: one that, like Allen’s, is linked to the Civil War. This case was aggressively made by Allen’s colleague Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, another political academic who gained public attention testifying against President Trump in his first impeachment trial in 2019. In 2021, Feldman wrote an entire book arguing that the Constitution as most Americans understand it, not only the balance between states and nation but between the three branches of the national government, doesn’t exist. Instead, Lincoln used Executive power so broadly to fight the Civil War and free the slaves that he destroyed the Founders’ Constitution, “effectively transforming himself into a constitutional dictator.” In the process, he created a new “moral constitution” dedicated to equality: a “vow of continuing effort” symbolized by Southern reconstruction and the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Feldman concluded that, since “persistent inequality still afflicts the United States, including inequality before the law of the kind the moral Constitution prohibits,” Americans must embrace Lincoln’s ideal of “a moral Constitution that will always be in the process of being redeemed.”
In his review of the book, Sean Wilentz, an eminent historian academically aligned with Gordon Wood, wrote that Feldman “cuts corners” and makes “questionable” historical links that are “far from perfect.” But he also traced out the political implications of the argument, noting that readers might be alarmed by them:
Coming at a time when not a few scholars have been saying that our modern Constitution is broken, Feldman’s final [point]— that it took an elected tyrant to emancipate the enslaved and usher in a rebirth of American freedom — can sound ominous.
Wilentz explained this argument as Feldman’s “contrarianism” lacking “historical soundness.” Feldman hasn’t responded directly.[ii] But recently he’s argued in defense of his book that we must be able to “imagine the necessity of constitutional change when it is required by circumstance and moral judgment.” What that means, again, is unclear. At the very least he’s giving Democrats the historical, legal and moral justification to push through filibuster reform and Voting Rights reform—and we’ll see where else he ends up based on “the necessity of constitutional change when it is required by circumstance and moral judgment.” Meantime, Kermit Roosevelt III, a legal scholar and the great-great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most nationalizing presidents in our history, has come out with a book making a similar argument to Feldman’s.
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So here, at last, is the moral rallying cry for a party, the Democrats, “fit for purpose in its times”; a latter-day struggle for civil rights in the tradition of Lincoln and King. The Biden Administration is on board: as The New York Times noted on January 23, 2021 "many of Mr. Biden's plans are longstanding liberal priorities...the president and his team are now advocating with a racial emphasis.” And the last two years have proven the point. Democrats have spent their time using claims of racial discrimination to argue for giving national majorities more power: specifically, for nixing the filibuster in the U.S. Senate and for passing a voting rights act that takes authority away from the states. If Secretary Buttigieg could, he would scrap the electoral college, too:
if one party benefits from fewer Americans being able to vote, and from our democracy becoming less representative, then there's something wrong with that party...the people who have found that the system of power benefits them are party chairmen and state legislators.
Next year the Senate is divided again, with a narrow Democratic majority including two dissenting senators, one of whom has become an independent and faces a tough primary in 2024. Democrats have two more years to push their agenda, so cue the “military-style discipline.”
We’ve seen this movie before. Last year, President Biden compared the Democratic holdouts on the bills, Senators Sinema and Manchin, to segregationists, and the White House made later statements blaming Manchin for obstructionism. Thanks to the activists who were trailing him to his houseboat with his grandson, Manchin felt these statements put his family at risk. Protestors also surrounded Manchin’s car, and followed Sinema into the ladies’ room of the college where she was teaching a class. An ACLU strategist tweeted as Sinema spoke in defense of the filibuster, “We’re breaking her,” and a former senior adviser to President Obama went on a podcast and called her a “c—t” to 1.5 million listeners. President Biden called some of these tactics inappropriate but said that they were "part of the process.”
When some version of this happens again next year, as it likely will, or a few years after that, as it almost certainly will, what will Professor of Ethics Danielle Allen tell her students, or the leaders the Safra Center is training to “make sound moral judgments in public and professional life”? Will she say it’s wrong? Will she say there’s no excuse? Will she say that politics depends on civility and rules and respect for peoples’ privacy? Or will she punt, and talk in class about “military-style discipline” to “fashion a party fit for purpose” so that “power is forged and the world changed”? An educated guess is that the last answer is the right one. Maybe she’ll even write an Opinions piece about the need for “purpose” and “military-style discipline” in “a healthy democracy,” pushing her readers to see differently what their eyes might tell them is organized bullying.
She’s the institutional cover—University Professor at Harvard, leader of a prestigious institute, politically active academic—who can intellectually justify what President Biden is mumble-justifying while Secretary of Transportation Buttigieg adds policy heft. Meantime, Professor of Law Noah Feldman can talk about why the demands of the “moral Constitution” makes it legally right, and Kermit Roosevelt III can offer support. Just remember, kids and critics, the line will be, Lincoln did it, too! Voices like these are why young ambitious graduates who stream from Harvard to Washington, and “right-minded” liberals who don’t like violence but approve of intellect, and people who don’t know what to think but hold the Ivy League in regard, could believe that what the Democrats are doing is okay.
But, in her recent Wall Street Journal entry, Allen may be doing more than covering. Her argument about a leader who “forges a party for purpose” and an activist who engages with “military-style discipline” is a good model for the Democrats to work from when it comes to political strategy, just a little ahead of where the party is now. Who will be the coming leader who “forges a party fit for purpose,” making policy proposals that centralize government from the top-down? Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, or Kamala Harris? Who will be the activist who harnesses “military discipline” at the grassroots, so that it can whip dissenters into line by harassing them when they go out to eat or drive their car or go home to see their kids? Cori Busch, Ilhan Omar, or AOC?
We already know the candidates for prophet of the movement, the one who lays out its plans and justifies them: Allen, or Feldman, or Roosevelt III. Their influence may not be immediate, but thanks to the hospitable institutions they’re part of, it can spread in other ways. What happens when Allen’s Safra Center sets up an “education pipeline” of the kind that have existed since the 1950s to high schools and grade schools to teach students civics? Her lessons are not exactly woke—they’re vaguer than that—so they’ll move in under the radar for awhile. But there’s no question about where they’re heading.
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There’s historical precedent for intellectual movements with strange ideas taking over institutions and indoctrinating the “masses” and the young. It’s not Lincoln or King, both of whom united movements with careful focus, the discipline of compromise and an eye to giving power to the ordinary person. Instead it’s the precedent Buttigieg, whose father was a scholar of Gramsci, one of Marx’s most effective disciples, pointed to in the 2020 interview when he said without irony that “[America is] a culture defined by our politics in a way that maybe no other society other than maybe Soviet, you know, some failed societies have done."
It would be interesting to know whether Buttigieg—whose father said that “ideas matter at least as much as the direct exercise of power,” and who friends reported “was interested in the idea of the public intellectual…who can make ideas work” and “raised a public intellectual in Peter”—thinks that the Soviet experiment could succeed in a different climate using different tactics. In one view, that question is what the Democrats have been experimenting with since at least 2018: merging assembly-mobs to harass dissenters with the seizure of institutions to make dissenters toe the line. It began with the spectacle of the Kavanaugh hearings and has extended to pushing Manchin and Sinema around, as well as to harassing Supreme Court justices and instigating House investigations into them. It’s a fusion of Arendt’s assemblies and the communist model, combining Sixties’ protests and corporate-political managing down. So far Democrats seem to think it’s working.
And this creates a real irony. The universities that trained Buttigieg and empowered Allen gained their power in order to defeat totalitarian communism, and freedom of thought was their purpose: Gordon Wood got to write freely and so did his mentor Bernard Bailyn, mentioned in this earlier post. But so did Leftists like Noam Chomsky. And so did William B. Allen: a Baptist pastor, prominent political theorist, former Dean of the James Madison College at Michigan State University, Reagan and Bush educational appointee and Donald Trump supporter who is Danielle Allen’s father. But, post-Eighties, the universities’ growing purpose is keeping their power over a society which no longer trusts them, so they’ve muted dissent and are pushing on society versions of ideas they were built to fight. Meantime, liberals who believed in the old university don’t seem to be doing anything effective in its defense. They can’t decide if they want to defend freedom of thought or defend the powerful institutions that have supported them, so they opt for a queasy middle-ground: advocating for free speech without tackling the institutional pushes that are taking it away.
So it’s on conservatives to face down a threat that the people like Conant who grew these institutions, and his successors who expanded them, never imagined when they built distant structures that are increasingly in hoc to ideologists. These ideologists have applied the great insight of Joseph Buttigieg’s subject Gramsci: to change a country you have to take power over its organs of culture. And American universities, cut off from the public and attended by an insular band of people who make up for in idealism what they lack in experience, are easy and willing targets.
To fight this new threat, conservatives have to remember something important. It may be the woke activists who are in the streets, but it’s the people like Allen, operating from the safety of the institutions, who are giving them purpose and cover: using intellectual authority to convince them that they’re morally righteous and the rest of us that what they’re doing is right. When conservatives express their outrage, they should lay it at the feet of not just the people breaking things, but at the elites urging them forward and pushing ideas on Americans from above. Conservatives should also express their outrage toward a bigger purpose. Reforming the universities might sound like an abstraction. But the use of ideas like Allen’s by Democratic elites and foot soldiers show why it’s a necessity.
[i] Magaziner and Clinton had gained early fame at the same time, when they were featured in Life Magazine as student leaders to watch: Magaziner, for trying to change the curriculum to “train leaders who, by definition, challenge authority, because that is how society progresses, not by maintenance of the status quo” and Clinton for advocating more “ecstatic, penetrating modes of living.” Then, rather than work for change in the real world, Magaziner went into consulting and Clinton into corporate law. In the 1990s, they brought that experience to Washington, D.C. when Bill Clinton became president, using a vision propounded by a third former college activist at Berkeley turned psychologist, Michael Lerner.
Lerner’s idea was a version of the Sixties’ complaint but much less concrete, and much less concerned with arbitrary government power: it was that the country was wracked by a “crisis of meaning” and demanded a "new politics of meaning...that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves." For Michael Lerner, it meant “Mrs. Clinton, and I…insisting that society can and ought to move from an ethos of selfishness to an ethos of caring and community.” The underwriter of this new society—you guessed it—would be the national government.
And even though the words were woo-woo, their applications were not. Lerner proposed “mandating changes in the workplace to make it less stressful, more concerned about workers' intelligence, creativity and ability to cooperate with others, and hence ultimately more productive”—exactly the kind of programs corporate consultants like Ira Magaziner had been urging conglomerates to adopt. (Think of the many perks that have led Google to be called a “playground for grownups,” and also the company spying on employees and you get a sense of the project.) Clinton and Magaziner, meantime, convened a secret healthcare panel to rework one-seventh of the American economy and tried to ram its plan through Congress—exactly the way, as a number of critical allies pointed out, that management consultants work, but in the name of higher ideals like “caring and community.” According to Martha Derthick, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, commenting on the plan:
I have never read an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naiveté...to achieve the Clintons' twin goals of universal coverage and cost containment would have required much more social control than Americans are willing to tolerate...[including] drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me.
The Clintons’ own Secretary of Health and Human Services recalled that “a lot of us told them we thought it was screwy.” Mrs. Clinton told a Democrat who told her the plan would never pass Congress, U.S. Representative from Tennessee Jim Cooper, “We’ll crush you. You’ll wish you never mentioned this to me.” She also called a counter-plan offered by Cooper “dangerous and threatening,” sent subordinates to Tennessee to attack the plan, and, “according to Newsweek, she brought an aide with a video camera to a meeting with senators and asked the senators to denounce Cooper on the spot.” Her healthcare push didn’t pan out, but today, thinkers like Danielle Allen have adopted more militant versions of these views in a more hospitable party filled not with older-style union and ward Democrats but with idealistic elite college graduates like Clinton and Magaziner looking for spiritual purpose.
[ii] Feldman has recently assumed a more compromising affect, by placing himself vis a vis Democratic ideas that are not so much dangerous as histrionic. For example, he argued that though the Senate makes our system unfair, it’s
a feature of our system, not a bug….Probably no one would want to design a democratic system from scratch this way today. Our constitutional arrangements…aren’t even just, seen through the lens of contemporary conceptions of equality and equal voice. They are also what we have. So while it is valuable to insist that some political arrangements are bad and need to be improved as much as possible, we should be able to do this without simultaneously and apocalyptically claiming that, if they don’t change, the entire constitutional system will collapse.
This is more than an eyeful: it’s also answering a Democratic argument so outlandish that it makes Feldman seem prudent by comparison. And, again, what Feldman means when it comes to how far actual reform of the Constitution should go isn’t clear.
*Photo Credit the Safra Center, Cornel West