- Danielle, it is so
delightful to have you here. And I wanna jump right
in, but before I do, let me say first that it
is such an exciting thing to be in the company of a masterful, a truly masterful teacher. You know, I look at your programs
online over the past year and it's been so exciting
to see you engage with undergraduates, with private citizens and no matter what you always seem to just coax the excitement out of them, even if it's, you know, I don't know many people, Danielle, who can talk about two sentences in the Declaration of
Independence for an hour and have everybody riveted. And so it's that extraordinary reminder of what great teaching can do and why it's so transformational. So thank you for being one of
those extraordinary teachers that changes lives. - Thank you, Emily. That's just incredibly kind and generous. You know, I think you just
put it to the nerd in me. I do love ideas, I love books and it's always just a thrill to be able to share that
passion and sense of joy with others, so thank you for that. That was really very generous of you. - So let's jump in to the Declaration. You've talked about the
Declaration of Independence as being our most important statement about how we govern ourselves
within a democratic order. You know, why is that, why is
this short text so important Do our understanding
of a democratic order? - Well, you know, it's
just incredibly concise and it really is adding to
the vocabulary of the language of political philosophy. It really key element
of human understanding. And that thing it adds is
the notion that each of us is the person best situated to make judgements about
our own perspective, health, safety, happiness, wellbeing. That nobody else's judgment
can replace our own judgment. So we have then both a need to be able to exercise our own
judgment in shaping our lives but also responsibility to
understand how to do that and how to do that while
others are also doing it. So then you get that
core political problem of how it is that we connect our different emancipated
judgments with one another in collective decision-making. That's really the kind of core issue that the declaration points to. And I think it's honestly the sort of the earliest, pithiest
statement of both that human goal, human need and the
challenge that comes with it. - So think back to the framers themselves, were they in articulating this
pithy philosophical statement about freedom, about
equality, about human agency, it's all packed in there. Were the drafters teaching
their contemporary something that they had not known before or were they just naming
something that felt familiar to everyone that once seeing it, it could be brief because it
was automatic yes, I get it right in that moment when I
hear it for the first time, I read it for the first time. - I think it's a little
bit more subtle than that, even actually. So I don't exactly think it's just that they were rendering something everybody already understood. I think they were
crystallizing an understanding that had been growing over time. So in order for you to exhibit this I am gonna have to just
recite the second sentence you will have to forgive me for doing that but so-- - I welcome it. - You'll remember it, you know, the sort of all-important
sentence the second sentence is, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, but they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed. And whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people
to alter or to abolish it and to Institute new government, laying the foundation on such principle and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Okay, it's a super long sentence. We tend to focus on the first part of it, the self-evident true starting with the list of individual rights. Those builds to the idea that institutions to secure our rights. But then there's this conclusion that we can change those institutions if they're failing at their
job of securing our rights. And that's really in the last clause I think they make their
most important contribution. So there is a sense in which yes the natural rights vocabulary
has already been in use, it's been deployed. And there's a real question I'm like, what does it actually mean to
live on the basis of this idea that people's own emancipated judgment should be the ground for
what we do collectively in a society. And that's what the answer to the very end when they say it's the
right of the people to, you know, to make these
changes, alter or abolish it by doing two things, laying a foundation on principle and organizing the powers of government to deliver whatever the
people judge to be best to effect their safety and happiness. So it's those two things. The notion that you have to
have a foundation of principle and they also have to think intentionally about how to organize
the powers of government to deliver on that principle. That hasn't been articulated
previously, right? And this is really what
lies beneath their evolution into constitution writers. Because of course they
were from a country, you know, England, the United Kingdom that understood itself
to have a constitution. The British used that vocabulary
of their own constitution but it wasn't a written document. And so what they were really
working out in that moment in 1776 was how to coordinate action. You need a shared
purpose, a common purpose that's that statement of principle. But then you actually also
need institutional design, mechanisms that make it possible again for individual judgements
about personal pathways to be integrated with some
kind of collective judgment about a collective pathway. And we can fiddle and
fuddle and futz and meddle and muddle our way to finding
what those institutions are or we can be intentional about how we do constitutional design. And it was really that kind
of bringing into clarity the fact that there's
this intellectual work called organizing the powers of government and it's gotta be hooked up with laying a foundation on principle
that is in an innovation, it's a breakthrough. And I actually think that when they were
writing that declaration, that part of it, they weren't just doing
it for the broad public. They were actually doing it for themselves to clarify in Continental Congress like what was the job
they had in front of them. And indeed, because that is
what they then proceeded to do, you know, they gave themselves that task of drafting that declaration principle, the declaration of independence
laying the foundation. And at the same time, it
also set up a committee to draft the articles of Confederation. And I'm just underscoring this because I think we've lost clarity about that important distinction
between sort of principles that guide us and orient us and then this other equally intentional and precise work about designing
institutional structures. So that is just an incredible gift that the document provides. - So I wanna slow the
speed down a little bit and unpack that distinction
between principals and I've heard you describe
it before as the first job of citizenship is to ensure the fact that the foundation of governance
is based on principle. So, well, let's start there and we'll get to the
second job of the citizen which is to organize
the powers of government to deliver on those principles. But first let's focus
in on an example or two of the sort of principles
that you're talking about. What makes them principles as opposed to sort of an
operational or more of a tactic. What's when you talk about principles, can you give me a sense
of what you're describing? - I mean, in some levels
we could sort of say it's kind of easy distinction
between the what, you know, and then the who and the how. Yeah, so the what is, you know, what are we trying to build here by way of a world for human beings. And in the declaration as a whole is a statement of principle. It's a statement that human beings is a part of their thriving
need to make their own judgments about whether or not their
political institutions are supporting that
thriving and then, you know, change them if need be. And so as a statement of principle is making a kind of fundamental point about the right of the
people taken as a whole, as well as the rights
of individual people. And it's also making a fundamental claim about the connection
between human wellbeing and that emancipation
that I'm talking about. So that's the what. The what is we are trying to build a world of emancipated people, whose emancipation is
nonetheless compatible with their governing together, okay? So that's the what. And so then yes, then after you then you have to see what, how. How do we actually do that? That sounds kind of tricky, you know? So we get into the question of organizing the powers of government. - So let's focus in on that
agency, that principle of agency for a moment. This is that idea that
you started out with that first of all, we as human beings we have agency to make our tomorrow better or at least attempt to
try to make tomorrow better than our yesterday. And we have the raw
materials available to us to at least pursue that. It doesn't mean that we're successful, but it means that we have the ability to pursue that effectively. Let me ask you the question this way to tie it to our contemporary context. Are we in jeopardy of
losing that sense of agency, that sense that of self-efficacy? You know, at what point, for example, does our care for one another, something that we want to be able to, we want to be in community together. We wanna govern with each other, we want to solve problems together at a in a Tocqueville sense. At what point does care for
one another, for example tip over into something that
looks more like infantalizing or super intending or
undermining that agency that you described as being
so central to the declaration. - Yeah, no, that's a good question. So I think this is where the question of how we organize the powers
of government does come in. So it has to be a basic principle of how the powers of
government are organized that they protect the
project of emancipation, that they invite the activity
of individual judgment, that they engage people in processes of collective
decision-making. So in other words, I
think it really matters that as we are trying
to identify those parts of the work in our community, that we can't actually do separately that we could only do collectively, we nonetheless need in
the doing of that work, sort of processes and practices that build on the
judgment of the citizenry. To some extent that's
just what representation is supposed to do, right? That is what the sort of
in principle, in the ideal the job of Congress is, is to make sure that the
emancipated judgment of the people is always shaping the
design of the constraints that the people then
is going to live under or the kind of supportive
scaffolds of the people who is gonna build for itself. And so, you know, I
think that's a question that we have now. You know, is representation working? Does it in fact emancipate our
judgment in appropriate ways? Or have changes in the size of our country or the scale of our country or the way in which our
media ecosystem operates have changes of this kind,
brought a fundamental challenge to representation and the
way it is supposed to work in both connecting people
to collective judgments and ensuring that they're
emancipated judgment is at the center of the
work we're doing together. - So let me talk, go back to that phrase. You talked about the
judgment of the citizenry and we can articulate that
judgment of the citizenry as if we know what that is and that that's a clear thing. But of course it's an
incredibly messy process to get to the judgment of the citizenry. And you've also alluded to
the fact that we need to find sort of in a be in a discovery
process with one another, in which we're trying to
discover what that judgment is. We're trying to understand and flesh out what those shared values are. And the only way to do that is to actually talk to each other. The only way to do that is
to be in real conversations. But it seems to me that
we've had trouble of late of being in productive, thoughtful, meaningful conversations with one another. So would you mind thinking through with me about through this project of what does, if a citizenry is to engage in a kind of productive conversation
around shared values, what is required of our
conversational norms? What do we need to be doing differently than we're currently doing to
have those good conversations? - Right, okay, thank you for that. Let me actually, I'm gonna
turn the crank ever so slightly on your question to make
it a two part question. So there is work to be done in about that, sorry there is work to be done in having conversations
about shared values, but there's also work to be done in having conversations about what our shared
work should be, okay? And I think it's actually important to pull these two things apart, because sometimes what we
fight over is whether or not a given activity should be shared work or should be rather the work
of, you know, smaller units, communities or families or the like. So we might actually, for
example, save, share a value. You know, let's say maybe it's
the value of good schools, but nonetheless disagree about
whether or not good schools should be the shared work of say the federal government
or state governments or local governments or
just families, right? And so I think it's just
important to call out that there are these two
different potential registers of disagreement. And in truth, I think our
disagreements these days are more in the second category
than in the first category, which is probably a bit surprising to say and I'll come back to that in a second. But I think if you look back at the original design
of the constitution, one of the things that is
really striking about it is that they put a lot of effort
into answering the question of which things should be shared work at the scale of the entire nation, which things should be shared work at the level of the state, you know, which things should be shared work at the level of the community. And the examples will be familiar, right? So the defense, the
military, was an example of shared work at the
level of the whole nation. There's no good way to do defense unless you took it up to
the scale of the whole. In contrast, their view at
the time was for example, the agricultural policy
didn't make any sense done at a national scale because
the sort of diversity of needs was too sufficient. And the decision-makers
needed to be more proximate to the specific, you
know, literally geography of where the agricultural
policy was being enacted. So that was something that
they expected to see cited at the level of the state. And I think that we
actually need to rebuild that capacity intellectually
to just go ahead and have a conversation about, you know, when is it a function suddenly something has to
be done at a national level, you know, versus when it
should be at a state level. So as an example in the kind of all of our fights around COVID, I think one of the kind
of core issues was that we just couldn't actually
quite see those distinctions. So for instance, you know, in Germany which also has a federal system, one of the very first things that they did was actually just create
a data architecture that could be used across all of Germany. They left a lot of other
kinds of decision-making at a local level, more
autonomous, but they recognize that they all did need to
be in one conversation. And since the data is these days very important to our conversations, they needed a single sort
of data infrastructure of metadata and the like. I think that's a similar
situation and in this country now that there are many demands of policy where we actually do really
need the federal government to do the work of creating
the relevant data structure that we can all then use in different and independent
ways across the States. But that is to sort of take,
put the time in and say, well, of the functions that
we actually really need to sort of be able to
activate right now, you know, which ones are properly cited
at a whole national level, which ones are better
cited at a state level or municipal level or
tribal level or territorial or family level. So anyway, that was a very
long-winded way of saying I think that's what our
fight is actually about, more so than about shared values. So let me come, if you don't
mind, it's a long answer but if you'll bear with me I'll say something
about shared values too. Is that okay, Emily? - Absolutely. - Okay, so on the shared values front. I thought that this was
where our biggest fight was. All right, and I think many of us do, and I recently had the pleasure and privilege of co-chairing the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences report on trying to build a healthy
democracy for the 21st century. And we ran listening
sessions all over the country as a part of doing that work to understand people's frustrations with our current democracy. One of the things that
we wanted to dig into was whether or not people
could articulate a picture of shared values. We thought that this was going to be fundamentally impossible to do. As it turned out, we actually found it was very easy to get
a picture of our 85% of sort of set of vocabulary
that people do share. So people on both left and right are willing to endorse the values of both freedom and equality. People on both left and
right are willing to endorse the values of rule of law
and constitutionalism, equal opportunity, equal
protection of the law, you know, concepts of this kind. So there is actually a remarkably
sort of sturdy agreement around those terms. But there was one thing
that provoked just complete and impassable disagreement as we sought to get this
rough sketch of shared values. That was the question of how
we should name the relationship that we members of the
citizenry have with one another. So for folks on the right, the necessary word was patriotism. And that was to be a bond to
each other and to country. And for people on the left, the necessary word was solidarity. And this was unbridgeable. There was no way of getting either side to use the vocabulary of the other. And so we did take from
our work on the commission the learning that the thing
we're actually struggling with above all else is simply this question of how we should name the tie that is supposed to
bind us to one another. So it's sort of a human
relational question. That is the thing that
we are most stuck on. - What'd you find is your answer? How did you solve the
solidarity versus patriotism? - You know, we did an answer, so what we did say was that we
thought we needed a strategy to work on a rebuilding,
and then it's a mouthful a sense of mutual
commitment to one another and to our constitutional democracy. So we ended up using that bundle of words in the place of a single word and trying to sketch out some pathways, that would let us all
dig into the question of how we might rebuild that
sense of mutual commitment to one another and a shared commitment to our constitutional democracy. - This reminds me, all of this reminds me of Elinor Ostrom's work. If you're as excited
about her work as I am, but the--
- I am, I am. - Yeah, her project of identifying the ways in which human
beings we are social beings by our nature, we're drawn to live in
communities with other people. And because we aren't
autonomous individuals and in isolation, we bump into each other, we need to figure out ways to resolve what happens when we bump into each other. And this is just that very
human thing called governance. And then we have all sorts of capability to solve those problems and we tend to find ways to
solve them from the bottom up. And one of the core insights
that she has in her work is that when you're trying
to solve problems together, it's not a question of either it is a collective
decision making or not more often than not, it's far more, it's like what's the right place to locate the policy question. - Exactly.
- Is it at the national level? Say for example, with national defense. Or is it at the literally
the private individual or household level where
it's like, there are some, there's a whole universe of things where we don't want anyone
else super intending a solution on private matters and
there's a whole bunch of stuff right in the middle. And it could be at the state level, it could be at a County or
city or even a community level, but that is the first order of business where in some sense the question of what are our common commitments are, and the the nuts and bolts
of operations of governance kind of collide is where to locate the
decision making process. I'm wondering if you might
think out loud a little bit about that challenge
and how we become better at governing ourselves, just
by asking that question better. - I think you've just said it perfectly and you ask if Elinor Ostrom's work is an influence on my work. So you're quite right to
register that and pick that up. And I do think it's our
fundamental problem right now. So the way I tend to think about it is that for the challenges we have, the human challenges, human
problems that we have, for any given challenge or problem, you may want a different
configuration of relationships among public sector
mechanisms, market mechanisms and civil society mechanisms, by which I mean organizational forms higher than the level of the individual, but not commercial, basically. So public sector, civil
society and market mechanisms. And I think we have gotten into what I take to be a bad
habit in this country of thinking that like it
either all has to be marketed or all has to be public sector. Whereas actually the job is to really look problem by problem at what
the right configuration of those three categories
of mechanisms is. And then, you know, beginning
to develop some more clarity about why one chooses
one thing or the other. So again, if you go back
to the Federalist Papers, they had real crystal clarity about why they were gonna put
some things at the national or federal level and why they
were gonna put other things at the state level. And that was that kind of understanding is really atrophied for us. So at the end of the day, you know, my kind of intellectual
project at the moment is to try to bring attention back to the concept of
federalism to say to people, you know, honestly we've gotten,
I think kind of weak minded in our thinking about federalism. We have these like default
understandings of what it is but they don't actually have traction on even what the original
design of our system was for. So either vocabulary,
the Federalist Papers is a vocabulary of
harmonization of interest. The job was to harmonize
the national interest with state interest, and
you use a federal structure to try to achieve that harmonization. And so that's the kind of
concept I'm really focused on is harmonization of interest. And again, recognizing that you
need the sort of flexibility of, you know, what's the
level of jurisdiction which is appropriate to do something. And then again, how do
you combine this package of market civil society and
public sector mechanisms. - And that's a good segue to
where I would like to go next, which is your discussion
of the constitution. And one of the things I love
about your work, Danielle, is that when you tell the
history of these documents, when you tell the history
of the American founding, you do it without a sort of like, you do it without romance, right? Or kind of overly romanticizing. You know, these were real human beings. They had, you know, real
challenges and limitations of their own time and thinking and that's just part of
the next, and in part also the imperfections of politics meant that there were some compromises that were really bad compromises. They were freedom limiting compromises rather than freedom enhancing compromises. But at the same time as you're telling this unvarnished truth, you also seem to leave
space for some awesome, some level of awe appropriately understood some deep appreciation. And I think that, you know what? A piece in the Atlantic so
beautifully captures it, it's title is the "Flawed
Genius of the Constitution." And if you wouldn't mind
taking a bit of time to think that through in your description, why do you describe it
as such as flawed genius? And am I right in thinking that this balance between critical scrutiny and appreciation is a deliberate
sort of balancing act? And why is that balance? And if so, why is that balancing act an important thing to do? - Thank you, thanks a lot. Maybe let me start with
the second question first and then I'll come back
to the kind of actual argument about the constitution and why does it give me a sense of all where I see the problems and errors to be. So on the balancing act. We, I mean, it's interesting, you know, as Eric Loo often describes this country as a creedal country, yeah? So we're not, you know, all
from the same stock of people going back, you know, millennia
or something like that. We come from all over this
globe and or arrived here, or we're here, you know Lynn Long term for indigenous populations,
but nonetheless our big now collective population
has just countless sources of its demography. And we bring so much to it in terms of different
religious understandings, cultural understandings,
heritages, and the like. So what is it that brings us together? Unites us it really is
common participation in a set of political institutions that are grounded by a set of documents. And so it's those documents
that he refers to as the kind of creed that makes us a nation. And so, as a result, you know, it does mean that every resident, as well as citizen of this polity has to have a relationship of
some kind to those documents in order to make sense of where you are and what you're a part of. This has provoked I think a lot of sort of
intellectual challenges and emotional challenges for people. And for a long time, we've
been kind of, you know, fighting back and forth between
two different perspectives. There's the perspective
that says, you know, those documents at the beginning, they did entrench enslavement, they did entrench inequalities for women and they entrenched sort of a war attitude and adversarial, ultimately
genocidal war attitude towards indigenous peoples. So that's just the whole thing is rotten from there's no recuperating it it's rotten from start to finish. Then we've had this other perspective which is said, no, actually,
no these sort of statements of principles but they weren't realized in practice at the time and so what we have needed
is a kind of progressive unfolding to the completion
of the original ideals. And so then that second mode, you get an acknowledgement
of the problems, but you also get a sense
those original ideals were sort of perfectly expressed and just needed to realize
themselves over time. And just as a human being as a person I've had to wrestle, you know, between those two points of
opinion, because, you know, they come at you, I teach this materials, students will articulate
what are the other view. It's an area of just
heightened emotional intensity for so many people. And over time I've come to realize I just actually have a
very different take on it than either of those two possibilities. So it doesn't actually seem to me, I think it's wrong to think that ideas are kind of removed
from concrete realities and that, you know, on the second view, you can have these sort of perfect ideas and eventually reality
is catch up with them. I don't think that's right 'cause I do think ideas
do real work in the world. And so I do think, either
our features of the ideas at our origin that made it
possible to entrench enslavement. And those are problems
in the ideas themselves. And so for me, what the project has become has been a really sort of intensely focused philosophical analysis of the founding sets of ideas to figure out both where they went right, and where they went wrong and why they went wrong where they did. So that then in the present, we actually have the job of
not just realizing things in practice through our institutions, but of actually making
philosophical corrections so that we can then do the right things in our institutions on
really sturdy ground. And so I'll give you an
example of what I mean if you don't mind, I know
I'm going on at length. - No this is helpful. - Okay, so this comes back
to actually that final clause in the second sentence
of the declaration again, the idea that you lay the
foundational principle and then you organize
the powers of government. This distinction was really important to how a number of founders thought about the work they were doing but John Adams in particular. So John Adams already in
the 1770s was being pushed on the question of the suffrage. So he had fellow politicians
would write to him and say, I really think, you know, poor white men without property
should have the suffrage. I think, you know, free Negros
should have the suffrage or his wife was writing to him and saying, what about the ladies? You know, where do they
fit in to this picture? And his answer back in both directions depended on that distinction
between the principles and how the powers of
government are organized. So he wrote back in both cases, and these are not quotes I'm paraphrasing, but he wrote back roughly to say, look the principles pertain to everybody. What we're building is about the happiness and the rights of everybody and that should be delivered for everybody in what we're doing. But he said, as far as the powers or anything government is concerned, I'm going to defend what his vocabulary that was was the masculine
system what he said to Abigail. That and he made an explicit case, power should be in the hands
of men who own property, okay? And so the point here is, and then what Abigail said
back to that was basically, I don't think that's right. I don't think people can
hold power over others and actually, in fact realize the protection of their rights. So she was just making
that kind of basic critique that you know, absolute power corrupts. Exactly the critique they were making against the King of England, right? And she said, you know,
I think it, you know, you can try this, but you know there's been a history of
men tyrannizing over wives. And if that history repeats itself under this structure you're
designing, then you know, we women are going to
have to foment rebellion for voice and representation, okay? So she's actually making a
philosophical criticism here. The point being that if you're actually gonna
deliver on those principles where rights are for everybody, then you actually also
have to ensure that power is allocated to everybody. You can't allocate power partially and expect to realize protection
of rights for everybody. So she, I think put her finger on a philosophical
mistake that her husband and his friends were making. And so when I say we have worked to do that's we have to correct
that philosophically. We have to say that organizing
the powers of government has to be universal. You have to include everybody
in the allocation of power. That's a philosophical correction. And then once you understand that point, then that really changes how
you think about the design of our institutions. So but that was very
long-winded, but that's-- - No it's really helpful. And it does get to another critical point that I wanna make sure that
we cover in our time together. And then and it's gonna
require a step back and on my part too on vocabulary. So, and you might wanna
introduce different vocabulary. But you know, when philosophers
and political theorists talk about the founding documents
and the American founding, they describe it as part of
a broader liberal project. And by liberal they don't
mean partisan politics as in the opposite of conservative. Conservative they mean
it's the arrangements, the political legal
and social arrangements that allow for an emancipated people to not only pursue their own happiness, but also to govern together. So that's what I mean
when I use the framing of the liberal project. And so, and this goes to this sort of like it can it be an evolutionary thing, must be an evolutionary thing. I would say that clearly at the outset of the American founding, the
liberal project that it was was very much an incomplete project. Arguably, I would say that
it's still a work in progress. And so you may use a
different language than this. And if you do, please use the
language that you like to use. But it seems to me that we
are at a critical point here, because you know, both
from the left and the right we're seeing a push to kind
of junk the liberal project as I've described it. That this happens in the world where we see very illiberal
movements in the world that are worrisome to anyone
who cares about living in a pluralistic society where there's high levels of tolerance and different people can live, think and believe differently than others and we can still live productively
and peacefully together. That's what pluralism is in my mind. And that's under threat
with some of what we see in terms of the liberalism
out there in the world. But even in the scholarly
traditions, we're seeing critiques of the liberal project, both
from the left and the right. And citizens and students are
listening to in on this both. The illiberalism we see in the world and the critiques of
liberalism within the academy and where are you in,
in thinking this through and would you want to call people back? It sounds to me like your
focus on the importance of the founding documents
just as a starting place is a callback too that broader
grander liberal tradition. And how would you make the
case for the liberal project to those who would say, we're
beyond that we can junk that. - So, yes, I mean, I am
absolutely a defender of liberal project and
actually have a book coming out I think in the fall sometime called "Democracy in time of Coronavirus" which does make an effort to make the case and make the case in terms
of rights protection. So I tend to gloss the word liberal is sort of rights protective, but it is also a part
of an emancipated people doing the work of self-governance, free and equal citizens
self-governing together. And so I make the case
in a number of ways. I do focus on the case for
human wellbeing in empowerment. I take empowerment to be
fundamental to human wellbeing and I take empowerment to
require both space for autonomy in one's private life, but
also a positive participation in co-creation of the constraints that through our laws
and political choices do set parameters for
that private autonomy. So, you know, we need both
what I call private autonomy and public autonomy in order
to truly have empowerment. And I think that's just
fundamental to human wellbeing. So I try to make a kinda case from this sort of intrinsic value of it. I also try to bring people
into experiences of empowerment so that they can just
directly feel (laughs) the human good, that
comes from empowerment. And then I think this, then
there's this next piece which is the harder piece. And I would be very
curious about your take too on the other side. On the left I think some of the problems or sort of reasons people don't
see the value in liberalism is actually because in the liberal project we have allowed
understanding of governance, understanding of some of the things that we were just talking
about with sort of federalism and the kind of decision-making
that needs to be made. We've allowed that to atrophy. And so people will try to
operate the institutions of our constitutional democracy and if it fails, that
it's not fit for purpose. And that then is rat is kind of indictment of liberal project itself rather than as a
recognition that, you know, we've lost the owner's manual. We don't really know how
to do this thing anymore. So that, you know, I could say more about sort of diagnosis on the left, but I actually think
that that's core to it. I think I struggle more in all honesty to understand the sources of
illiberalism on the right. And, you know, for me, as
I try to look at the right I see a kind of kaleidoscope of things and that I can't kind of resolve into a single coherent picture. My guess is there's probably
not a single coherent picture at the moment, but I'd
be very curious to know what your sense is of the
sort of rise of illiberalism on the right. - Yes, I mean, it's when I see and hear leaders around the world
advocating like, you know, in Hungary, Viktor Orban, you
know, saying that explicitly what he's advocating is
an illiberal democracy. Well, that should give us all pause. - Not eviction in terms, yeah. - And that should give us pause that it's but it's also useful in at
least peering in to his thinking about the idea that he would know better. He and his administration
would know better than private citizens or local communities to, you know, superintend
his end over there. So that's an important piece. I think the other thing
is that it does for us is it helps us to unpack that
language of liberal democracy. You've also described it as
constitutional democracy. Then sometimes we think about
democracy as being one thing and we know what that
is, but that modifier whether it's liberal democracy or constrained constitutional democracy, those two things are separable, but the fact that we lean on that phrase, liberal democracy or
constitutional democracy in the United States has meaning. And I completely understand
why we default to a shorthand to talk about democracy. But democracy that is unconstrained
I think is potentially it is very dangerous, right? If we lay open to a population that says, well if they voted to bridge
the rights of minorities, that would be incredibly
troublesome, right? So why is it not just democracy, we want to have constrained democracy or constitutional democracy
or liberal democracy which in my mind, all
means the same thing. So perhaps perhaps it is about
trying to understand better what we mean by democracy. - Yeah, so I would go a
little further than that even in the sense that. So for me, I think it's a mistake when people collapse democracy into the idea of authoritarianism. I do not take authoritarianism
to be democracy. I take democracy to be
empowerment of the people where the people means the whole. That means by definition,
democracy is an entity that combines mechanisms
that both do respect majority votes, where those
are the appropriate tools but also have minority protecting
mechanisms and the like, and you have a kind of
this is the constraint and the constitutional part you have a complicated
balance of mechanisms. The purpose of which is to
empower the whole people and to keep each of them free
from domination by the others. And I take that to be democracy. And so, you know, I don't
accept the definitions of democracy that sort of
allied the concept of democracy and the concept of a majority vote. But I do agree with you, I
think that is a common way in which people understand
the concept of democracy. In that regard, the kind of
definition that I just offered is really very similar to Ronald
Watkins definition as well. And so I would sort of
refer people back to that. In his approach as a way
of understanding that. Again, you know, universal empowerment where you're also keeping
everybody free from domination by one another is about
a cluster of mechanisms working together to balance
power within a population, basically. - So just one more question from me and then we'll turn toward
our audience Q and A. But your work, the book that you published about your cousin Michael called "Cuz" and it's such a compelling
and heartfelt statement about a phenomenon
around mass incarceration and how it is crippling
communities across our country. And my question then goes back
to these founding documents. Is the solution to really
pressing challenges like mass incarceration, concerns about policing and over-policing and communities of color,
concerns about the impact, the disproportionate
impact of the drug war on communities of color and
other social justice concerns. Is liberalism in the manner in the spirit in which we've been describing it here? Is the liberal project up to the task of addressing social
justice concerns like these? - I think as an analytical
matter, the answer is yes, but I think there's a different question with regards to the practical
matter of presence, you know, and sort of how our
institutions are functioning and the like. So basically I think, you know, sort of what the liberal project requires is a real assessment of
where laws are supporting safety and wellbeing and where
they're undermining them. We tend to neglect that
second kind of analysis. You know, our policy-making
landscape is sort of tends to be more focused
on producing evermore laws to deliver safety and happiness where as opposed to like
figuring out the laws are actually undermining safety, happiness and like getting rid of them,
taking some of them away. So I do think we have to
make space intellectually for that second project and
our policymaking landscape and in a related fashion,
I think that, you know, this comes back to the sort
of Elinor Ostrom material that we were talking about. We really need more clarity
about the kinds of work that need to be done at
the level of the community, at the level of the state, sort of the level the federal government in to support the development of health and wellbeing for communities
to sort of reduce the need for penal systems, sanctioning
systems and the like. But I think actually
succeeding on that front requires projects of self-governance
about all those levels and I think that is a
place where we also need considerable rebuilding. And this is not sort of a point about whether people are
or are not, you know, equipped to do self-governance. I think actually by and
large people are equipped to do self-governance. I think we have removed opportunities for people to govern and
participate in self-governance and I think we have to
rebuild those opportunities. - That's really helpful. And what a great note to
turn toward our audience. So I'm gonna invite Brad Jackson back who is going to moderate the Q and A and help us with the
remainder of our conversation. - Thank you very much and thank
you both for that wonderful and very interesting conversation. We have a number of
questions in the queue, but if folks have questions,
I definitely encourage you to add them to the queue as we
can still be looking at those during this time. We'll start with a question that has to do with some kind of recent events and how to place those events within the context of American history and some of our thoughts
about liberalism broadly. So the questioner in particular was asking about what Tocqueville might
say about the connection between the post civil war era and the post January 6th era. We're kind of drawing a
connection between those events. And I would add beyond, like, what Mike Tocqueville say about it what would you say about it? How might it-- - I'll just answer for Tocqueville
that'd be so much easier. (Danielle laughs) Oh, goodness. So it's a great question. Let me just, I mean the question,
sentence the question is are we in another era of reconstruction and if so, what does that require of us? And can we do better than last time round? I think that we're not
actually quite yet to the point of being in the era of reconstruction, because I think the
fight is still underway to tell you the truth. And so I think we're all
struggling to understand exactly what the nature of the fight is. That's underway in our country right now. I think we don't actually have
clarity yet about precisely what's going on for us as a society. So I think if the question is less is the era of reconstruction here and what we do and more a question of, okay we can see the degree of conflict. How do we respond to that? Then I do think Tocqueville
does have useful answers. I do think that a lot of the work has to be about rebuilding
at a very, very local level with the people in communities who have the greatest
capacity for bridge building, stepping up and taking leadership roles, finding ways in the context of literally municipal
government and local activities to bring people up together
across lines of division for some project of common action and to take the opportunities of such work to do intentional work
on relationship building seeking mutual understanding of the like. So I don't think that there's
a kind of top down solution. I do think it is about
rebuilding trustworthiness at a very, very local level. - And Brad, can I jump in on and ask another question
that's related to that. What does the average citizen do? What kind of thing when we're
talking about leadership, local leadership. People have different
understandings of what that means. You know, they assume if
they haven't been elected to some office that that's not them, but I hear something different I hear you calling upon
citizens for something from them as well, that the
demands of governing together means that we've got to govern together. And that we have to do that in the context of our ordinary lives. Or do you have an example of the kind of thing that we
can do as ordinary citizens that makes a difference, it doesn't require sort of elected office? - Well, I'm sure you've
heard of an organization called Braver Angels which has been building
out around the country and working in a kind of
way, such as I described, where in communities
that are riven by strife, they find leaders on opposite sides of those lines of division and put them through a pretty
kind of long-term process of getting to know each other, trying to start to redefine
what the issues are that are the sources of strife. And then moving forward to act. I first encountered them when they were doing work in Minneapolis. This was, you know before,
well before the Floyd events. Trying to bring together police and the black community in Minneapolis. And so the point is not
that it always has to be specifically that you're
trying to build a context where people are taking
on the intentional work of building bridges, it can also be just that there
is work that has to be done in a community. And for example, you
know, making a decision about whether or not
to build a new library. This is an example coming out of some things I've encountered
in Massachusetts recently. And, you know, then the
work on that project starts to devolve into a very
local misinformation campaign or disinformation campaign and get sucked into the same
kind of polarized divisions that we see for federal policy politics. You wouldn't think, you know, building a library would
trigger that sort of thing. So then the question is
like in moments like that who can within the communities
sort of step forward and start building the kind
of networks of connection that can start to bring
people back together and, you know, put whatever
the burning issue is off to the side for a moment
while some work is done to try to achieve enough
mutual understanding to move forward again. So that's very, very granular but I do actually think that's sort of where we see conflicts emerging
in our local communities. Those are opportunities for leadership. And the question is, you know, who are the bridge builders, you know, on either side of a conflict
who are willing to say what sort of stake in the
ground and say like, you know, like community is actually more important and we're just gonna
have to like do the work of trying to figure out
how to build a context for talking again. May be that's completely pie in the sky. - The next question I had a
couple of questions about this has to do with how we
think about the people within the context of a democracy. And I'm gonna phrase this question in kind of a Russo in terms where it seems like you're distinguishing between the will of all on the one hand and the general will on the other hand where ultimately
democracy should be aiming not just at the majoritarian opinion but rather at some kind
of thickly or less stick they constitute a notion
of some kind of common good of the people or maybe that's
not quite right way to put it, but in any sense something that's distinct from merely the majority will. So I'm wondering if you
could talk a little bit about how we constitute
that notion of the people and how it is that we
go about distinguishing between majority opinion and
something like the common good or whatever phrase you
might stick into that place. - Right, so I'm willing
to accept the public good. I'm just not willing to describe that as Russo in general will, okay? (Danielle laughs) So let me try to answer that,
thanks, it's a good question. So basically, as I see it,
I mean, this is the work of democratic process and
democratic institutions. And what democratic processes
institutions should deliver is solutions that actually
ultimately align perfectly with nobody's point of view, okay? Precisely because what the process and institutions are doing is
discovering solution pathways that were not visible from
the specific perspective of any given individual. And the point is that
those solution pathways should deliver something that
secures the sort of broad collective happiness and safety in the language of the
declaration of independence which can be broadly
endorsed as doing that. Never would any decision
be endorsed by everybody. So, hence it's not through. So in general will, you're
never going to get unanimity but what you do want to be
getting is very, you know, as often as possible decisions that really do win super majority support from the general public. And we actually can do this. And we know we can, because if you analyze who we are as a people, not by looking at our
federal electoral results, but by looking at the
results ballot propositions, ballot measures, we very often
have super majority votes on ballot measures, okay? So we are actually capable. And so examples would be
so of drug legalization, 15 States by now have legalized marijuana, a number of those votes if
the super majority votes, the felony and franchisement
vote in Florida was a super majority vote, Massachusetts campaign finance about proposition as
a super majority vote. You can go sort of through
the mix the flag in Missouri, I think it was this past
go round or Mississippi, can't remember. Getting rid of the Confederate emblems, replacing them with newest,
super majority vote, right? So we're actually capable
of using our processes in institutions to find solution pathways that can secure a super majority support. That for me is gonna captures
what the goal is here is kind of conversion of a problem that's recognizes a problem
into a solution pathway that does deliver a collective kind of conception of the good that wins legitimacy
a supermajority level. Now you're not gonna have every decision winning super majority support. Sometimes you do just need, you know, that 50 plus one decision 'cause you gotta like
break through an impasse. You got to make a decision. But we also have to
recognize that those moments aren't stable and the whole thing's just gonna kinda keep,
you know, equilibrating and vacillating until you hit the solution that actually does secure super
majority support over time. So that is it's a dynamic system. That's the sort of important
thing to recognize. - We've also had a question
about the relative balance between States, local and federal power. And the question is wondering whether there is any opportunity in our current politics
to do a rebalancing toward the States as
laboratories of democracy or is it the case in your view that the federal government
simply must do so much that such a rebalancing
would be impossible. And the questioner in
particular is interested in the relative tax rates
pointing out that we pay a greater proportion of
our income and federal rather than state taxes, and wonders if we flip that balance and gave the States more
resources to work with, would we be on our way to having
a better sense of community within the local levels
that we're living within? So could you say a few words
about those three questions? - That's a great question. That's a great, great question. So I don't think that we need to think that the current balance and structure are the end of the road in
terms of what's possible. I do think that this
is a moment that calls for creativity in this regard. And I do think that I'm seeing
more of what States can do and rethinking how the federal
government supports States in hitting standards that
meet the equal protection of the laws requirement. I think there's a pathway there. And I think that is something
that we should be working on. The question about taxes
is super interesting. I haven't thought about it
precisely that way before, but I do think there's a
conversation to be had there. So thank you for putting
that question on the table. - If I could jump in too, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the conservative critique
of the administrative state in this regard, because
it seems to me like this could be a common
ground kind of conversation if we framed it the right way. So, you know, in the brief
version of it is that unelected on, you know, potentially unaccountable
sort of faceless agencies at the federal level have replaced or have stepped in to solve problems that in a prior era might have been solved at a much more local level,
still perhaps collectively but at a much more local level. And that it is left people
feeling disempowered. And it's one of the things that struck me when I was reading through
the common purpose work is that it seems like there's,
your work is pointing to a real hunger for re-engagement at the local level, a
disengagement at the federal level. And perhaps there's something to that, that perhaps there's a thread here with the conservative case
against the administrative state that are problem-solving entities. It becomes so big and removed from us that it's taken out the
relational component. And so, and I could imagine
us getting into the room left the center liberals
and and conservatives. And if we started out, is
the state too big, you know, we'd get a clash, right out of the gate. But if we ask the question how
can we re spark and reignite an engagement, civic
engagement and start there that with a common problem. And some people would be entering the room with the critique of the
administrative state in their head and others would be saying,
no, we want to activate the citizenship in a
sense of solidarity more. So they would be coming at the problem from different perspectives. But perhaps if we framed
it as a common ground challenge that there'd
be some fruit there? - So I think there is
a common ground space. I would actually probably
suggest a different way of getting people to the table. And I don't know if this way would work for folks on the conservative side, but I think there's a question about how can we achieve effective governance that would bring people
from the left of center side to the table, where the
question of effective governance for me the answer to
that question is through what I call harmonized federalism, which is what I was
trying to describe before where you do the work of figuring out the jurisdictional level at
which different functions should carried out and then
work to sort of harmonize relationship to those things
that in that kind of picture of the federal government is
often in a supportive roles supportive of the work that
States and municipals are doing as opposed to in a mandating role. So as a sort of like flip
a switch in that regard. So the difference, so the
important thing, I guess I mean sort of, you know, so yes, I do think I as just speaking for myself, I do share a critique of
the administrative state. And I think that you will find, you know, some chunk of left of center
folks where that's true, not everybody by any
stretch of the imagination, but some chunk. But then on the other side,
I think there's the problem of a sort of starting point where there's sort of like presumed that the best answer to
the question about the role for the federal government
should be, is no role, okay? And that's a sort of non-starter. On the other side for, I
think very good reasons. I think it's yet to miss exactly
the same point I was making in the Federalist Papers before about they ask the questions like, well what are the functions
that should be carried out at a national level? There are some functions that should be carried out at that level. And so I do think, you
know, if we can get folks from the right of the center to the table and there's openness of the question, okay, well let's acknowledge
that there is a role for the federal government
and let's figure out what the right version of that is. And then that's where I
would get to the sort of flipping the switch
from the mandate picture of the federal government
to the supportive of the functionality of the
other jurisdictional levels picture for the federal government. - The next question that
I would like us to turn to is a question regarding
the role of the Academy and specifically of academics in pursuing a better form of liberalism or pursuing sort of social change that we've been talking about today. What role do you think
that faculty members who make up the majority
of I.H.S as an audience, what role would a faculty members play in your point of view? - That's a super interesting question. Well, you know, what's the professor it feels like a very, very big question. I mean, I think there are lots
of elements that are needed. I do think that we need to rebuild the parts of our education
for undergraduates that are about understanding
constitutionalism, understanding governance,
understanding the relationship between civic engagement,
citizen engagement and effective governance, all these themes that
we've been talking about they have less space in the curriculum but they should have. So in other words if you take
the conversation we've had over this hour as, you know, marking out the terrain of curriculum, there should be more room
for this kind of conversation in curricula, in higher ed than there is. That would be point one. Point two would be another thing that you're doing with this program, which is that you are seeking people from different parts of
the ideological spectrum and bringing them in or
bringing us into conversation with one another. We need more of that and
intentionality around doing that. My center runs something called the Intercollegiate Civil
Disagreement Project, which is multiple campuses
around the country where students are working together to learn actually skills of
mediation and negotiation. And then they pick hot button
topics to invite speakers who are different sides of the balance on. And then in addition to that
event which we try to structure to make productive. We also have smaller group
discussions afterwards where we're trying to
bring together students whose starting points and perspectives are on different ends of the spectrum. So I think that we just generally all need more work of that kind. So I guess I would focus on
those two things for starters. - So the next question is my own, and this comes out of the fact that I'm also a political theorist and so I simply can't resist asking. Could you comment a bit on some of the other 20th century thinkers who have worked on the
declaration of independence and your relationship
to their points of view and folks I have in mind in
particular would be Carl Becker, Harry Jaffa, Pauline Mayer, right? So there've been a lot of different ways of looking at this
documents and what it means. And I think that many
of these points of view have good points and bad
points within themselves. I just wonder if you could comment on some of the previous
work that's been done and how you look at it. - Right, okay. Well, let me go backwards in time. So let me start with Pauline. And so Pauline of course
wrote a beautiful book about the many other kinds of declarations that were written before this declaration and the structure of the
argument is basically that as you know, Jefferson
himself said, yeah, I just was recording this
the spirit of the times I wasn't really innovating
or doing anything new. And I mean, I think she's
right to have sketched out a whole world of conversation. People were thinking
about the same problems. They were really chewing on
them, wrestling with them. But at the same time, I do
think it's also the case that the declaration
of independence itself achieved some conceptual
breakthroughs as I described. So it's not just a record
of the spirit of the times. Then don't credit Jefferson
with the breakthroughs. I think that it was John Adams who achieved those breakthroughs. And I could go through
how I've documented that but that's another
conversation for another day. But so that would be a
difference from Pauline. And then to Harry Jaffa. So obviously, you know,
he made a powerful case for the way in which Lincoln recognized the content of the declaration and kind of re grounded
formally the country's sort of on its basis. And I think that's, you know,
I largely agree with that. In fact, the place where
I probably part ways some with Harry Jaffa will
be the points I was making about philosophical
errors in the founding. So I do think that, you
know, professor Jaffa he was more sort of an add
a picture of the answers were all there in the beginning and we just needed to
let the answers unfold. I think some of the answers
were there in the beginning but I think there were also
mistakes in the beginning and we have to correct the mistakes in order actually to achieve the unfolding of the answers. And then Carl Becker. Honestly, I've always, I've turned to him just as a kind of useful resource 'cause he does such an
amazing job of assembling, you know, sort of basic
facts and sort of picture of the period and have
not given as much thought to some of the substance of his arguments. I'm afraid I'm gonna
have to let that one go. I apologize, Brad. - Thank you very much, I appreciate that. The next question that we have, which I think is a very interesting one, it points us back to this distinction that you were making earlier between patriotism and solidarity and asks if you would just
dive a little bit more deeply into that and talk about
ways in which you think that we can bridge that divide. You had your kind of phrase
that you had used earlier that kind of replaces it or
tries to bring it together. And I wonder if you could
kind of break that phrase down a little bit and just talk about the
work you think it's doing. - Sure I can offer one piece of good news which is that the one
phrase that did seem viable on both sides was love of country. So that was something so that's something to sort of start working with. And so I have sort of begun
a bit of an experiment of asking people from a variety
of different backgrounds and contexts to just tell me their story of their love of country, because actually as best as I can tell just huge numbers of
people have such a story. The stories are very different
and it is entirely possible for people to have
stories of love of country that are also compatible
with stories of real anger at country or criticism of country. These things can live together just as they do in our families. You know, we kind of love family members that we are just desperately
angry at us at the same time. So that's a piece of it. And I think actually just
asking people to articulate, you know, what it is they do love about the place that they call home at the same time that we're
also articulating our criticisms and our challenges to our
country is a valuable exercise. In terms of unpacking that
mouthful phrase, you know, sort of share a mutual, restoring a sense of mutual
commitment to one another and shared commitment to our
constitutional democracy. There's a way in which that goes back to the declaration, right? That is that emancipation
is actually not a project you can do in a solitary fashion. It is probably about private autonomy but it is also about public autonomy, about making some decisions together and recognizing that there are some things that are public goods and some things that we
can only do together, and to build and sustain the capacity to do that work together we do need a sense of mutual
commitment to one another that we're in something
together we have a shared fate. And so then the question is, okay, how do you connect that
individual emancipation to the stuff that we do need to share? Well, that is through that
constitutional democracy. So that's why we need a shared commitment to constitutional democracy. 'Cause it's the thing
that makes it possible for us to have like a tolerable a mutual commitment to one another. Where having that commitment
to each other is not in itself, you know, oppressive basically. So, you know, you got to have that constitutional boxy piece in there in order to make realizable, you know, a kind of mutual commitment to one another in all of our diversity and heterogeneity. - Thank you. I think this will probably
be our last question and it has to do with
the way in which today on the left and the
right, it seems as though we have a lot of trouble talking across ideological barriers. And the questioner compares these to almost Kuhnian paradigms where it's as though like
someone who, you know, believes strictly a Newtonian physics just can't have a
conversation with someone who's doing quantum physics that in some way, but the
terms are completely different. The kind of vision of
reality is different. So the questioner wonders one
whether that's an accurate way to think about the way in
which these ideological bubbles are sort of forming misinformation,
bubbles on either side we might say. And how we can start to break some of that those barriers down. I know you mentioned
Braver Angels earlier, but are there other conversational tactics that folks can maybe
use in their own lives or that perhaps think academics can use and analyzing the world to help break down some of these ideological
barriers that have been raised? - So this is a question I'm
really stuck on actually and it's a question
that's more about politics and about ideas. So our politics operates in
such a way that people benefit from throwing caricatures at one another. And that's what we're trapped in, right? So right now lots of
people hate the caricature white supremacy, okay? Totally get that. On the other side, lots of people hate the
caricature socialist. (Danielle laughs) Hey, just as much, right? So, you know, the label
socialist is thrown around where it does not apply. Now some people have embraced the label. So that's an interesting
change in the dynamic. But you know, it was thrown
around lots in politics and places that it did not apply. The label white supremacy is
thrown around lots in politics in places where it does not apply. And so then somehow like real conversation ceases to be possible. That's the thing I'm stuck on. And I know that, you
know, well-meaning people are really easily able to sit down and like talk through those
labels and get to a place where they can actually have
productive conversations. But there are others
in our political world who actually just don't really care. I don't think about actually having well-meaning good faith conversations. And for them, the characters
are very powerful and useful. And I can't really honestly figure out how to turn off the
value of those characters to those folks who are interested in instrumental political power. And I think unless we can figure that out, we're kind of stuck. - Can I jump on that thread, Brad, that and this is in the spirit of a yes and kind of, yes the
destructive power of characters is something we need to overcome. I heard the question a little differently which is you've got
these two different ways of seeing the world. They look at the same evidence and they draw very, very
different conclusions. And I think I'm thinking in particular in the scholarly discourse
around some of these topics that we've been discussing
where that applies. And to me, this also
goes to the point about why intellectual
diversity is so important. So much of the conversation
around campus speech and diversity of thought on campus has I think inappropriately been couched as a kind of equal time
kind of argument, you know, equal time for the
conservatives kind of thing. I think that totally
misses the point, right? We need intellectual diversity
because it challenges us to step outside of our
own framework of thought so that we interrogate why we have, we are capable of interrogating why we have the assumptions that we have. How is it that I know
the stuff that I know and I don't know the
stuff that I don't know, how is that or what's
my framework of thought? What might require another
framework of thought for me to kind of dwell in for
awhile to really challenge, to really just see it. I used to teach comparative
economic systems and though I'm very much a free
market kind of girl, right? I would teach Marxism
as if I were a Marxist because it was so powerful in helping people to unmoor
from their presumptions and their assumptions
that were uninterrogated. And so it was a very
powerful teaching tool for me to dwell in the world of Marxism as if I really, really believed it because I think even those
who walked away feeling sure that market society
was the right way to go now understood why Marx was so influential across the 20th century, right? It really shaped the 20th century. And you didn't see that unless you were exposed in a
very deep and thoughtful way to that other point of view. So perhaps comment on
that and close us out. - Sure, you know, I
mean, I agree with you. I mean, I think that intellectual
excellence, you know, requires freedom of expression. These things are mutually reinforcing and we definitely need, you know, exposure to viewpoints
very different from our own to test our own to understand
where they come from to also understand why other people ultimately judge differently
about what the right answer is. I think what I was maybe
responding to the question is in my own life experience, maybe this is it's obviously
limited, but it's impartial. I do get the chance to
sit down with people from different ideological points of view and wrestle with evidence. And I don't really have the experience of looking at the same facts and coming to completely
different conclusions. I have experienced instead
of looking at the same facts and then clarifying, what
are the choice points where I'm choosing this principal, you're choosing that principle or I'm choosing this prioritization you're choosing that prioritization. And those are places where we
have to make judgment calls. And so then you can even
bring those judgment calls to the surface, explain why you're making
your judgment call. And yes, you've come
out to a different place but not because you've
seen a different thing but because you've made
a different judgment and you can explain those
different judgements to one another. And that I don't have any problem doing. It's a kinda common experience in my life. And so that's what I was
sort of making the point about the kind of
caricature labels is that I think that's totally within our capacity to have conversations of that kind, but we don't have space for it at all because we have this shadow boxing with caricatures that has become our norm. - And I love that and
it's a great way for us to end the conversation because
it goes full circle back to the importance of human agency that not only do we have the raw material to set our course for the future, but also we can take
responsibility for what we know and what we assume and the
conclusions that we draw and that's an essential and important part of being a citizen with
agency and efficacy. So thank you for closing
us out on this point. Thank you, Danielle, for
being with us this afternoon and thank you for all the
great work that you're doing and all the great teaching
that you continue to do. - My pleasure, thank you
for a great conversation. I truly enjoyed it. So thanks for making the space for it.
