Why Coronavirus Is an ‘Existential Crisis’ for American Democracy

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Fascinating analysis on how we got to where we are as a democracy and how this pandemic might affect our future.

 

Excerpt:

If you think the coronavirus pandemic is simply a health crisis, or a crisis of leadership in Washington, it’s time to wake up.

This moment is nothing less than an “existential crisis” that will reshape American society, says Danielle Allen, head of Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics and co-author of the university’s “Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience.” “It is a moment where societies are forced to answer the question of who they are. And I think [the U.S.] didn’t answer that question terribly well.”

The reasons why are plentiful. Yes, Trump plays a role in this—in Allen’s estimation, “he cares about politics and he cares about his own popularity, but he doesn’t care about governance”—but the problem is much deeper, a window into the shortcomings of the kind of democracy America has turned into.

“The democracies led by populists—the U.S., the United Kingdom, Brazil—have done poorly, and the democracies led by institutionalists have done well—[German Chancellor Angela] Merkel being a prime example of an institutionalist,” Allen said.

“Then there’s a separate cut, which is ‘old democracy’ vs. ‘young democracy,’” she continued. “Basically, if you look at Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan — those are all young democracies. Whereas the U.K., the U.S., France, those are older democracies.” The older ones have more “bureaucratic buildup” and have trouble responding in an agile way, she says—and are also less in agreement on social rights, and more built around 18th-century ideas about political and civil rights. In a crisis, they struggle to rally around the public welfare without getting in fights about it.

It might seem like a stretch to invoke 18th-century political principles to discuss a 21st-century pandemic, but Allen’s work goes even deeper than that; she’s a scholar of democratic ideas reaching back to Athenian times, whose modern interests include not just the pandemic response but strengthening participatory democracy. And in a moment this unique and historic, the long view is precisely what can help.

So what does the pandemic tell us about what a revitalized American democracy might look like? What specific reforms are needed? In addition to her coronavirus reports for Harvard, Allen recently co-authored a major report for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on exactly what needs to happen for America’s civic life to be reborn. On Wednesday morning, she spoke to POLITICO about all of this. A transcript of the conversation is below, edited for length and clarity..........

 

...................Allen: Well, for me, the silver lining is that the absence of a national response has required us all to think through, in really detailed ways, how we can make the federal structure achieve what we need. I’ve always been a supporter of the value of federalism and its flexibility. But I do now see our capacity as a federal structure in a way I couldn’t previously, and I have 100 percent conviction in our collective ability to activate our federal infrastructure—all its layers—to achieve what we need. That will be a positive benefit that comes out of this. There will be other problems that require real clarity about how the federal layers should interact with each other that will benefit from the learning we're now acquiring.

As a concrete example, New Orleans is one of the places in the country that’s done better than others. They managed to suppress the coronavirus really fast in April when they first got hit by it. And one of the reasons, actually, is because Hurricane Katrina forced their different administrative jurisdictional levels to collaborate. So they had a kind of built-in structure for harmonizing responses. The rest of the country hasn’t had that, but we will by the end of this.......

 

.........Stanton: You mentioned federalism. One of the curious things about this moment is seeing how the characteristics of American democracy and politics collide with the realities of a crisis. Do you see this as a moment when we see federalism’s strength, as states take different approaches, or as a time to question whether federalism works?

Allen: Often, when people invoke the concept of federalism, they immediately think it means leaving the states to do their own things. That’s not actually what federalism means. If you go back to The Federalist Papers, the vocabulary they use is about the importance of harmonizing the interests of the states. Successful federalism has a role for every layer. There’s no such thing as successful federalism without the appropriate activation of the national layer in harmonizing the interests of the states. I definitely feel that I’ve seen the power of federalism and its potential. I don’t think that we are fulfilling its potential in the current moment, but this experience has given me a new window into just how powerful and robust our architecture is—if we know how to use it. And that’s where the problem comes in: We don’t know how to use it. It’s like sitting in your uncle’s Ferrari, and you don’t know how to drive it.............

 

Read the complete piece at: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/01/coronavirus-pandemic-democracy-america-expert-347431