Citizenship in Times of Crisis: A Comment on Danielle Allen’s Democratic Theory

Danielle Allen is one of our most profound and inspiring democratic theorists. Although difficult to place in any one tradition of democratic thought or tie to a model of democracy, the centerpiece of her work has always been the citizen. The challenges and responsibilities of democratic citizenship furnish the lens through which she has written about democracy—from how to repair racial divides to build an effective pandemic response—as well as how she has organized for democracy, and finally run for office in a democracy. Institutions, elites, classes, social movements, experts, and policy play a role in her work on democracy. But she always comes back to the fundamental need for citizens to embrace and ethically commit to constitutional democracy and a shared public good. For Allen, no race of devils (to invoke Kant’s famous dictum) can sustain the solidarity and common purpose needed to keep democracy afloat. In times of crisis, we need to redouble our efforts to repair a collective sense that we are all in this thing together. Allen has an uplifting and positive view of citizen potential, but it is not utopian. She does not expect ordinary citizens to reach extraordinary levels of civic virtue and knowledge. But she does think—and I follow her here—that ordinary citizens (mostly) can move beyond toxic factionalism and senseless and destructive policy preferences. In this she pushes back against what I see as a growing and alarming trend in democratic studies—particularly the empirical study of American politics. This trend is spearheaded by what I call the new Schumpeterians who are doubling down on the old citizen competency trope in an age of digital misinformation and hyper polarization. Questioning whether citizens are epistemically and ethically up to the job of governing themselves is as old as democracy itself. But modern science, especially experimental neuro, social, and political psychology,