THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 37
“One lesson we take from that period
is that ideas matter—words matter,” Put-
nam told me. “All the stuff that Trump
was spewing was pushing in exactly the
opposite direction.” But Putnam and
Garrett also highlighted the importance
of a “moral awakening,” which encour-
aged those in office to reverse a trend
toward “widespread selfishness.” In one
encounter after another, inescapable re-
alities had forced influential Americans
to acknowledge the need for change.
Frances Perkins, an architect of the New
Deal, was a New York socialite and a
local activist until 1911, when she wit-
nessed the horror of the fire at the Tri-
angle Shirtwaist Factory, in which scores
of women and girls jumped to their
deaths. Others were shaken by the re-
porting of Ida B. Wells on Jim Crow, or
of Upton Sinclair on meatpacking. Paul
Harris, the president of the Rotary Club,
was nudging businessmen to build pub-
lic toilets and embrace “Service Above
Self.” Garrett told me, “It was becoming
unacceptable to continue in that mode
of social Darwinism. It was a moral and
cultural shift. And we think that’s be-
coming true today.”
Putnam said, “We don’t like the met-
aphor of a pendulum, because it swings
back and forth by itself. In every case,
people had to do it.” He went on, “After
this election, fighting will break out
within the Democratic Party, and I
think it should, because that will reflect
that broad coalition starting to push
the envelope.”
In that spirit, another set of propos-
als emphasizes changes to laws and in-
stitutions. Commissions, as a rule, are
not known for dispensing vital reading.
But, in June, the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences published the civic
equivalent of the 9/11 Commission Re-
port: a blueprint for avoiding another
political catastrophe. The project began
in 2018, with a bipartisan search for ways
to revitalize modern democracy. The
academy convened listening sessions
across the country, and gathered a moun-
tain of technical advice on ways to “birth
for ourselves a sense of shared fate.” The
result was “Our Common Purpose,” a
set of thirty-one proposals, chosen with
an eye for what could be plausibly
achieved by 2026. Many of them sounded
radical a few years ago but are increas-
ingly mainstream, including a federal
law to expand the House of Represen-
tatives (and, thus, the Electoral College)
by at least fifty members; ranked-choice
voting (which has been shown to re-
duce polarization) and multi-member
districts; a term limit of eighteen years
for Supreme Court Justices; and a uni-
versal mandate for voting, as exists in
Australia and Belgium.
Some of the proposals would require
moves by Congress or state legislatures,
but others can be achieved
with no legal changes. Re-
markably, only one pro-
posal—undoing parts of
the Supreme Court’s Cit-
izens United decision—
would require a constitu-
tional amendment, and even
that is not as radical as it
might sound. Historically,
Americans maintained the
agility of democracy by
amending the Constitution, on aver-
age, at least once a decade, until the
pace stalled, half a century ago. Other
than a minor amendment in 1992, to
adjust congressional salaries, the last
major change to the Constitution was
in 1971, when the voting age was low-
ered to eighteen. Danielle Allen, a Har-
vard political theorist who helped lead
the project, told me, “The conversation
about the health of our political insti-
tutions and political culture is really
just beginning.”
Allen and her colleagues also iden-
tified techniques of reviving the habits
of citizenship. To break down social seg-
regation, they call for expanding Ameri-
Corps and similar programs, to foster
“an expectation of national service,” and
establishing a National Trust for Civic
Infrastructure, seeded by private and phil-
anthropic money, which could expand
the occasions “where Americans can en-
counter people different from them-
selves.” The United States already has
more public libraries than Starbucks lo-
cations, but many of them need a burst
of new resources, as do parks, museums,
and performance spaces.
It would be hard to look at the 2020
election and not question the real-world
effect of earnest studies of political cul-
ture. But Allen was hardly disappointed.
On the morning after the election, she
said, “There is a part of me that just feels
quite exuberant about the election re-sults, because of the level of turnout”—
the highest in a hundred and twenty
years. “People without college degrees
increased their turnout. Young people
increased their turnout. Communities of
color were actively engaged.”
Reviving democracy, Allen said, hardly
guarantees a simple notion of unity.
Rather, it provides a legitimate forum
for the harsh clashes that may be neces-
sary for progress—what Frederick Doug-
lass called the “awful roar.”
The goal of American pol-
itics should not be “a world
where everybody agrees
with you,” Allen said. “That
will never be the reward of
life in a constitutional de-
mocracy. The reward is the
chance to participate in free
self-government. If you love
that, then you can tolerate
the hard work of ongoing,
routine contestation with people who
disagree with you.”
For four years, Trump has worked to
equate disagreement with treason. He
has banished loyal opposition and called
for the criminal investigation of ordinary
opponents. In “Audience of One,” the
Times television critic James Poniewozik
described Trump as the ultimate expres-
sion of “the cultural anger machine,” an
endless source of violent imagery that
combined the spirit of “Breaking Bad”
and “The Sopranos” with the dopa-
mine-delivery system of hurricane cov-
erage. For decades, Poniewozik wrote,
Trump had essentially been a cable-news
channel in human form—“loud, short
of attention span, and addicted to con-
flict.” In the White House, “he and cable
had achieved the singularity, a meshing
of man and machine.”
The Biden campaign could not have
conveyed a more different spirit. “To
make progress, we have to stop treating
our opponents as enemies,” Biden said
last Wednesday, as the steadily rising
vote count suggested that he could win.
“We are not enemies,” he said, echoing
Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address. “I am
campaigning as a Democrat, but I will
govern as an American President.” It
was one of his favored clichés, so famil-
iar and soft that it usually slipped by
unnoticed. But for a beleaguered peo-
ple, bracing for battle, the sentiment was
something close to radical.