That means the project of democracy is just always and perpetually to be undoing the challenge of oligarchic capture.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

One way to think about this moment is that philosophical liberalism is facing a serious external crisis. This has happened the

number of times before in the history of liberalism. In the mid-late 19th century, liberals didn't

quite know how to deal with transformation of the economy, with the rise of factories in the

north of England, with industrial capitalism

and the emissoration of big parts of a new proletariat. In the middle of the 20th century, liberals

didn't quite know how to deal with the threat from totalitarian ideologies like fascism

and communism. In each of these moments, liberals reinvented their political tradition, refurbished their ideas in a way where the basic values remained, but they were able to speak to this political moment.

That is some of the intellectual work that I'm trying to do in my own writing on this podcast at Persuasion.

And I thought that I would invite one of the most prominent political

theorists at work today in the United States to think with me about some of these issues.

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant-Conan University professor at Harvard University.

She holds a number of other roles at the university, and she is also the founder and

publisher of a substack called Renovator. She also had a recent piece in persuasion about

why we should abolish partisan primaries. We talked about how to renew liberal tradition. We talked

about the importance of civics education and her concrete work on

trying to get a form of civics education that liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans

can agree on, rode out into more places around the United States. We talked about the

importance of participation and whether or not participation will always skew the political debate in favor

of the ideological extremes, in favor of professional managerial class.

We have a little bit of a disagreement about that.

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