This Philosopher Wants Liberals to Take Political Power Seriously
About this episode
Danielle Allen, a political philosopher and former Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, argues that liberals must take political power seriously — not just checking power but sharing and building it. Her 'power-sharing liberalism' diagnoses liberalism's blind spot: the left focuses on rights and courts while ceding structural power. She and Klein discuss her work on democratic renovation: citizens' assemblies, quadratic voting, vTaiwan-style digital democracy, proportional representation, and the bipartisan 'Our Common Purpose' commission she co-chaired, which found elite consensus on reforms like making Election Day a holiday. Allen argues that democracy's crisis is partly one of citizen power — people need real agency, not just guardrails. A striking coda: Allen's paper on AI development, which frames the 'alignment problem' as a democratic problem and proposes 'alignment assemblies' where citizens deliberate over the values governing AI models, insisting that AI should be shaped by democratic deliberation, not just engineers.