What Does It Mean to be an American? Reexamining the Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship

David W. Oxtoby is President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the Academy in 2012.
 

Good afternoon and welcome. As President, it is my pleasure to formally call to order the 2106th Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Our event today is a Jonathan F. Fanton Lecture, named for my predecessor who served as president of the American Academy from 2014 to 2019. Jonathan has joined us virtually to participate in today’s program, and I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge his outstanding stewardship of this institution.

Today’s event stems from initiatives that began during Jonathan’s tenure. In 2018, under his leadership, the American Academy launched a project to explore the pathways and barriers to participation in our democracy and what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century. The work of the Academy’s bipartisan Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship has grown more essential since then as a series of crises has deepened the cracks in our political culture. We are grateful for Jonathan’s prescience in recognizing the need for this effort, and for his continued service as a member of the Commission.

Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, the Commission’s final report, was released in June 2020 and offers thirty-one bold recommendations to help the nation emerge as a more resilient democracy by 2026. We are in the implementation phase of the project, and it has been inspiring to see how many Americans from across the country are committed to improving the health of our democracy. We are grateful to all who have joined us in this impor­tant work.

Today’s conversation on the rights and responsibilities inherent to American citizenship connects directly to the core questions that animated the Commission and led to the Our Common Purpose report. I look forward to exploring together what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century and hope that today’s discussion will help us all practice better citizenship in our own communities.

I want to welcome our panelists: E.J. Dionne Jr., María Teresa Kumar, and John Shattuck. I also want to thank our moderator, Danielle Allen, a cochair of the Commission. Danielle is the model of a scholar patriot, working tirelessly to protect and promote the ideals that underpin our democratic system through her scholarship and, most recently, as a candidate for office in Massachusetts. We are grateful to Danielle for her service and her example.

Danielle Allen is Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She was elected to the American Academy in 2009 and is a cochair of the Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.
 

Thank you, President Oxtoby. I truly appreciate your kind words and having you preside over this important conversation. It’s wonderful to be here to celebrate Jonathan Fanton’s work and leadership for the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. We have extraordinary panelists joining us today for this question of what does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be a good citizen? The questions sound antique, and yet they are core to our ability to function together in our massive and multicultural, diverse, and beautiful society. What does it mean to be a good citizen and a good civic participant? These roles and modes of engagement are broad.

The work of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship really began because Jonathan Fanton sent up a flare and asked, “Who else out there thinks that we are in a red-alert moment in our democracy?” And for those of us whom he reached out to first, we all had our own moments of red alert. In my own personal case, my sense of the fragility and the failures of our democratic system date back to 2009. Growing up, I had a mixed sense of light and dark about our country: a sense of hope, optimism, and pride in our accomplishments but also a clear-eyed focus on the limitations and failures.

In 2009, I lost my younger cousin Michael to a combination of mass incarceration and gun violence. That was a real turning point for me. It gave me a bleaker view about where we were as a country and what it would take for our democracy to reach a place where we don’t leave people trapped in situations that don’t permit them the well-being and flourishing that our Constitution and democracy promise. My other red alert came in 2013 when Congress had an approval rating of 9 percent. As Jonathan made calls to lots of people, he found red alerts all over the place and all kinds of people who said, “It’s time for us to really dig deep and figure out what a healthy democracy consists of.”

At the end of the day, a democracy can’t be anything other than the people who make it. So, fundamentally, that question about what we need for the health of our democracy is a question about what it means for us to be citizens and civic participants and to do that work together. Fundamental to that are benefits captured in a vocabulary of rights. We earn those benefits by fulfilling a set of responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities: those are the core components of the social contract.

As we come together today to talk about this question, we are dusting off some old categories and some old ideas, but we are doing that because of their urgency in the present. We have a pressing need to figure out a new, reimagined, reinvented democracy. We have a pressing need to answer the question of what rights and responsibilities we have to each other and to the practice of democratic citizenship. We have an incredible group of panelists here today, true leaders of both thought and practice. I will share their bios, and then I will jump in with a single question to each. Then we’ll bring everybody together for a shared conversation.

E.J. Dione Jr. is a journalist for The Washington Post, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a university professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. E.J. works at the intersection of journalism and scholarship with expertise in community and civil society, in elections, politics, polling, faith-based initiatives, ideology, journalism, and the role of religion in public life and public opinion – all at the heart of our current struggles. He is the author of several books, but for today’s conversation, let me note a brand-new book with democracy advocate Miles Rapoport entitled 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting.

I am also pleased to introduce María Teresa Kumar, the founding president of Voto Latino, a civic engagement organization that leverages youth, technology, social platforms, and influencers, and is responsible for registering more than five hundred thousand new voters. María Teresa is also an activist and social entrepreneur, as well as an Emmy-nominated MSNBC contributor. She has been named as one of the top one hundred creative minds by Fast Company, one of the ten most influential Latinos by Hispanic Executive, and one of the ten most influential women in D.C. by Elle.

Last, but not least, I am glad to introduce John Shattuck. John is Professor of Practice in Diplomacy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He is a former Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, and served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. John has also been the Washington director of the American Civil Liberties Union and a U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. His new book, with coauthors Sushma Raman and Mathias Risse, is titled Holding Together: A Hijacking of Rights in America and How to Reclaim Them for Everyone. John is a master of thinking about rights and responsibilities.

I will kick off our discussion with a question for John. Some years ago, you and I had a conversation about rights and responsibilities. I was very impressed that you were grabbing hold of these two terms that people often want to push off to the side. In your new book Holding Together, you tell a powerful story about an America where we have large bipartisan majorities for some core values. This goes against the grain of our current understanding of ourselves because we take ourselves to be polarized. Can you fill us in on what you found about what Americans think about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship?

John Shattuck is Professor of Practice in Diplomacy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He was elected to the American Academy in 2007.
 

Thank you, Danielle. And a salute to you for the many ways you’ve demonstrated your leadership on democracy, including your outstanding academic work, your commitment to public service, and your recent campaign for governor of Massachusetts.

I would like to say a few words about some relevant history in answering your question. The United States is a nation of unprecedented diversity. Unlike other countries, which are built on common ancestry, we are built on successive waves of immigration, and on a legacy of enslavement and the subjugation of Indigenous people.

Over the centuries, Americans have been thrown together by chance and exploitation, but have been held together by a promise reflected in the Declaration of Independence – a promise that all people are created equal and have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have failed to implement the promise of rights in many ways, but most Americans still have a deep belief in it. In that sense, the promise of rights is a core set of values that has been handed down over time.

The founders were an elite slice of the population. They were white men with property who had an exclusive view of rights: basically, rights for white men with property, like themselves. This historic exclusion has been challenged throughout American history. And the great struggle for equal rights, which is the struggle that we’re talking about in our new book – a struggle for the right to vote, for equal protection and equal opportunity, for freedom of speech, religion, individual dignity, due process of law, and, above all, a democratic form of government – this ongoing struggle defines what it is to be an American.

In our book, we wanted to find out what Americans think today about their rights. We conducted a series of national polls and town hall meetings, and collected some remarkable data that frankly surprised us. Eighty percent of people across the political spectrum said that “without our rights, America is nothing.” Now, of course, rights have very different meanings for different people. We certainly know that there can be a conflict between the right not to wear a mask and the right to be protected from COVID, which is a contemporary version of these conflicts. But despite the conflicts, our polls show that 80 percent believe that Americans “have more in common than most people think.”

This is remarkable, because it’s at odds with the division and extremism that we see all around us. Let me give you just a bit more data. A majority of Americans agree that rights must be balanced with responsibilities. Eight out of ten people agree that personal freedom should be balanced against a responsibility to keep people safe in a pandemic. Eight out of ten agree that the police can protect the public from crime while also being held responsible for their own crimes. And seven out of ten agree that the United States should have automatic voter registration or universal voting, as E.J. and his colleagues write in their book, to reinforce the right and responsibility to vote.

So, there is a lot going on here that is counterintuitive given the polarization that we face in the country today. The bottom line – and there’s a lot of polling data in our book to back this up – is most Americans have an expansive view of equal rights and see rights and the responsibilities of citizenship as core values of the nation, values that determine what it is to be an American. This silent majority, which consists of a wide range of citizens – Democrats, Independents, Republicans – disagrees on specific issues but has a common commitment to democratic values.

They have the potential to hold the country together, but their diversity keeps them from being politically cohesive. They are overshadowed by an active minority that is working to polarize people. This minority is made up of a mostly white constituency motivated by fear, an extremist constituency that denies the equal rights of others that they regard as threats to their own racial, cultural, and political identity.

They are attacking American values in the electoral process, where we find an increasing assault on voting rights. Thirty-five new state laws have been adopted by nineteen states over the last year that would weaken, restrict, or put burdens on the right to vote in various ways.

But our polls show that most Americans want to strengthen, not weaken, the right to vote. Eighty-seven percent, including 80 percent of Republicans, favor national standards to protect the electoral process. Eighty-four percent favor the Justice Department reviewing voting regulations to make sure they aren’t racially discriminatory. And 82 percent, including 55 percent of Republicans, favor increased early voting to promote maximum participation.

So, we see a disconnect between the polling, the underlying values that Americans feel they continue to have, and the activities that are going on in a highly polarized political arena. The data that we include in the book show where this disconnect begins.

Allen: Thank you, John. You have given us a picture of hope. Maybe we agree on more than we think we do. You raised some questions about the disconnect between us and what our policies are. We will come back to that disconnect later. Let me now turn to E.J. Dionne.

John just articulated a hope that this big, silent supermajority that he’s saying is out there wishes that their voices could be brought to the surface to lead and guide our politics. You have just published an extraordinary and controversial book, which has the job of trying to make sure everybody’s voice is truly heard in our politics. In 100% Democracy, you argue that voting shouldn’t be something we think of as a right, and it shouldn’t be something that we think of as a moral obligation. It should be an actual legal duty. We should be required to vote, every single one of us, just as we are required to serve for jury duty. Why should we want that? Tell us why we should take this unprecedented step.

E.J. Dionne Jr. is a journalist for The Washington Post, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a university professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He was elected to the American Academy in 2005.
 

I love that way of introducing it. First, let me say it’s a real honor to be with you, Danielle. I admire you for many things, including your writing and scholarship, of course, but I really admire you for jumping into the political fray. Three of our last five presidents – Obama, Bush, and Clinton – had an election race in their lives that didn’t turn out the way they intended, and they became president. You are now fully qualified to become President of the United States. God bless you.

I want to thank the Academy for hosting this session and for their extraordinary report on American democracy that includes a set of reforms that are deeply valuable. Among them is an idea that I want to discuss today, a proposal supported by my coauthor Miles Rapoport, María Teresa, Norm Ornstein, and many others in the democracy and voting rights communities.

Our core argument is that rights and responsibilities reinforce each other. Often when people talk about rights and responsibilities, they seem to think that responsibilities somehow limit or qualify rights. What we argue is that in the case of voting, the best way to defend the right is to assert the legal responsibility of everyone to vote. Let me just parenthetically say that we call it universal voting and not compulsory voting for a very specific reason: nothing in our proposal requires anyone to vote for anyone.

Our proposal is modeled largely after Australia’s system, although there are some two dozen democracies that enacted versions of the idea, and many of them have made it work very well. But Australia is really the ultimate proof of concept. They’ve had it for one hundred years, and if one hundred years isn’t a good enough proof of concept, I don’t know if we’ll ever get one. Under our system and Australia’s system, you are required to participate but not to pick a candidate. If you don’t like anybody on the list, you don’t have to vote for them. You can write in any name, say Danielle Allen, or María Teresa, or John Shattuck. And just to make sure that this requirement cannot be viewed as compelled speech, we would add a “none of the above” option to the ballot, which exists now in Nevada and Arizona.

The core idea here is that American elections have become like fancy dinner parties: you have an A-list of likely voters, a B-list of people who are registered but don’t vote that often, and a C-list of people who haven’t been able to register. By the way, this last category includes large numbers of young people because our voting system is very unfriendly to the young who move around a lot more than older people do. The dinner party approach to elections means that politicians spend almost all their time appealing to the A-list, the likely voters, which means they spend a lot of time trying to turn out their base. As my friend Miles likes to say, that often means “campaigns based on enrage to engage,” just to pull people out.

But they also spend a lot of time trying to depress the other side’s base, sometimes by erecting legal barriers but often through attacks discouraging partisans from supporting their own side’s candidate. This leads to campaigns that are needlessly divisive. Now, Miles and I do not pretend our idea will fix everything that ails the system, nor do we think political campaigns will all be peaceable kingdoms. Candidates will go after each other. But we believe the dinner party system aggravates divisiveness and aggravates the tendency to be negative.

This system might produce a somewhat more moderate electorate, since many who don’t vote are less ideological than those who do. This seems to be what it does in Australia.

There is a larger point, captured by our Declaration of Independence, in which the founders declared that a legitimate government depends upon the consent of the governed. They didn’t say the consent of two-thirds of the governed, which was our turnout rate in the 2020 election. They didn’t say 50 percent of the governed, which is what we got in what was in historical terms the high turnout midterm election in 2018. They said, “the governed.” That means all of us.

But the other side of this is that at a time when there are active efforts to make it harder to vote, making voting a duty sends a signal to every part of the political system that the obligation of that system is to make it as easy as possible for people to carry out their duty. We argue that we would need a variety of what we call “gateway reforms” to make sure it’s easy for everyone to vote. One of my great research assistants, Amber Herrle, was looking at all the ways in which Australia makes it easy for people to register to vote. And she came running into my office and said, “Look at all this cool stuff Australia does to make participation easier. We should do this, too.”

As it is, we’re becoming two Americas on voting. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that twenty-five states have expanded access since 2020, but nineteen states have pulled back access. We want to be one America, indivisible and fully participating.

I’ll close by mentioning jury duty, because that’s another area in which rights and responsibilities reinforce each other. One of the greatest victories of the civil rights movement was to end discrimination against Black Americans in jury service and to allow Black Americans to serve on juries. But remember what that victory really meant. Charles Ogletree, a great scholar at Harvard and a civil rights activist, has pointed this out. It meant that Black Americans, like white Americans, would be compelled to serve on juries. That is a form of compulsion that increases freedom, increases fairness, increases the justice of our system, because everyone is included. And we think everybody should be included in our election process too.

Allen: Thank you, E.J., and thank you for mentioning that Our Common Purpose includes an endorsement of universal voting as one of its recommendations. The report has thirty-one recommendations for securing the health of our democracy and reinventing the practice of democratic citizenship.

We will come back to this question of why, when we have this supermajority with a commitment to voting, and we have a mechanism to include everybody’s voice and achieve universal voting, aren’t we there yet? What are the obstacles? I would like now to invite María Teresa to join us and to share her perspective on this question. You are an advocate for voting rights. You have increased people’s participation in voting. You have deep knowledge and expertise of the experience of Latinx communities, both in facing hurdles to voting and finding ways to overcome those hurdles.

When does it help for us to talk about voting as a responsibility and as a duty? Is that a useful thing? And what do you think about the prospect of going all the way to a mandate for voting to make it truly universal?

María Teresa Kumar is President of Voto Latino and an MSNBC contributor.
 

There is an assault on our democracy and on our institutions. Danielle, you did one of the bravest things: you put your hat in the ring. Remember it’s not just about running; it’s about finding great candidates because that’s how we change the equation.

I joined E.J. and Miles Rapoport in the Universal Voting Taskforce, and through that journey, I was sold on the idea of universal voting. Our biggest challenge is making sure that people of color, and poor people in general, are not penalized for not voting. John, thank you for the conversation, but more importantly, for being brave enough to have it at a time when people are polarized. I would say that there are a few of us who are polarized and a lot of us who are a silent majority. And oftentimes, the person who screams the loudest is the one who gets amplified.

I would like to clarify something about our work at Voto Latino. We actually registered 1.2 million voters in this last election, according to a report by Tufts University, in which the movement’s work, not just Voto Latino’s, is audited. Of the voters we registered, 56 percent were first-time voters, and, equally as important, 57 percent had less than a college education. This is hard work. We got people, who are often apathetic to government, excited. Officially, we are the largest online direct voter registration outfit in the country. And we’re the second largest voter registration organization in the country, second only to the Voter Participation Center. I say this only because it’s taken eighteen years of a longtime experiment to convince people that if we target young Latinos, talk to them, and tell them that they belong in this space, they listen.

One of the things that we have found is that when we talk directly to individuals in the Latinx community, and especially young voters, and create a space where they can ask questions, where we can tell them that you don’t need a degree, that this democracy is theirs, they start paying attention and participating. We are living at a time when the government that they are trying to participate in doesn’t look like them. So how do we change that equation? We do it by voting and running for office.

I’ve been doing a lot of reporting recently on what’s happening in Ukraine, and one of the things I found most fascinating was that the parliamentarians who were talking on MSNBC and CNN, each one seemed younger than the next. I finally asked the question, “What is the average age of a Ukrainian parliamentarian, not including the president?” It turns out that it is forty-six. These individuals are representing a rising generation in Ukraine.

This idea of universal voting brings the largest and most diverse group of Americans, Generation Z, into the fold. We are starting to see what that means when they run for office and when they participate. They are talking about intersectional issues that make older folks uncomfortable, but that is their lived experience, and it is allowing us to make monumental change. I often say that I don’t have to convince a young person that climate change is real. I just have to convince them that the system works if they elect officials who reflect their values.

And so, universal voting is an opportunity for us to convince people about participation. I’m very proud of the 1.2 million people that Voto Latino has registered, but to be honest, Voto Latino should not be in the business of registering voters. That’s a government function. Our charge should be convincing people about the policies that will make their lives different.

In 2004, when we first started, our job was just to register voters. Then, after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, we had to explain to people how they could make their vote count. And now, with the onslaught of over four hundred pieces of legislation trying to prevent people from voting, we have to sue the states. We’re suing the State of Texas. We’ve sued the State of Florida, the State of Arizona, and the State of Colorado. That should not be our charge. But because there is a group of individuals trying to repress the vote, we would not be doing our function in advocating for democracy and for our voters if we were not in the fight.

I am sold on universal voting because it brings everybody in, and we can get back to a place of negotiating for the best policy possible. That takes patience and time, but it allows us to address the fundamental issues that we’re facing in this country.