Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen, much profiled, is a curious figure. Author, political candidate, inspiring figure behind the deplorable Educating for American Democracy, Allen offers a vision of the best the modern left has to offer, but she will not—perhaps cannot—firmly repudiate the activist radicalism that is the left at its worst. The academy should embrace her to begin to purge its demons. Tradition-minded education reformers should not, or they will find themselves taken over by those demons.

I work for the National Association of Scholars (NAS), and we have a firm oral tradition that Allen once was a student intern here—her father is the noted scholar William Allen, friend of NAS, and her politics may have been closer to ours in those days. No longer. She is a figure of the left—although it is to her credit, and distinctive in a movement surrendered long since to fury, that she does not hate the right.

Allen is a serious scholar, a classicist, and a political theorist, but one whose views have been molded by the mental deformations of the left. Her Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2015) is exemplary. Allen appreciates the Declaration, calls the increasingly anti-American left to embrace America’s foundational document—but she reads it perversely, emphasizing a modern egalitarianism (“equality”) rather than liberty. Allen loves the Declaration, but the Declaration she loves is one that aligns neatly with the ideology and the policy preferences of the modern left. For traditional-minded Americans, she is excessively comfortable as she elides the differences between her Declaration and our Declaration.

Perhaps because she is comfortable with such elisions, Allen has been too much lauded by the left Establishment. She was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow at 29—the “genius” award.

She certainly is better than the alternatives within the academy. Harvard University could have had Danielle Allen as its president. Instead, they chose first a non-challenging board member, Lawrence Bacow, and then the plagiarist, academically incompetent, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchik Claudine Gay. Harvard exemplifies what the American academy has become: one part mediocrity and connections, one part incompetence and illiberal repression. Allen is not mediocre, not a plagiarist, and has not made her career in the academy’s repression bureaucracies. In the strange career of the American academy, Allen is an icon of the path not taken.

But that does not mean she should be embraced by Americans outside the academy. Her signal work has been Educating for American Democracy, which offers a putatively bipartisan civics program that minimizes traditional civics while mainstreaming the radical action civics movement. I put it this way a few years ago:

EAD demonstrates the art of bureaucratic politics—the careful combination of putatively bipartisan compromise, impenetrable jargon, and euphemized but extensive radical commitments that will provide the ‘framework’ to radicalize America’s sprawling K–12 civics education. It further demonstrates that the radical activists’ focus on political action does train them well in the arts of administration and obfuscation, if not to cherish and preserve a free republic. EAD encapsulates the America they would make: democracy and equity imposed and maintained by the Byzantine arts of career bureaucrats.

Another way to put it is that action civics means socialist teachers in Chicago taking students out of class for an anti-Trump protest. EAD is the spoonful of sugar to get conservatives to swallow action civics. Danielle Allen may not intend for her bipartisan compromises to act as the sweet disguise that allows anti-American radicals to gain power. But that is their effect. No open-eyed tradition-minded American should cooperate with EAD.

What is at issue, ultimately, is that far too much of the left, radical or more softly liberal, does not accept tradition-minded Americans as morally or intellectually legitimate. This is the soft or hard presumption of a million conversations, and it works itself out in university hiring committees that never hire conservatives, in repressive regulations, in festering anger, in hatred, and in far too many incidents of actual violence, up to and including attempted murder (President Trump, repeatedly) and successful murder (Charlie Kirk). The academy’s refusal to treat tradition-minded Americans as morally or intellectually legitimate is the breeding ground for repression, violence, and murder. The civic task for our day is to remove that presumption from our civil society and our government—and above all from our colleges and universities.

Danielle Allen personally does not share that presumption. That is extraordinarily rare in the American professoriate and worth commending. But her “bipartisan” civics work makes those who do share that presumption central to American education. It even asks tradition-minded Americans to cooperate with those who seek their elimination, certainly from any position of power and—in their increasingly common rhetoric—even literally. To follow Allen’s policy prescriptions is, at best, to end up with the conclusion to a Kipling poem: “We are not ruled by murderers, but only—by their friends.”

And it is a short road from rule by the friends to rule by the murderers themselves.

It would be pleasant if Allen belatedly became president of Harvard University. It would be more pleasant if she used that position to dismantle Harvard’s regulatory and bureaucratic labyrinth of repression and discrimination, and most pleasant if she then called forthrightly for her peers in every American university to do the same. Even if she did not go that far, she would be an improvement on the status quo.

But tradition-minded Americans should avoid working with EAD. Tradition-minded Americans may think well of Allen, but EAD deserves our quarantine.

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