Danielle Allen on Why Technocratic Liberalism Failed

Danielle Allen on Why Technocratic Liberalism Failed

Yascha Mounk and Danielle Allen discuss democratic backsliding.

By Yascha Mounk, Feb 28, 2026

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Democratic Knowledge Project, a research lab focused on civic education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Danielle Allen discuss why the liberal worldview of the 1990s and 2000s has collapsed, how “power-sharing liberalism” can address the failures of technocratic governance, and whether participatory democracy risks empowering the professional managerial class at the expense of ordinary citizens.

This transcript has been edited and lightly condensed for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: We speak regularly, and it seems to me striking that we have now been in this crisis of democracy, or whatever we want to call it, for at least ten years, at least since Donald Trump was elected in 2016. For me, it feels like with each passing year we have fewer answers about what to do and how to get out of this moment. At the beginning there were confident prognostications that this was just a temporary thing, that changes were going to make sure that something like Trump could never get elected again, or confident policy prescriptions about the three clever tricks we had to adopt in order to get through this moment. It seems to me that as Trump got reelected, and as similar political movements are now leading in the polls in Britain and France and in some polls in Germany, that no longer seems realistic. Where is your head in terms of understanding this moment and thinking about how to respond to it?

Danielle Allen: Sure, thanks. I appreciate that framing, Yascha. You and I have been in conversation about these themes for nearly a decade at this point.

I think we live in a new world. In that regard, the most important thing is to understand the world we live in and then to figure out how we are going to navigate it. There are a lot of features of that new world. One is what I talk about as the end of neoliberalism, and I mean that in a purely descriptive fashion. One might also mean it from an evaluative point of view, but what I mean is literally that a set of status quo policy frameworks involving trade liberalization, globalization, relatively open borders, and market-based solutions for nearly all social problems is no longer with us. That status quo policy package is gone. In the United States, both the Biden administration and the Trump administration have moved into completely different policy territory. We are also seeing dramatic policy shifts in other countries.

In that context, the third thing we are seeing is a real struggle on the part of legacy democracies to govern effectively in turbulent and rapidly changing circumstances. That is the situation. I believe in freedom. I believe in self-government for free and equal citizens. For me, the question is not how we preserve some old thing, but rather how, in these conditions, we win the institutions of free self-government. I take it that we have the job of winning them from a set of circumstances that are fundamentally eroding the opportunity for free self-government.

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