Remake America

At a time when authoritarian tides are rising, it has become a cliché in American politics for liberals to say that “democracy is on the ballot.” What exactly does that mean? And given the clear failures of existing institutions to address endemic social problems—from economic inequality and persistent racial injustice to endless war and ecological disasters—is democracy even worth rallying behind? In The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, Osita Nwanevu offers a stirring defense of the concept, in theory and in practice. He does so by excavating its essential meaning, explaining why Americans have never enjoyed a democratic order and ultimately calling for a new political and economic founding.

In the process, Nwanevu argues that what many Americans understand as “our democracy”—the constitutional system—in fact undermines key democratic principles and has played a corrosive role in facilitating the rise of Trumpist authoritarianism as well as rightwing assaults on multiracial inclusion. He powerfully details both the weaknesses of current institutions as well as the reform agenda necessary for equal and effective freedom. At the same time, Nwanevu moves well beyond typical accounts of democracy promotion by connecting the extremity of American economic hierarchies to the breakdown of political representation and basic civil liberties. Democracy requires self-rule both through the ballot-box and at the workplace—a transformative project that alone is capable of reserving authoritarian tides. I spoke with Nwanevu earlier this month over Zoom about his book, the return of Trump, and the pathway to democratic change. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Aziz Rana

Aziz Rana: Early in the book, you note that democracy is a ubiquitous term in American public life. But you say that the way it is used often transforms the term into “a hollow idea for a hollow, unserious time.” What do you mean by this? And what motivated you to write a book in defense of democracy?

Osita Nwanevu: One of my favorite parts of the book is the section in the introduction where I talk about all the ways that the concept of democracy is invoked. I talk about, for instance, how people talk about cryptocurrency as being democratizing as far as finance is concerned. People referencing social media being democratizing in other respects. Donald Trump, on January 6, talked about the need to overturn the results of the election in the way that would preserve and defend American democracy.

This is a floating signifier, this word democracy, I think, in American public life now. We have become very detached, I think, from a really grounded understanding of what it means. And I think that’s dangerous. We are in a moment now where we’re staring down the rise of authoritarianism, the rise of fascism, and we want to defend democratic ideals, but we’ll be poorly positioned to do that if we don’t know what democracy actually means and if we’re not making a really robust case for it.

I think that most people came into the 2024 election understanding it as a kind of binary choice. On the one hand, they heard from Kamala Harris that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy, that Donald Trump was destroying or attacking our democratic institutions, and that they should care about that. On the other hand, they heard Donald Trump making direct economic appeals that prices were too high, they were paying too much for certain things, that they were being underserved by the economy, and he was going to materially help them out. And I think people read that election as this choice between an abstraction—a set of ideals that maybe their civics teacher told them that they should care about—and their own material well-being. They didn’t really see democracy as a robust enough system of ideas at the level of directly impacting and benefiting their personal lives. And democracy lost on that basis.

That’s a real challenge for those of us who believe in democracy. And so this book is animated by this underlying sense that we’ve talked about democracy in insufficiently serious ways. I thought that before the election, and I think the results of the election really underscored the need for a version of democracy, or a revision of democracy, that is compelling, that speaks to people who have who have doubts about whether democracy can really work for them. Gallup did a poll earlier this year that found that 61 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working in the United States. That has to change if we want democracy to survive as a project in this country.

AR: Unlike the plethora of writing about American legal-political institutions, your book begins with first principles. It starts by telling us what the concept means and defending it as a matter of political philosophy. Why did you decide to return to first principles? And what is democracy?

ON: I decided to return to first principles because I was bored. I was covering politics for ten years, kind of day in, day out, responding to the news cycle: Donald Trump did this. Democrats did that. And you’re very rarely given the opportunity to think back to what the underlying purpose of politics is, the values that we want society to uphold and reflect. And it seemed to me that the concept of democracy was a central issue.

Donald Trump won in 2016 with an Electoral College victory rather than a popular vote victory. It was the second time in twenty-five years that that happened. I remember in second grade following as close as I could as a second grader in the 2000 election and knowing that there was a kind of basic unfairness at work, at least from my perspective. And George Bush won that election over Al Gore, who won the popular vote. That feeling, I think, returned for a lot of Americans after 2016. Obviously we saw the effort to overturn the 2020 election, we saw January 6. Democracy became this live concept that people were invoking. And I also found that as I covered the Democratic primary in 2020, I kept having to say—whether it was on Medicare for All or the Green New Deal or immigration reform, whatever policy happened to be—that Democrats were very unlikely to pass parts of this agenda given the structural features of our system, despite the broad public support you had for a lot of these policies.

In response to pointing these things out, you’d often hear from conservatives saying, “Well, you know, we’re actually a republic and not a democracy, and so there should be this gap between what the public wants on health care policy or immigration policy or climate policy, and what actually happens.” I wanted an opportunity to respond to those arguments. So in all these kinds of ways, I felt like there was occasion to return to the first principles here, to think through what democracy is, and use that definition to make analysis of our political system and our political situation.

The definition I came to by reading a lot of very dusty and dry texts that I don’t know I would recommend people who are not academics was that democracy is a system in which the governed govern. So the responsibility of governance, the power of governance, is not given over to some higher, arbitrary authority like a king or a class of oligarchs. People who are themselves subject to governance do the governing or, in Lincoln’s formulation, government of, by, and for the people. That is the core of what democracy is.

There are three basic characteristics of a democratic system. The first characteristic is political equality. Everybody who was party to a collective choice democratically comes to that collective choice in equal standing. If that’s not the case, you leave the door open to some privileged minority actually being the group that gets to make the decisions. Everybody in the democratic system has to be roughly equal. The second thing is responsiveness. Democracy is not a suggestion box. When the people come together to make a collective choice, they speak with some authority. Things happen as a consequence of them coming together. Otherwise they’re not actually governing. And the third thing is majority rule. That is the only decision principle that reflects and respects political equality. If two people want something and three people want some other thing, it’s very hard for the two to get over the three unless there’s some kind of fundamental inequality involved. As common sensical as it sounds, our system in the United States violates those three principles in pretty basic ways that I think we need to come to terms with.

AR: In discussing the concept, you spend a significant amount of time responding to arguments against democracy from recent scholars and commentators. What do their arguments tell us about the current political malaise, and why did you feel it was essential to rebut their empirical and theoretical claims?

ON: I wanted to make a case for democracy that engaged with critics who speak to a lot of the anxieties that even those of us who support democracy harbor after the 2024 election. You know, it was striking to me to see so many people who had argued forcefully for protecting and expanding voting rights over the last decade saying that, well, because Trump happened to win the popular vote this time, maybe democracy is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe people in this country are too misinformed, too tribalistic, too polarized, to make democratic decisions. That alarmed me. I think if democracy is going to survive as a system of ideals, we can’t be fair weather friends. You have to accept the possibility that we’re going to lose and not get what we want sometimes.

But you only get to that fundamental bedrock commitment if you respond well and logically to the critics of democratic thinking, democratic thought. And so that’s what I set out to do in in chapter two, especially. There are a couple of texts that end up being central to that part of the book. One of them is Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, which came out in 2016 and talked about challenges like polarization, tribalism, the fact that we seem more divided in this country than we’ve been in recent decades. I think it comes away from that reality with a more skeptical view of democracy than I have. And the other book I wrestled with was Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, which a makes full-throated case for epistocracy—kind of setting democracy aside and saying to ourselves, “Well, why don’t we just have experts resolve all of these questions for us? Don’t they know more? Aren’t they more qualified to participate in policy-making than ordinary people?” You know, these were thoughts, I think that many people, even people who believe in democracy, had and that undermined their faith in the system. They’re worth responding to in a serious way.

The other category of critics that I wrestle with in that chapter are people from the social choice theory tradition, who tell us that there are basic logical conundrums that Democrats have to work through—that there is something intrinsically unstable about the concept of majority rule and the concept that within a democracy, when you have an election or you have a legislative battle, the people who prevail represent the will of some transcendent majority. I trouble that concept in really, really important ways, and I thought that was worth talking about too. But all that’s to say, I thought that it was important to have a section in the book where I really steelman, as people say, the veiled arguments against democracy. And I came away actually with more faith in democracy than I had at the outset.

AR: You contend that the United States is not now and has never been a democracy. What do you mean by this? And how does such perspective shift the typical conversation about “our democracy?”

ON: We have a political system that’s changed a lot in the 238 years since the Constitution was drafted—and changed in ways that I think are pro-democratic. We have equal voting rights for minorities and women. We don’t have a Senate that is indirectly elected anymore. We’ve made the system more and more democratic with time. But I argue in the book that certain basic features of our political institutions have remained undemocratic as designed by the founders, who came to the convention 1787 in Philadelphia with a real apprehension toward democracy, with a real sense that democracy, in the aftermath of the American Revolution, had actually led to a kind of wayward series of populist policies that were endangering private property. This is a story that Michael Klarman tells well in The Framers’ Coup. And it’s out of that anxiety that things like the Electoral College and the Senate emerged as barriers to direct democratic representation and majoritarian politics.

I think it matters that a resident of Wyoming, by virtue of the state’s population, has about sixty-seven times the representation of a resident of California does in the U.S. Senate. That shapes policymaking, that shapes the way that we think about the political composition of this country. And it’s fundamentally unjust from a democratic perspective: it’s not just important to ensure that people aren’t denied the vote or representation because of their gender or the color of their skin. It also matters that people are not denied equal representation on the basis of where they happen to live. Every American should count, whether you live in a big city like New York or whether you live in a rural area. And we have a system that flouts that principle in all kinds of ways. At the extremes, you have situations like we have in Washington, D.C., a city of about seven hundred thousand people—more people, in fact, than in all of Wyoming—that does not have full voting representation in Congress. You have a single non-voting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who cannot cast a vote in the final passage of legislation. So this is a city that is governed by the federal government without a real say in federal governance. And we don’t have very many opportunities in American politics to think about the injustices there and what makes the system, from a basic perspective, undemocratic.

AR: As you pointed out, a common conservative response is to say that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. What does that framing get right and wrong about the founding and contemporary American politics?

ON: One of the central provocations of this book is that I—as a leftist—am saying that conservatives are more right than they are wrong on this question. Liberals have tended to respond to this argument by saying, “Well, look, you know, all the founders really meant and intended by republican governance was representative government. They didn’t want a government like Athens with direct democracy. They wanted the system of elections, and that’s all they meant.” I don’t think this is actually true.

My understanding of republican governance and what republicanism means comes not only from the founders but people like Philip Pettit, John McCormick, people who consider themselves theorists of republicanism. And my understanding of republicanism is that it’s a system of political thought that really invests in the distribution of power. Power is not concentrated within the hands of one person, you have checks and balances. You have written constitutions, you have the rule of law—all of these interlocking institutions that allow for decisions to be made collectively by some group of people.

But that’s not intrinsically democratic. The Roman Republic, for instance, had certain democratic features, but it was not a representative democracy in the sense that’s familiar to us today. The Italian maritime republics of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were republican governments, but the people who had the power to vote and make decisions were a wealthy class of oligarchs. The appeal to the founders of republican governments was that it’s a system that ensures that power is not controlled exclusively by a particular class of people. But it also makes sure that power is also not inordinately in the hands of ordinary people who might make attacks on private property. They wanted a system of checks and balances to even out the distribution of power—and from their perspective, that meant, to a large extent, disempowering poor, ordinary people. That is one version of republicanism. We can call that aristocratic republicanism. But there are other republicanisms we can turn to, including a democratic republicanism that on the flip side that we should also be troubled by.

So the founders, I think, very definitively, created in the Constitution a republican government. But we can see in the letters that the Founders wrote, in Madison’s notes on the convention, in the defenses that they made of the Constitution, that they did not intend for republican government to be a democratically accessible government. They feared ordinary people using government to take more than they believe that they ought to from wealthier Americans. And that’s one of the reasons the system is designed the way it is. Charles Pinckney and others talk about the U.S. Senate as being the institution that is designed to create a kind of stronghold for wealth within the whole system of government so that ordinary Americans, poor Americans, don’t influence policy making too much. And I think this is these are all reasons why conservatives have better side of the argument. But the fact that we are a republic does not mean that we should not become a more democratic republic. The status quo is never an argument for itself.

AR: Let’s get into more detail about the existing constitutional system and the problems with it. As you’ve already mentioned, you describe how the United States’s legal political institutions have shifted in a more democratic direction since the founding, especially through the “constitutional revolution” that was Reconstruction. But you nonetheless highlight the persistent and deep democratic failures across all branches of government. What are these failures and what have been the consequences?

ON: The failures of different parts of the federal structure compound upon each other. The Senate is, I think, the linchpin in all this. We’re told in civics class that the inequities in the Senate are balanced out by the House of Representatives because the House is popularly apportioned. Now we are in the middle of a gerrymandering controversy right now that gives the lie to even that understanding of what the House does and its role. But even taking that seriously, the House is the popular chamber.

Still, the powers of these two chambers are not balanced out in any meaningful way. The Senate alone shapes the judiciary. The Senate alone shapes the executive branch. And so the inequities between smaller states, more rural states, and more urban parts of the country actually ripple out to other branches of government—perhaps most consequentially at the Supreme Court, where we, very unusually for a developed country, have lifetime appointments to the bench. So you have these high-stakes battles every so often to put somebody on the bench who’s going to be influencing policy making, perhaps for decades on end. Again, it’s a very unusual situation internationally, and that matters when it comes to the executive branch. The Electoral College, the number of electoral votes you get, is shaped partially by the House but also partially by Senate seats. So there’s a little bit of intrinsic overrepresentation of smaller states there, and again, this is another place where we are very, very unusual in the international context: 80 percent of the countries with presidents like ours, with similar powers, similar functions within government, elect their presidents by popular vote.

I think that we’re telling ourselves a story, or have been told this story, that some of these kind of majoritarian features are intended to prevent the rise of a kind of authoritarian populism. But it’s plain that those structural features have failed to do so under Donald Trump.

AR: Now, a distinctive feature of your book is that you link the economy to the story about political democracy. In what ways have market fundamentalism and rampant inequality compromised democratic practice, and why is a democratic economy essential to any reform project?

ON: In the last eight months or so, we all saw as the wealthiest man on the planet, because he donated about $260 million to Donald Trump’s last campaign, get rewarded with a post in government where he reworked the executive branch to his liking, firing thousands of federal workers and ending certain programs. I could not have come up with a more absurd caricature of our existing political economy than what we saw happen under the Elon Musk. That was something that told all of us—even if you’re not on the left—that there are intrinsic risks to having vast concentrations of wealth in the hands of so few people.

But that was an extreme example, and people have been saying for years that lobbying and campaign finance are ways in which wealthy people and corporations shape policymaking to their own benefit, while ordinary Americans outside of that system are left behind. I think most Americans perceive that, and that’s one of the reasons why the appeals to democracy that the Democratic Party made in the last election rang hollow. And that’s why I spend so much time in this book talking not just about the need for campaign finance reform, lobbying reforms, which I think we ought to do, but the ways in which the economy, even outside of politics, ends up shaping our political reality.

It’s going to be very, very hard, I think, to sustain any kind of democratic society if working people are not empowered. I think that in and of itself, detached from the political situation, is a democratic question. If we believe in democracy because we believe democracy grants us some measure of control over the conditions that shape our lives, it should matter to us that we govern, not only in Washington, but in the economy and at work because the decisions that are made at the top of corporations we work for often affect us more directly, immediately, and intimately than decisions made in our national capital or in city hall.

AR: You say that the time is now for what you call “new American founding,” one that would transform both our politics and our economy. What would this new founding entail?

ON: The language of the new founding is language really derived from the work of Eric Foner, who argues that the Reconstruction amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—were so consequential and so transformative that they ought to be understood as a new founding moment. There was a fundamental shift in American governance and American life as a consequence of those changes, and the economic and political changes I’m arguing for are large enough that if we implemented them, we’d find ourselves in a new society, in a new country.

And there’s something galvanizing about thinking and arguing for change on that scale. We’re at a moment now where so many Americans distrust institutions. They don’t think the system has worked out for them. But there’s nowhere in politics, perhaps, save Trumpism, where that skepticism, that cynicism, that sort of hope or aspiration for something transformative is being spoken to. And I think that if we want democracy to survive, we need a vision that’s going to be more compelling than the one the authoritarians are offering in that respect. And that is why I sort of, I think that the project of American democracy, spoken about in this way, presented in this way, can fill this kind of gap. We shouldn’t take it for granted that the only people who should be considered founders in this country were Madison and Hamilton and Washington and Jefferson.

AR: An interesting feature of this moment is that Trump’s authoritarian assault on U.S. institutions has promoted among many liberals a desire to recommit to the Constitution. These voices are calling for Americans to rededicate themselves to the text and to place it back on its pedestal. How do you respond to those who agree about many of the institutional weaknesses you describe but who argue that now is not the time for this “new founding” or for more potential rupture?

ON: We all are rightfully troubled by some of the things that Trump is doing in in this sense. I don’t believe in lawlessness, and I think that there are aspects of the Constitution that we ought to respect even as we work toward fundamental change.

But I see that as a long-term project, a project of building consensus among the American people for these democratic changes. I’m not arguing for shredding the document tomorrow, as I think Donald Trump is doing, in many respects. But in order to work toward that more democratic future, I do think that we need to change the register in which we protest against Trump’s actions. If the thing that trouble us most about him, from my perspective, is not that he’s violating the Constitution as a sacred document, but that he’s violating our rights to democratic agency—that he is dominating ordinary working people, immigrants, populations we should care about—then he’s violating human rights. When you speak in this register, you not only communicate the things that are fundamentally wrong with Trumpism, you also leave open this space for a post-constitutional kind of politics where we are saying we’re not going to get rid of this thing tomorrow.

Americans are very unused to thinking about politics in this way. And I think now is the time to begin making arguments of that kind, partially, because if we don’t, we’re going to stick to a system that, again, has produced Donald Trump.

AR: While you call for a new founding, you push back against pursuing a second constitutional convention in the present. Why is that not the right approach? And what does your wariness about a convention suggest about how best to get from here to there. What are the concrete steps that you see as helping Americans practice and entrench democracy?

ON: Again, there’s a real movement to have a constitutional convention the next couple of years. Unfortunately, that movement is being driven mostly by the right, mostly by corporate interests, mostly by people who hope that the next other constitutional convention would, for instance, make it illegal for us to tax people or would force a balanced budget. These are not changes offered with the intention of making us a more democratic and more just society. And the people who would like us to be more democratic, would like us to be more equitable, have really not organized to the point where we’d be able to compete on that ground, fairly if we had a convention in the near future.

Most people, at the same time, are not on board yet with the idea of getting rid of the Senate or enacting some of these broader, more ambitious changes. I think people have internalized a lot of the lessons, a lot of the rhetoric and hagiography, about the founding that sustains the system we have today, and it’s going to take some time to wrestle people away from that. I also think that we want to come to another convention with a substantial amount of power vested in the hands of ordinary working people. I think that if the people who come to that convention flout democratic principles, if they simply want to recreate an oligarchical system in some way, they know that ordinary people have the power to say no, to shut down the process. And the kinds of power that ordinary people wield most readily in that sense, is labor power shutting down the economy—but you’re not going to get that kind of power in a society with about 6 percent private sector union density.

But I think there are democratic reforms that are accessible now. I think the For the People Act was a good piece of legislation that could have gone farther in certain respects, especially when it comes to statehood. We should revive that kind of thing. These are things that can be passed by a Democratic Congress in the near future. To the end of expanding labor power, we should make it easier to organize. Pass the Pro Act. And I also think we should be using state constitutions, which are easier to amend, and local politics as opportunities to experiment with different forms of democratic governance. Maybe we implement sortition in certain ways at the level of local level, maybe we have other forms of direct participation that prove to us that we do have the right and capacity to govern ourselves more directly than we do now and that builds support, maybe in the future forms a democratic system.

But I think there’s gonna be a lot of experimentation, a lot of arguments that need to be made, a lot of consensus-building that has to happen before we are ready for new constitutional order. But I don’t think that future is too far off. I mean, the world of hundred years ago looks very, very different from America as we know it today.