During the 2024 campaign, voters were repeatedly told that democracy in America was under threat. Polls show that voters believed that — albeit for different reasons based on their political affiliation. And yet, Donald Trump, who on the campaign trail promised a movement of autocracy and quashing of political dissent, won a second term as president. He won despite striking at the heart of American democracy by trying to steal the 2020 election, then fomenting a violent insurrection when he didn’t get his way.
Trump’s second term has since confirmed those fears about American democracy. His attempt to consolidate control of American society has led to the country becoming a mixed or illiberal democracy, according to experts.
How could this have happened? And how can the country find its way out?
In his first book, “The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding,” journalist Osita Nwanevu argues that the way out of Trump’s authoritarian morass begins with acknowledging that the U.S. is not — and more relevantly, never was — a democracy.
The country was not founded as a democracy. Our institutions, like the Senate and the Electoral College, are not majoritarian. Nor is our economy, with more and more wealth flowing into the hands of the already rich and less power in the hands of workers, democratic.
Politicians, workers and social movements have altered the original arrangements of the Constitution towards democratization over the years. However, the job of democratization is not yet done, Nwanevu argues — not in our political institutions or in our economy. By acknowledging this history, Nwanevu proposes, liberals and the left can adopt a vision of society that puts democratization at the forefront.
“We can see ourselves as founders with as much or more of a right to establish the country we want than Jefferson and Madison and Washington or all these people two centuries before us,” he told me. “We have higher, better, grander aspirations for what America could be than they did. So, why not use that to embark on a project of national refounding?”
Such a vision, he says, can help provide the “connective tissue” to link together the disparate policies that currently comprise what the Democratic Party has to offer. It also provides a forward-looking and ambitious vision of what’s wrong with America today and how we, the people, can fix it in the future — something sorely lacking in center-left politics at the moment.
I spoke with Nwanevu about his book, American democracy, our present political troubles and whether we still have it in our power to begin the world again.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The premise of your book is that the U.S. is not at present a democracy. So, what is democracy and why isn’t the U.S. one at the moment?
Osita Nwanevu: The basic definition of democracy you come to, reading [in] a lot of very, very boring books, which I’ve gone to the trouble of reading over the years, is that democracy is a system in which people who are subject to governance are the ones who would do the governing. In Lincoln’s construction: government of, by and for the people. That’s the basic definition.
As far as I can tell, there are three basic characteristics that a true democratic system is going to have. The first is political equality. Everybody who comes to a collective choice is on equal standing. There’s no elevated class of elites within the body politic. The second thing is responsiveness. Governing structures and institutions respond to the governed public. Democracy isn’t just a suggestion box. And the third thing is majority rule. You tally up everyone’s opinions and you come to a choice that way. Majority rule’s the only one that implicitly takes seriously the equality of all participants: It’s very hard if two people want something and three people want some other thing. For the two to get their way over the three means there’s some fundamental inequality involved.
So these three things — equality, responsiveness and majority rule — are the three basic components of any democratic system. It sounds very common-sensical, but there are ways in which our political system flouts them fundamentally.
I’ve done a number of these talks in Washington, D.C., now where I make a point of saying, “We are now sitting here talking in a city of about 700,000 people with no actual direct say in their own federal government.” There’s a non-voting delegate representing Washington, D.C., Eleanor Holmes Norton, who does not have the right to vote on final passage of legislation in the House. Suffice it to say, this is a city of people who are being governed by the federal government without a real say in their governance. Not an equal say. There are 4 million Americans for whom that is true, most of whom live in Puerto Rico. That’s a non-trivial percentage of the American population that is not living in democracy by any reasonable standard. And then of course, even for those of us who do have representation, that representation is distributed unequally. California, a state of about 40 million people, has the same number of senators as Wyoming, a state of fewer than 600,000 people — fewer people than Washington, D.C. What this means actually is that people in Wyoming have about 60 times the representation as people in California do in the Senate.
Despite us being told in civics class that this is balanced out by the House, it’s not really. The Senate alone shapes the judiciary, shapes the executive branch; you need both chambers to pass legislation. The inequity is there in that chamber and spreads throughout federal governance and shapes policy in very dramatic and important ways.
When you look at those inequities in the Senate and the lack of majority rule in Washington, D.C., what’s the cause of this lack of democracy?
I think that a lot of the democratic problems that we have now are products of the ways in which our federal system was designed at the outset. There’s this classic debate we have between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives will say, “Actually, it’s supposed to be that way because we’re a republic, not a democracy.” And liberals will counter by saying that “the founders wanted us to be a representative democracy, we just have to fix what they did.” I actually tend to think the conservatives are right as a matter of historical perspective, which is not a way of saying that we ought to remain what the founders wanted us to be. We have the power, agency and, I think, the right, as the book argues, to create a more democratic America. But when it comes to understanding why we have the institutions we do, it is simply correct to say the founders were deeply skeptical of and hostile to democracy.
From their perspective, there had been an excess of democracy in America after the American Revolution. The Articles of Confederation had set up a very ineffectual federal government, yet you had very active state governments by contrast. And because there was an economic crisis following the revolution, you saw in those years immediately afterwards poor farmers and other people appealing to state legislatures for various kinds of economic relief that the founders are really disturbed by and felt undermined the right to private property.
And so they came to Philadelphia to craft a new political order, one where the federal government will be able to act upon the states and the American people directly in new ways. You would not be able to use this new system to enact populist economic reforms of the kind that people were pursuing after the revolution. They were very clear about this. We have notes from the convention. We have letters back and forth between the founders talking about what they wanted this new system to do and to accomplish. The very first speech made at the convention is made by Edmund Randolph, where he says that they had been brought there by an excess of democracy and concerns about ways in which democratic politics had undermined the stability of America.
And so they created institutions that they felt were going to quell this. They are republican institutions. All that republicanism means is the distribution of power. You don’t have a king who can do what he wants, you have checks and balances. But there’s nothing intrinsically democratic about that.
The founders wanted to create a republic that was going to be democratically inaccessible to most Americans. The argument of the book, functionally, is that if we take the steps I think we need to democratize what the founders left to us, we will have republican government surely, but a democratic republican government oriented towards representing most Americans and guaranteeing political equality. We only get there by losing our illusions about the nature of the system and why it was designed the way it was. Once we see this as a democratic encounter, we’re going to be in a better place to enact the reforms that I think we need to.
There’ve been a lot of changes in that direction over the history of the United States. The post-Civil War amendments — 13th, 14th, 15th amendments, democratization of the economy under FDR, amendments passed in the Progressive Era and even through changes in legal precedent, like the Rights Revolution. What do you think should happen now and how do you think that might come about?
The book is arguing for two things. It’s arguing for certain near and medium-term reforms. So, I talk about things that are already widely discussed by progressives like adding new states, adding justices to the Supreme Court, getting rid of the electoral college through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. These are all things that I think if we really organized around them, if we had the political leadership in the Democratic Party that was invested in democratic reform, we could see that stuff being done in the next 10-15 years.
But I’m also arguing for something broader than that, which is a kind of movement for democracy akin to the Civil Rights Movement or the movement for women’s rights, where over time we gradually democratize more and more parts of our politics and also more and more parts of our economy so eventually we reach a point, hopefully by the end of this century, let’s say, where we have a new constitutional order entirely. That’s the only way you get to fundamental reforms like replacing or getting rid of the United States Senate. There’s a long-term vision here, an economic vision, and a set of near-term practical reforms are going to be necessary, even just to deal with our immediate political crisis, which is the rise of authoritarianism in this country.
And you can read that as a product of Donald Trump as an individual. But there’s an argument in the book that we’re in this political situation because the institutions that were created by the founders in order to prevent the rise of a demagogue have actually abetted and facilitated the rise of Donald Trump and continued to radicalize the American right. Even just to deal with this particular mess we’re in, I think these near-term reforms are going to be necessary.
But there’s also a long-term horizon here, which is a vision of a more democratic society that we should have as our north star. I think that could be compelling to people who are looking for a sense of direction, who don’t trust our institutions, who don’t trust leaders who hold themselves up as defenders of our institutions. Polls say they’re looking for larger-scale change than what’s on offer from most of our politicians. This I think fills that vacuum.
These democratizing changes in the past or constitutional reinterpretations were backed by large social movements, whether it’s abolitionism, labor in the FDR period, the Civil Rights Movement. Many of them centered on creating and transforming political parties – such as the Republican Party, a party rooted in the people, and the Democratic Party during the New Deal Era. But we’re living through a period of weak parties, hollow parties, weak associational bonds and attacks on labor unions. Does something need to be done to strengthen our associational bonds so that they can lead to a movement?
I certainly think so. As far as political parties are concerned, like the Democratic Party, I think that their weakness and hollowness is a kind of opportunity. That means there’s a vacuum waiting to be filled by people with a sense of purpose and direction beyond the habitual defense of the status quo.
As far as economic institutions are concerned, I think that they were the kind of institutions that, beyond materially making people’s lives better, beyond materially addressing concerns about working conditions and wages, they were civic groups. They were training grounds for democracy. They were how people learned how to work together with people who were different from them, talk across differences, to compromise, to learn how to articulate themselves. Those kinds of capacities have atrophied in the American people in the last several decades. So I think we have an interest, even for that reason alone, for reviving unions and also other kinds of institutions that can build worker power because they’re so vital as venues where people develop the skills we need for democracy. Democracy is something you need to practice more than every couple of years by going to the polls and dropping a ballot in a box.
I think it’s important that people feel really embedded and embodied in democracy because it makes it more robust. And it deepens people’s connections. If you think of democracy [as something] that your civics teacher told you was important a million years ago and that’s all it is to you, your connection to it is weaker than if democracy is the way that you got your wages increased or it was the way that you came together with your fellow workers to fix something that was bothering all of you at work. If it’s a lived part of your own experience, one that you can connect to your own material life, it means something more to you. And it means that you’re much less likely to throw it away for some authoritarian who promises you this or that.
In your interview with Ross Douthat on this topic, you said you think the Democrats should pass the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act as part of this agenda. It seems like you’re thinking of this along the lines of focusing on rebuilding this associational strength, on rebuilding civic bonds and to create the necessary to push for further democratization.
That’s exactly right. It would also protect political democracy in another way. Inequality, we have to understand now, is a fundamental risk to the project of democracy in America.
I could not have come up with a caricature more suitable for the purposes of making this argument than the spectacle of watching one of the wealthiest human beings on Earth, who donated over $260 million to help Donald Trump’s campaign last year, get a position in the federal government where he got free rein to fire thousands of workers and destroy programs. We cannot have a democratic society with this level of inequality.
Talk about getting rid of Citizens United and campaign finance reform and lobbying reform, all of that is fine and good. But one of the reasons that so many of those efforts have been so unsuccessful is, thus far, because the wealthy use the power and the resources that they develop in an unequal economy where workers have no power to corrupt and dominate our political system. You can’t consider these realms separate. The power that working people have or don’t have within the economy ends up influencing, shaping the health of our political system. Right now, when workers are dominated in the economy, that means they’re going to be dominated in our politics. That’s another reason why, beyond the civic association needs in building more labor power, elevating or boosting the power of workers within the economy for this other reason is going to be essential for safeguarding any hope we have of creating that democratic society.
We are on a path to having a few trillionaires in the world pretty soon. I don’t know if democratic society survives that level of economic concentration. We better think about how to fundamentally restructure our economy so we’re not functioning under the rule of golden elites.
I covered campaign finance for a long time and I’ve been thinking that our conceptions of corruption need to be rethought and not focus so tightly on quid pro quo regulations on public officials or politicians and refocus on the way there is too much concentrated wealth in the hands of the few to spend around to influence politics and how it undermines democracy.
That’s right. You know Amazon comes into a community and says “we’d really like to build a data center here, but we’re only going to do it if taxes are reduced by this amount or you don’t regulate us in this or that way.” That’s not illegal, per se. But it’s obviously an example of people using their resources and using their wealth to shape politics in a way that we all kind of dislike.
The concentration of economic power matters in ways that you can’t just slap regulations on. You do have to fundamentally think about the structure of economic firms and the way our economy works in general to prevent the wealthy from completely upending democratic politics.
There was a very recent example of this with the Jimmy Kimmel suspension. It was fueled by the duopoly of Sinclair and Nexstar, which control most television affiliates and were able to pressure ABC to pull Kimmel off the air amid threats from the FCC. Do you feel like that can break through to people on how this economic concentration is undemocratic?
I hope so. I think that the more important thing about the conversation around the killing of Charlie Kirk is that it sort of gives a material grounding to this very nebulous debate about cancel culture, free speech and employment.
People are trying to construct these norms that they don’t really believe in about when people should be punished for speech. You could make the argument that it’s a part of your free speech to say that somebody should lose their job for saying something offensive to you. The opposite [argument] is it should be difficult to fire anybody for anything. As a practical matter, we should be protecting workers for their non-work behavior. And the only way that happens is if we move away from a system of at-will removal to just cause, like most of the world has. We’re one of the few economies in the entire world where you can be fired for basically any reason your employer says.
Well, one concrete way to do something about this is to change the nature of employment in this country. Beyond protecting people from being fired for their private speech, it would also make it more possible to organize labor unions. I hope that this is a case study in the injustice or at least the impracticality of a system where your employer can let you go for any reason.
“We care about democracy, I think, because we have this intuition that we are entitled to a measure of control over the decisions that shape our lives.”
One of the sharper things I thought you did at the beginning of the book is getting into how our politics today is obsessed with “our democracy.” You say that this focus is hollow. How so?
It’s a strange thing to make a case, just as a matter of political strategy, for your own candidacy as Democrats did in the last election on the basis of your defense of institutions that most Americans don’t believe are working. Most Americans, I don’t think, are aware of all the different structural problems that I define in the book, but there is a real sense that our supposedly democratic institutions don’t actually work democratically or function democratically in the interest of ordinary Americans. Most people know even if they can’t explain exactly why. I think people perceive the hollowness of the Democratic message. They know intuitively that the people who get their way in Washington are the wealthy and corporations.
When you frame your candidacy or political project as defending democracy, many Americans will think, “Well, I don’t know if we have much of a democracy to lose in the first place,” so why not consider voting for Donald Trump? It’s dangerous to build a case for democracy on top of institutions that aren’t working.
One thing I noticed in the 2024 campaign was how Kamala Harris started out talking about freedom — the freedom to choose, the freedom to join a labor union — and then the campaign shifted to this democracy talk that revolved a lot more around defense of institutions and appeals to former Republicans, bringing out Liz Cheney. Maybe that exemplifies the problem that you’re identifying here. How should they go about it differently?
The first is to recognize that there are enemies of democracy within mainstream American politics, not just Donald Trump.
It’s important for Democrats to recognize and to say that the threats to democracy are not just embodied by Donald Trump and his authoritarianism. It is embodied by a Republican Party that does not fundamentally believe in democracy and is willing to defend anti-democratic institutions on that basis. This is something conservatives increasingly say out in the open. Sen. Mike Lee said a couple of years ago that democracy is not the objective. They want liberty, they want prosperity, but democracy is something else. Charlie Kirk, before he died, decried democracy.
Democrats need to be up front, if they want to defend democracy, that the Republican Party does not fundamentally believe in it and that’s going to remain true even when Donald Trump goes [away] because it’s a principle of conservative ideology. If they don’t do that, I think they’re going to be very, very poorly positioned to make some of the reforms that I would be for, which are going to be for reforms that are passed on a partisan basis. Democracy is a partisan question in American life. They are going to be caught flat-footed in any attempt to uphold and defend it unless they’re honest about that.
There’s an ongoing debate about what size the tent the Democratic Party should have here and what the overriding vision of the party should be. And it sure seems like there isn’t an overriding vision at the moment. The party is kind of a mess, for lack of a better description. Do you think that this vision you’re offering can serve as an overriding ideology or narrative for the party? And do you think that it expands the tent that it has now?
I think it does. I think it wraps in a lot of different constituencies at once. Obviously it includes Democrats who are rightfully troubled, again as I, about Donald Trump and the rise of authoritarianism in our society. It’s a vision of democracy that also connects that part of the Democratic Party to the Left. The argument you should make is that if you are troubled by authoritarianism you should not just be resistant to Donald Trump, you should be resisting authoritarianism embedded within the everyday structures of work. And then also people outside the immediate Democratic Party constituency who might be curious about Donald Trump, or at the very least dislike and distrust our economic institutions, now have a vision of democracy that’s not just about protecting and upholding them. It’s an effort to knit together these three vital constituencies under one banner. It’s a way of talking about democracy in a high ideal way, yes, but one that is also grounded in material needs.
People felt that they were being asked to choose between democracy as an abstraction and paying their rent and paying their mortgage and the price of groceries. Well, this is a way of talking about democracy in a way where you say to people, this is actually the means by which you materially empower yourself. I think it is a vision that fulfills a lot of different needs and desires and brings people together. But, I don’t know, the proof will be in the pudding if people adopt it. We’ll just have to wait and see. This is just conceptually possible to me.
Do you see any current politicians leading the way on this?
No. I’m sorry to say that I don’t. There’s still time between now and 2028. But, I’m especially hopeful that politicians on the left take an interest in this. We undersell how our politics as leftists are built upon the desire to expand democracy and build it into other parts of our lives. People associate us with social programs that we obviously need. Medicare for All. Climate policy. Improving our education system. Housing.
These are important, but I think there are people who don’t really understand that we are also about democratic empowerment — giving people more agency in their lives than they presently have. And giving people more for the work that they actually get. Not just getting given stuff by the government, but also saying you are democratically entitled to more agency at your workplace and more of the wealth that your labor generates.
That basic level of agency and a sense of being entitled to the fruits of your labor, that’s a point of connection that we can do more to build into our political appeal and our political project.
It seems rather different than the grab bag of policies that we tend to see now with the Democratic Party. They tend to campaign by promoting a policy for everything — universal child care, expanding health care, etc. But there isn’t necessarily a connecting vision they’re providing here.
I think that’s right. This isn’t so much in the book as it is in the writing I hope to do moving forward. Even to the extent that we think about child care or climate policy or health care or abortion rights, all these different parts of the Democratic agenda. People look at that constellation of ideas and they don’t see what the connective tissue is.
It’s very hard to explain to people what it means to be a progressive in ways that I don’t think it’s hard to explain to people what it means to be a conservative. Conservatives can explain this all very, very easily in ways that I think facilitate their political appeals and also give them a sense of direction when they’re trying to figure out what to do as a matter of policy. Progressives don’t have that. They have a lot of policy ideas, policy concerns, constituencies that they care about, but without the connective tissue.
One thing I’ve thought a lot about is the extent to which democracy, one of the background ideas of democracy, might be that connective tissue. We care about democracy, I think, because we have this intuition that we are entitled to a measure of control over the decisions that shape our lives. That is why we deserve the right to vote as a matter of politics.
That’s why I argue we deserve rights as workers in the workplace and democratic agency as workers. I also think that’s why women deserve the right to choose. I think that’s why we should have a health care system where people aren’t bankrupted because they can’t afford medical care or die because they can’t afford medical care. That’s why we should have a climate policy that says that we are not just arbitrary victims of the circumstance of having a hurricane knock down our community. We have some kind of agency that allows us to live at our own direction. There’s something about that concept of living the lives that we want and ought to, rather than being victims or subjects without any power or control, that unites different parts of the progressive agenda. Maybe democracy is the thing that pulls it all together.