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Is America a democracy? Reactionaries, such as the activist Charlie Kirk and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, say it is not, never was, and shouldn’t be. They justify the antidemocratic features of the Constitution and contemporary politics—the Electoral College, the gerrymander—with the label republican, meaning a representative system with guardrails that protect political minorities (and happen to keep their side in power). Some progressives agree that the United States has never been a true democracy, but they would very much like to change that. They trace the country’s ills to this original failure and imagine the fulfillment of America’s promise in a democratic rebirth that puts real power in the hands of the people.
This is the thesis of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, a new book by Osita Nwanevu, a writer for The New Republic and The Guardian. Nwanevu wants more collective decision making, more equality and freedom, for ordinary American voters and workers. Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, he argues that genuine American democracy would be a good thing, but that creating it would require “the transformation not only of our political institutions but of our economy.”
Nwanevu wields journalism as a cutting tool that’s well oiled with contempt (I’ve been on its receiving end)—a style refined in the social-media polemics of the past decade’s progressive orthodoxy. After Kamala Harris’s defeat in last year’s election, Nwanevu wrote in an X post: “Yep, time to break from the left. Next time, Dems should try saying they’ll do more to crack down on immigration than Republicans. Instead of ‘Defund the Police,’ run a prosecutor. Talk about having a gun and wanting a strong military instead of your identity. Just some ideas.” Habitual sarcasm toward fools who can’t see why you’re right is usually a sign of political weakness, suggesting that you have no hope or intention of convincing the unpersuaded of anything. Contempt is a style of proud and perpetual defeat.
In The Right of the People, Nwanevu subdues his own journalistic reflexes long enough to construct a sweeping argument out of history and political theory. He says at the outset that he’s “dog-tired, already, of the habits of mind that shape American political journalism” and jaded by all the talk about threats to “our democracy” from pundits who don’t know or care what it really is. Democracy in America doesn’t just need to be defended, Nwanevu believes—it needs to be articulated, affirmed, and built: “Democracy has become a specious and suspicious platitude, equally useful to marketers and would-be dictators—a hollow idea for a hollow, unserious time.”
The Right of the People is his ambitious response. Nwanevu describes democracy as collective self-government by equals in which decisions are made by majority rule; explains why this, of all systems, is the one most worth pursuing; answers democracy’s critics, beginning with Plato; argues that democracy has been betrayed in the United States since the country’s founding; and proposes ideas and policies to make democracy an American reality. A subject on this scale doesn’t lend itself to savage takedowns. In the slower, more demanding form of a well-researched, carefully reasoned book, especially in its first half, Nwanevu takes democracy’s opponents and its own vulnerabilities seriously.
[George Packer: The end of Democratic delusions]
And yet, despite the ringing title and subtitle, little in Nwanevu’s “new American founding” is new. The thesis that the Founders drafted an antidemocratic Constitution to protect their own political and economic interests dates back to the groundbreaking work of the Progressive historian Charles Beard, first published more than a century ago and contested ever since. (Nwanevu’s version relies heavily on Michael J. Klarman’s 2016 book, The Framers’ Coup, also much debated.) When Nwanevu leaves theory and history for current politics and policy, he moves onto even more familiar ground. Yes, the Senate is grotesquely unrepresentative, and unless its structure is radically changed (a Constitutional near-impossibility), the people of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico deserve senators of their own. The filibuster exaggerates the Senate’s anti-majoritarianism, giving each resident of Wyoming a far louder voice than a Californian. The unelected, life-tenured Supreme Court upholds laws that take power from common people and give it to corporations. Inequality is at Gilded Age levels, and some CEOs make several hundred times more than their employees. Amazon’s destructive effect on workers’ wages, bodies, and communities has been well documented—the journalist Alec MacGillis wrote an excellent book about it. Far too much power is concentrated in far too few hands. If you don’t think so, you haven’t been following the career of Elon Musk.
Nwanevu’s proposals for a new founding amount to a progressive wish list: End the Senate filibuster, expand the House of Representatives, oblige the states to abide by the national popular vote, impose Supreme Court term limits, raise taxes on wealth, break up monopolies, remove obstacles to unionizing, give workers more say in the running of companies, etc. I’m for most of it. None of it is very original.
What’s the point of saying we need more equality and more democracy? The question is how to get them, beyond simply laying out an agenda. Other progressives, such as the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy, want a second Constitutional Convention; some of them would scrap the 1787 text as hopelessly flawed and start anew. Nwanevu doesn’t place much faith in this constitutional Hail Mary. The idea of a new convention first gained traction more than a decade ago among conservatives, and Nwanevu rightly realizes that they’re better positioned than liberals to determine the outcome. “We are still perhaps generations away from a truly democratic Constitution,” he acknowledges. “But the work toward it—and the work to build a more democratic country—must begin now.” In other words, there’s no escape from politics—from “decades of political persuasion and organization.” Exactly what that effort would look like, Nwanevu leaves to others, noting that “there are details here that political professionals and organizers are going to have to work out.”
But this is where his aspirations run up against the shortcomings of his politics. Though most of the book is a nonpartisan brief for democracy as a good in itself, in the end Nwanevu leaves no doubt that a more democratic America will be a more left-wing one. “Our frustrations with our false democracy have corroded faith in the ideal to the benefit of antidemocratic figures on the right,” he concludes. “Beyond being worthwhile on their own merits, the political and economic reforms we’ve examined constitute a democratic agenda that stands a better chance of defeating the right than the flimsy and predictable rhetoric their opponents have offered up so far.” These “opponents” are left vague, but they seem to be mainstream Democrats who are too timorous to embrace his agenda and take the fight to the right-wing adversary. According to Nwanevu, giving more power to the people will eventually bring the country around to his worldview.
This belief—that ordinary Americans are closer to New Republic and Guardian readers than most of us realize—is a besetting vice of the left, an undisturbable illusion from inside the bubble that forms around political isolation and defeat. It’s based on assumptions about what goes on in the minds of ordinary people Nwanevu shows no sign of having talked to. And it’s belied by election after election, including last year’s.
[Adrienne LaFrance: A ticking clock on American freedom]
In The Right of the People, Donald Trump is barely a minor character. Nwanevu has almost nothing to say about right-wing populism—the strongest current in electoral politics around the world. He can’t explain (and doesn’t try to) why working-class Americans of all ethnicities currently seem to feel more strongly about stricter immigration enforcement than paid family and medical leave. He can’t account for the fact that those Americans who were so alienated from our fake democracy that they didn’t bother voting last year would have been likelier to have gone for Trump than for Harris.
Now that Republican populism, in complete control of government, is showing itself to be a defender of plutocracy, Democrats have a chance to earn the trust of voters as the party that represents the interests and values of the majority. But to do so, Democrats have to know what country they’re living in. Nwanevu’s analysis of the original Constitutional Convention, in which conservative elites thwarted the democratic will of ordinary people for their own selfish ends, remains his vision of our America. It’s a satisfying story, but it doesn’t explain important aspects of 1787—for example, that populists in small states secured the grossly unequal structure of the Senate against the egalitarian arguments of large-state nationalists. And it gets American politics today, with a left-leaning party supported by professional elites (such as Nwanevu and me) and a right-wing party supported by less educated wage workers, nearly backwards. Persuading and organizing your fellow citizens begins with trying to understand how they think. But this is just what Nwanevu’s approach to politics never does.
For Nwanevu, democracy is ultimately about the distribution of power. Distribute it more equally, and the result will be more and better democracy. He has almost no time for Alexis de Tocqueville, who understood self-government as not just collective power to be used but a difficult art to be practiced, mastered, and easily lost. The illiberal atmosphere of the past decade, with a political culture of hostile mobs and mass delusions, doesn’t seem to trouble Nwanevu, as if it has nothing to do with democracy. He likes to quote Walt Whitman and John Dewey, but his own language never conveys their sense that democracy is a spirit, a mode of life—the only form of government that allows human beings to realize their full potential.
Nwanevu is right that democracy’s advocates have to do more than earnestly ring an alarm bell about authoritarianism. They also have to diagnose and fix what’s wrong with an American system that most Americans think has failed them. Majorities of both Democrats and Republicans have recently expressed the view that democracy is under threat and that self-government isn’t working. But if half the country thinks that Trump is the reason for those problems and the other half thinks that he’s the solution, arguing that more democracy will change America for the better isn’t convincing. You first have to put away sentimentality about “the people.” We’re as capable of hating one another and believing lies and making terrible decisions and using power to take away one another’s rights as we are of governing ourselves with clarity and wisdom. “We know more than the Founders did,” Nwanevu asserts in his last pages. “We are more practiced at governance. We are more moral, more just.” At a time of widespread indifference to the destruction of the most basic values that deserve to be called democratic, I’d hesitate to flatter Americans with these claims.
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