Know Your Enemy: The Case for Democracy

Know Your Enemy: The Case for Democracy

Matt and Sam talk to Osita Nwanevu about his new book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Since the start of the Trump era over a decade ago, few words have been deployed as often as “democracy”: how it’s become imperiled, who threatens it, and what to do to defend it. In The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, Osita Nwanevu sets out to understand the true meaning of democracy and defend it from its critics, not just on the right but those liberals who doubt the capacity of ordinary voters to determine their country’s fate in a complex world. From there, he levels a critique of the Constitution for its myriad democratic deficits, then details what refounding the United States as a genuinely democratic country—politically and economically—would require of us.

Listen again: The Wolfe in the White Suit, with Osita Nwanevu (2024)

Further reading:

Osita Nwanevu, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (2025)

— Conservatism’s Baton Twirler, New York Review of Books (2025)

Sheldon Wolin, Fugitive Democracy: And Other Essays (2016)

Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (2016)

Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998)

Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (1922)

Publius, Federalist 49 (1788)

Matthew Sitman, Will Be Wild, Dissent (2023)