Is America a Democracy?

Is America a Democracy?

An interview with Osita Nwanevu, author of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Democracy became a watchword of U.S. center-left politics under the first Trump administration. Scholars debated terminology and sifted through the news for signs of backsliding, while pundits argued over the merits of a “pro-democracy” electoral strategy—which often amounted to little more than the idea that Trump was not normal, and the assumption that people just wanted to go back to how things were before he came to office.

In The Right of the People, Osita Nwanevu reexamines our commitment to democracy at a moment of growing threats to the existing constitutional order. Rather than enumerating the dangers of the second Trump administration, however, Nwanevu ranges over U.S. history and political philosophy to raise fundamental questions about our political system. What kind of government have we inherited (and amended) from America’s founders? When we seek to prevent Trump’s power grabs, what exactly are we trying to defend? And can democratic principles inspire us to something greater?

Nick Serpe: The present moment threatens to overwhelm us, but I wonder if you can go back to when you started working on The Right of the People. What kind of book did you want to write, and how did it look different from the reporting and commentary that you had done up to that point?

Osita Nwanevu: I’ve been writing about American politics since the early summer of 2016. Since then, one of the underlying questions on everybody’s mind has been: Do we have a politics that undermines our democratic institutions in some fundamental way?

As I began covering the 2020 Democratic primary and was writing about all of the proposals that were being floated—whether it was Medicare for All or immigration policy or climate change legislation—I got tired of having to say: even if the Democrats win this presidential election, and even if they win Congress, this is probably not going to happen, because the Senate is this way, and the Supreme Court is that way. This question of the nature of American democracy, and what was ailing it, is the through line in a lot of these stories.

When you hear the Republican response to these questions—we’re a republic, not a democracy—I didn’t feel like we had a very robust set of answers. Many people would deny the charge—no, the founders intended for us to have a majoritarian democracy—without actually defending democracy itself. I wanted an opportunity to take things back as far as I could. What is democracy? Why do we like it so much? Do we have as much faith in it as we tell ourselves we should? Is America a democracy? And if it’s not, what would it take to get us there?

These are questions that you can only really take on outside the scope of daily political journalism. You have to dive into Plato and John Stuart Mill and ask fundamental questions. Americans are not urged very often to think about political philosophy, and I wanted to write a book that would be an invitation to do so: don’t just take the premises of our political discourse for granted but think more fundamentally about what kind of society you want to have.

Serpe: Defining democracy might seem like an easy thing to do, but as you show, it gets slippery the deeper you go. What are some of the features of democracy that we shouldn’t neglect? Maybe we can start with the title of your book.

Nwanevu: The title, at first, was mostly a reference to the Declaration of Independence. We all know the beginning part of that famous passage: we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Far less often do we go to the next part, which states that if we are confronted with, or live under, a government or a system that fails to secure those rights for us, we have the right to fundamentally change it. They use the word “abolish.” It is the right of the people to alter or abolish such governments. That’s what they did in 1776.

“The right of the people” means we have a responsibility to evaluate the system and to determine whether or not it matches up with our ideals. And if it doesn’t, we have to have the courage to say that we need to go somewhere fundamentally different. We’re all bound up in a reverential attitude toward the founding and toward the Constitution, which is ironic, given the fact that we have the Constitution and a country in the first place because the founders were willing to make this radical break from what had existed before on the basis of their ideals. More than two centuries later, we have a system that is failing us in many fundamental ways. We see the impacts of that not just in Donald Trump but in our inability to resolve basic policy problems. Things have been messed up for a long time, and we’re all proceeding along this trajectory set by a rickety old political system.

As I was reading and thinking about democracy, the title took on another meaning. It’s very common, obviously, to say that democracy is about instantiating “the will of the people,” some transcendent thing that all of us will into existence. Every time an election happens, or any time a policy is passed, this is what the people of America wanted. There are a lot of problems with this concept. In an election, it is obviously not the will of the entire electorate to have the person who won elected. It was the will of the majority, at best, of the people who voted. Even within majorities, you can have all kinds of contradictory outcomes, with overlapping majorities who agree on certain issues but not on others. Political scientists and mathematicians have considered these questions in a lot of different ways. The upshot is that when we have an election, it’s not necessarily the case that there is a singular majority that is speaking through the result. But what we do know is that democracy secures for us the right to collective decision-making on an egalitarian basis. It’s a system of contests that allow us to share power and change power and distribute power in more just ways than would be the case if we left power to one or a few people. I think “the right of the people” is a phrase that captures more accurately this system of contestation than the phrase “the will of the people.”

Serpe: In one chapter you focus on critics of democracy. Why did you choose the variety of perspectives that you did, and why was it important to spend time with them?

Nwanevu: We’re in a moment when people have lost a lot of faith in democracy. That’s one of the bases upon which Donald Trump has been successful. Most Americans don’t trust their fellow Americans to make good democratic decisions; they believe other people aren’t informed or smart enough. A lot of people share that understanding, no matter where they are on the political spectrum. It’s distressing to me, in the aftermath of the election last year, to hear a lot of liberals and even leftists say, “How could you choose to bring this guy into office again? Maybe there is something that we should distrust within democracy as a system.” I wanted to answer that directly.

Most of the chapter on democracy’s critics is a critique of two books that I thought were particularly interesting: Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels and Against Democracy by Jason Brennan. The Brennan book in particular takes the skepticism of the public’s wisdom to an extreme. He argues we should establish a system where we let experts rule, perhaps deny the vote to people who don’t pass certain tests, and who don’t demonstrate themselves as politically knowledgeable. I take that argument seriously, and I try to work through it.

The whole exercise of that chapter is to understand more deeply through engagement with these critics how democracy actually works; and to answer what I think are real doubts. If left unanswered, they only help the Donald Trumps or the Curtis Yarvins or Peter Thiels who want to move away from democracy toward authoritarianism. We’ll be vulnerable to those efforts if we don’t have strong answers to the strongest critiques that are on the table.

Serpe: While you make the case for democracy, you are fiercely critical of what you call “our democracy” in the United States. What are the sources of undemocratic institutional power in the American constitutional system that deserve the most attention, or are the most underappreciated, even by people who care about democracy?

Nwanevu: If you take democratic principles seriously and look at our political system, certain things jump out. We do not have a system in which people’s votes count equally, or even close to equally. It’s difficult as a matter of political design to have that be the case exactly, but we are very far out of whack with international standards. It’s hard for people to see this squarely, because once you take political equality seriously, the entire edifice of the American constitutional system falls apart very quickly. And the central locus of a lot of things that should concern us is the U.S. Senate.

The design of the Senate was a problem at the Constitutional Convention. Madison didn’t like it, and Hamilton didn’t like it. They thought that equal state representation was going to be an Achilles’s heel of the entire system. But the compromise was forced by the small states in 1787. And things haven’t gotten better. The classic comparison is California and Wyoming: California has 40 million people, and it has the same number of Senators as Wyoming, which has under 600,000 people. Wyoming has sixty-seven times the representation by population size that California does. The Senate distorts policymaking, but it also confirms people to the judiciary and the executive. This is not democratically tenable but we accept this status quo as normal, because we tell ourselves a story about how the House of Representatives balances things out. It doesn’t.

Serpe: Looking to the last six months: on the one hand, we can see how Trump is an outcome of “our democracy”—all of these structural issues that have contributed to bringing us the kind of ruler that we have now. On the other hand, there’s a feeling among a lot of people that we are losing the democracy that we did have, such as it was. Thresholds are being crossed; we’re entering new terrain. How have you been thinking about this?

Nwanevu: It’s a difficult needle to thread. So much of the book is a critique of the Constitution and an exploration of all the ways it’s structurally deficient on democratic grounds. At the same time, we don’t want to get rid of this thing tomorrow. We need a gradual process of democratic experimentation, of building public support for reforms, that will eventually put us in a place where we can replace the document. The Constitution is bad, but we can’t have a lawless president, flouting the Bill of Rights, detaining people and sending them abroad without due process, and violating procedures that we think are just and make sense.

I hope that people find ways to make appeals not to the sanctity and the inviolability of the Constitution, but to democratic principle. With all that Trump is doing, with all that Musk did, the thing that we should be upset by is not necessarily that it stands in contrast to this piece of paper that we’re obligated to respect, but because it is unjust on the basis of ideals that are worth defending.

It’s hard. People have been trained for their entire lives to see the Constitution as the embodiment of democracy, or of liberal ideals. They haven’t been encouraged to think about those principles outside of that document. That’s what I’m trying to do with this book. We don’t have an obligation to any particular political system. I do think we have an obligation to treat each other in certain ways, to have certain aspirations for our society, to structure society in particular ways that are just. And those things should be our North Star—what we’re able to lean upon in constructing a new political order and, perhaps someday, writing a new constitution.

Serpe: Your book culminates in a chapter on economic democracy. Why is it so vital?

Nwanevu: One of the other things that I took an interest in these last ten years were proposals like Bernie Sanders’s employee ownership funds, or the plans on codetermination Sanders and Elizabeth Warren put together for the 2020 primary. It seemed pretty obvious to me that there were democratic principles at stake in the questions of how work is structured and how much voice workers have in corporate governance.

As I started reading, I began to see where democratic theorists had explored the same questions. Robert Dahl spent his entire life trying to understand political democracy, and he eventually came to the conclusion that it was hard to achieve on the basis of abstract principles without also considering whether they apply to the economy. We tell ourselves that democracy is desirable because it’s the means by which we grant ourselves some measure of control over the conditions that shape our lives. But our lives are shaped in many places outside of Washington, D.C., our state houses, and city halls. Our lives are shaped substantially in the places where we work, and it’s not obvious why that boundary shouldn’t be crossed, at least on the level of principle. More and more people, on the left especially, are coming to understand that we are governed in many places. (Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government deserves a lot of credit for putting that at front of mind for a lot of people.)

Frankly, after last year’s election, it did seem to me like the Democratic Party failed on the basis of offering a substantially immaterial understanding of what democracy was. In terms of their own lived experience, many people believed they were being asked to choose between democracy and their economic well-being. If there’s a way that you can talk about democracy that does appeal to people’s economic interests, it can safeguard the health of the democratic ideal in our politics. If you tell people that it’s a means through which they might address their economic conditions, it becomes something even stronger.

To me, this should be the next frontier of progressive policymaking. We have all of these debates now about whether the Democratic agenda should be about zoning or whatever, and I think we can reach higher than that. We can talk about the fundamental structure of our economy. Because these reforms—whether it’s codetermination, worker ownership, work councils—can bolster labor power in a country where it has been decimated. And we don’t fight inequality without building labor power back up. Europeans have a very sophisticated labor infrastructure that includes a lot of these ideas, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t.

After the last six months or so, I don’t think anyone can go around anymore pretending that the economy and our political system exist in different spheres. Or that our political system exclusively acts upon the economy, or could act upon the economy, without the reverse being true. The richest man in the world bought a position in the U.S. government that he used to make policy unilaterally. This is as clear-cut an illustration of the danger inequality poses to democracies as you could ever devise. Many books about our political system talk about some of the problems I write about, whether it’s the Electoral College or the Senate or the Supreme Court, but they never really talk about the structure of the economy beyond saying we should reverse Citizens United and pass campaign finance reform. We should, but we also know the economy pervades and corrupts and shapes our political reality in more insidious ways. If we don’t take those things on, we’re going to have a hard time protecting even political democracy.

Serpe: This isn’t a campaign strategy book. You’re talking about a long-term vision and a project of reconstruction. During the first Trump administration, there was a lot of discussion of democracy, but it felt like there was a clear divide between centrist restorationists and people on the left pushing for deeper reforms. Do you think that split is getting scrambled at all by the more radical actions of Trump’s second administration? Do you see any promising signs of people starting to overcome the shortcomings of mainstream “pro-democracy” politics, or are we still mired in the same problems?

Nwanevu: I certainly think the pro-democracy politics seems moribund. Most Democrats think that message failed in November, and they’re correct. But it’s been striking to me to see that nobody’s prioritizing democratic reform the way they were when Joe Biden came into office. It’s just fallen off the map. And for all the reasons I talk about in the book, I think we actually need to have that conversation. It’s just that you can’t have a conversation about political reforms alone and expect it to resonate with voters unless you’re also talking about the ways in which it will concretely benefit them in their material lives.

With the Democratic Party’s internal debate about direction and strategy, there’s a lot of grasping happening. Zohran Mamdani’s win has given people on the left a lot of hope. He succeeded on the basis of a Bernie-style agenda of social provision. But I think that we can stand to be more ambitious in taking on the fundamental structure of the economy and doing so in a way that brings more people into the left.

The way I talk about economic policy in this book is aimed at getting people who consider themselves liberals, or even centrists, to consider injustices that leftists take for granted. What I’m trying to say is: if you’re concerned about authoritarianism, and you are upset by the specter of Trump doing as he pleases with the government, it should trouble you that you yourself, and many workers who are worse off than you, face that reality in some way every single day that they go to work. That injustice has contributed to our political situation. That’s not an argument I hear very many people on the left making, or as many people as I would like to hear. But I think there’s a lot of potential to bring together different constituencies within the Democratic Party.

It’s also an agenda where you can materially improve people’s lives without spending a whole lot of money. You can do a lot to expand labor rights and give workers in this country more power without government spending any money at all. There’s an obvious way that labor reforms make a lot of sense in very practical terms. Whether you consider yourself a socialist or not, the policies that I’m advocating here can be defended, and should be defended, on basic democratic grounds.

Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at the New Republic and a columnist at the Guardian. He is the author of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Nick Serpe is senior editor at Dissent.