After the great rebuke of 2024, many Democrats seem to think their party needs to become more moderate. But there’s another theory potent on the American left that believes Donald Trump’s election shows not just that American democracy is in danger, but that it doesn’t really work at all. What the country needs isn’t just a new policy agenda; it might need the kind of constitutional revolution — from adding new states, to packing the Supreme Court — that some Democrats already flirted with under Joe Biden.
That’s the kind of argument that my guest today makes in his new book, “The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.”
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Ross Douthat: Osita Nwanevu, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Osita Nwanevu: Thanks for having me.
Douthat: We’re going to talk about how radical ideas and radical critiques from the left might end up being very influential in Democratic Party politics going forward. But before we get there, I want to go back to the last election, which the Democrats had basically presented themselves as defenders of our democracy against the threat of authoritarianism, fascism, or at the very least, a dangerous kind of populism.
And what you saw in 2024 was the failure of that argument, because in the end, Donald Trump didn’t just win the Electoral college, he won the popular vote. Our democracy as it exists today voted for him. So to start, could you talk a little bit about that Democratic message and why, from your perspective, it failed?
Nwanevu: Sure thing. So I think many voters went to the polls in November understanding the election as being a referendum on democracy in precisely that way. I think the people thought that they were being asked to judge, on one hand, a set of abstract ideals that their civics teacher might have told them was important in high school or grade school; on the other, the price of groceries and the cost of living.
I think a lot of Americans looked at that choice and they said: well, hell, I’m going to go with my own economic well-being — the hope, which I think was a misguided hope, that Donald Trump’s going to improve conditions within the economy. And so the abstractions that Democrats ran on, the conception of democracy that they put forward, wasn’t compelling for a lot of different reasons.
Early last year, Gallup did a poll where they found that more than 70 percent of Americans didn’t believe that democratic institutions were functioning properly. So when Democrats came out and said that our democracy needs to be protected and saved, I think a lot of Americans doubted whether they had a functional democracy to save to begin with.
So they invested their hopes in Donald Trump, partially because they believed that he could be somebody who would unstick the institutions, tear them down, reformulate them in some kind of way.
And so, I think that this election can be read both as an indictment of the particular way Democrats talked about democracy in their pitch to American voters, and also as a culmination of, I think, basic antidemocratic deficits within the Constitution that have empowered Donald Trump and brought him to the White House yet again.
Douthat: In your description, I think you can see two potential takeaways that people trying to reformulate ideas for the Democratic Party could draw from the election. The idea that voters were asked to choose between abstractions and kitchen table issues, you get the argument that, basically, what the Democratic Party needs to do is just focus on those kitchen table issues, have policy debates, argue about specific issues — health care, education, the environment, and so on — and not get caught up in larger theories of how democracy works.
But you do have a larger theory of how democracy doesn’t work in America right now, and how it should work. So, give me your definition of democracy. What is a democracy?
Nwanevu: A democracy is a system in which the governed govern. You can read a lot of political theory, you can read the classics — I don’t think you get a definition that is more succinct than that. Another formulation is Lincoln’s government “of, by, and for the people.”
And so, in a democracy, the people themselves are the people who govern. It’s not entrusted as a responsibility to some alien authority, some external power, some other hierarchy. People take on the responsibility and burden and promise of governing themselves. That’s the core idea.
Douthat: And how do you know that America in 2025 is not by the people and for the people, that the governed are not actually governing?
Nwanevu: So I think there are three characteristics of any democratic system. The first is political equality. People are equal in standing when they come to make a collective choice. So when it comes to the Senate, for instance, we have one of the most malapportioned upper houses in the world. I think only Argentina and Brazil, among our peers, are more malapportioned than ours.
The second characteristic is responsiveness. There’s real authority among the public — when they come together to make a collective choice, things happen. And the last thing I would say is majority rule. But I think, as I write, in very, very basic ways, our system flouts all three of these things.
Over the course of talking about this book, I’ve done a lot of events in Washington, D.C. That is a city of about 700,000 people in this country without full representation in Congress. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the one delegate they have, cannot cast a vote in the final passage of legislation in the House.
There are four million Americans for whom that is true. Most of them live in Puerto Rico. They are governed by the federal government without a full, equal say in governance. That, by any reasonable definition, is not a democratic arrangement. It’s something that’s troubled people for many years in this country.
But even beyond that extreme, those of us who do have representation have very unequally apportioned representation. Classic example: California is a state of about 40 million people. If it were its own country, it’d be one of the 40 largest countries in the world. It is one of the largest economies in the world. It has the same number of senators as Wyoming, a state of fewer than 600,000 people — fewer, in fact, than Washington, D.C. That means functionally that people in Wyoming have about 60, or more than 60, times the representation than people in California do in the Senate.
I don’t think that’s merely an academic point. You hear in school that this is balanced out by the House. It’s not really, in a substantive way. The Senate shapes the judiciary, it shapes the executive branch, and obviously, it’s a veto point for the passage of even ordinary legislation.
Right away — and I think the Senate is the crux of a lot of this — we have a fundamental piece of our system that flouts basic democratic principles and basic democratic intuitions, again, more so, by international comparison, than some of our peers. No country gets it perfect. There’s no ideal democracy out there in the world.
But I think, it’s fair to say that a system is not really democratic, as much as it might purport to be one.
Douthat: What about the economic component? How is a vision of economic equality, in your view, essential to having a functional democracy or having a democracy that is actually democratic?
Nwanevu: This is one of the central provocations of the book. The background intuition that people have in mind about democracy, even if they don’t know it consciously, is that we are entitled to an amount of say, a basic level of say, over the conditions that shape our lives. We’re not mere victims of circumstance helplessly thrown about by the universe. We’re not the peons of particular hierarchies of people who are more powerful than us or more privileged than us. That’s a basic democratic intuition.
One of the things that has gone around progressive circles over the last decade or so is you have people like Elizabeth Anderson, for instance, who make the point that we are governed in more spaces than just the political sphere. We spend about a third of our time at work. The decisions that are made at the top of corporations we work for often affect us more directly, intimately, and immediately than decisions made in Washington, D.C., or in our statehouses or in city hall. And yet we feel that we’re not democratically entitled to any kind of voice in those spaces, except for maybe hoping that we can act through government to regulate the economy. When we try to do that, we find that Washington, D.C., and political institutions are often dominated by wealthy people — our bosses.
When it comes to solving the concrete problems of inequality, worker power — the absence of worker power, the absence of worker voice — is one of the things that’s contributed to our current economic situation. That is a democratic problem, and I think it suggests democratic solutions as well.
Douthat: All right, let’s do an excursion back in time to the American founding, because one of your arguments is that America was not actually intended to be a democracy.
Nwanevu: Right.
Douthat: That in fact, we should understand our founding almost in terms of a kind of oligarchic coup.Talk a little bit about your view of the founding.
Nwanevu: So when you raise some of the objections that I’ve raised about the nature of our system, conservatives will often say: well, we’re a republic, not a democracy. I think liberals, by habit, say: No, no, no, that’s not true — the founders actually intended democracy, but they messed up in 50 million different ways.
I think the conservatives have the better side of the argument when you actually look at the historical record. People should understand that the Constitution is forged in a particular political and economic context. At the end of the American Revolution, we’re in a state of true economic crisis. A lot of reasons for this — land is destroyed and ravaged, slaves escape, trade restrictions are imposed by the British.
Poor farmers, especially people in the back country across the nation, are appealing for debt relief and for tax relief. They’re asking if they can pay their taxes and their debts in kind with goods. They’re asking for different measures of economic assistance. One of the main things they’re asking for actually is the circulation of paper money. There’s a shortage of hard currency in the country, and they believe that the circulation of paper money will make it easier for them to pay down their obligations.
This deeply, deeply troubles the wealthiest people in America. There’s a belief that this undermines the stability of contracts, that it frustrates or complicates the credit worthiness of the country. And there’s this belief, too, that people are in economic distress because they hadn’t been frugal enough. They were spending on gambling and drinking, on luxuries imported from Europe. There’s a lot of —
Douthat: My understanding is that they were in fact spending on drinking to a substantial degree.
Nwanevu: Well, yes, yes, of course. To a substantial degree — but is that the source of economic distress across the country? Probably not, but there’s a lot of colorful writing that Woody Holton goes through in “Unruly Americans,” if people want another read on this.
So people are successfully appealing to state governments for this relief, with the exception of a state like Massachusetts — very conservative in its design with the state Constitution. It resists these appeals. In fact, it increases taxes. And then you have this uprising, which people may have heard about in school, Shay’s Rebellion — this armed uprising that is eventually put down. And it alarms the founders significantly.
There have been abortive attempts to rework the articles and to reform government before then, but they come to understand that state governments had gotten out of control — they were actually directing the economic situation in the country — and something needed to be done. They needed a stronger sovereign federal government that could act directly upon people, that could request taxes and revenue directly from people, and that would actually be less accessible democratically than the prevailing order had been.
They come to Philadelphia in 1787 with that understanding. And this is not a matter of speculation. One of the very first speeches made at the convention was made by Edmund Randolph of Virginia, where he says: Look, the thing that actually brought us together here is the excess of democracy at the state constitutional level.
We have pamphlets and obviously the Federalist Papers. We have a real body of information that informs us as to what they were thinking when they designed some of these institutions. And it’s not a history that I think most Americans are familiar with or are encouraged to think about, but it matters. It matters in getting us to understand why the institutions we have function the way that they do.
But I also think it gives us a kind of permission. This was not some kind of sacred compromise that came down a mountain on tablets. This was a particular contingent agreement, and we should consider ourselves empowered — with all we know now about governance, with the values we have now — to make dramatic changes to the political system, with just as much right as the founders did.
Douthat: Right. But it is also, in a way, an invitation that Americans have been taking, accepting since barely after the ink was dry on the Constitution. Because I think there’s another narrative which says that a number of influential founders, for different reasons, envisioned a more aristocratic form of republican government than what we’ve ended up with. But some of that just evaporated at the start.
Nwanevu: Right.
Douthat: Founders did not anticipate political parties. Founders imagined a version of the Electoral College — or at least some did — where, literally, the electors would be wise men deliberating — and that collapses very quickly. Then you have a sequence across the 19th and 20th century where the country steadily becomes more responsive to democratic majorities. This starts with Andrew Jackson, who is currently a figure in great disrepute on the left, but —
Nwanevu: Democratizes the system.
Douthat: Democratizes the system, in a way that once led to him being celebrated in the old days of the Jefferson–Jackson dinners that the Democratic Party used to have, and all of the narratives around New Deal liberalism, which celebrate Jackson as a democratizer.
But you have the expansion of the franchise over time to women, to freed slaves, African Americans, and so on. By the time you reach the Civil Rights Era and the middle of the 20th century, you have a landscape where that founding constitution — you have the direct election of senators, right? So America becomes, you would agree, much more democratic?
Nwanevu: Of course. I wouldn’t dispute that at all. We’re living in a much more democratic society today in all kinds of ways than we were in 1787. I wouldn’t dispute that.
The case I’m making, though, is that the central institutions that the founders set up in 1787, in many ways, survive today. Yes, we have the direct election of senators — that is true. But we have equal apportionment still, which is one of the central compromises that they made at the convention. For all they might have distrusted and disliked democracy, Madison and Hamilton both thought that the principle of equal apportionment went too far in advantaging the small states. They say this at the convention. They say this in the Federalist Papers.
The small states were going to walk out, in fact —
Douthat: You got to keep Rhode Island happy.
Nwanevu: You got to keep them happy. But Gunning Bedford of Delaware says during the convention: We will secede. We will join some other foreign power if we don’t get a preservation of equal apportionment, which we’d had under the Articles of Confederation, in the new system.
So that feature, which Madison warns about quite cogently at the convention, continues to be perverse and continues to generate perverse outcomes for us to this day. People have talked about the Senate in this respect, especially, that if population trends continue, a smaller and smaller proportion of the country will win a greater and greater proportion of the seats. This is going to continue to distort governance, and actually, the distortions are going to worsen.
We have a presidency that we’ve seen, in the last six months especially, I think, validate some of the concern people had at the founding about whether they’re creating some kind of monarchical or quasi-monarchical executive.And so, I think it’s time for us to consider, to the extent that people are angry about Donald Trump, again, what are the elements of the system that allowed Donald Trump to rise as a political figure and that have sustained him? I think they’re, to an ironic extent, some of the elements that the founders hoped would prevent somebody like Donald Trump from coming into power.
Douthat: So what should we do? In brief brush strokes, give me the new Constitution that you think the United States should have.
Nwanevu: We could start with the thing that I think most Americans think about when they think about the undemocratic nature of our system, a reform that most Americans have supported for a long time, which is dealing with the Electoral College. There’s a proposal on the table now, actually something that’s being acted upon in states across the country, to move to a national popular vote by interstate compact, without needing a constitutional amendment. I mean, the amendment process itself is one of the things that needs amending very, very hard — one of the hardest constitutions in the world to make substantive changes to is ours. So if you get a number of states totaling up to the 270 you need to win a presidential election, to say, “We’re actually going to throw our electoral votes to the popular vote winner,” you functionally worked around the electoral college. That’s one thing.
I’ve advocated in the past for adding new states to the Senate. I think that there is an ideological imbalance now for all kinds of reasons in who gets represented the most and most reliably in that body. But that’s not a permanent fix to the Senate at all. It’s actually taking advantage of the equal state distribution.
Douthat: So that would be most likely Puerto Rico and D.C. ——
Nwanevu: Most likely Puerto Rico, D.C., the territories.
Douthat: So an ideal Senate — or would there be a Senate at all?
Nwanevu: Well, that’s another question. I think it’s worth exploring. It’s a kind of radical idea, but it’s an argument that you have to make on the basis of getting people to understand, not only that the system is not democratic, but what is the value of democracy, actually, to begin with?
Douthat: So, one reason I wanted to have this conversation is that I think that the focus on Donald Trump and the focus on some of the very real radicalism of some of the ideas on the table on the political right, right now, has obscured a little bit just how much radical enthusiasm for structural change there is on the left.
In the Biden administration, there were both a set of concrete legislative pushes for things like a big new voting rights bill — that kind of thing. And then there were just a lot of proposals. These run the gamut from, as you’ve already mentioned, statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, to big changes to the Supreme Court. Now that the Supreme Court and Donald Trump are not in open war with each other, I think the left-wing critique of the Supreme Court is going to come back probably in a big way.
And the filibuster. We haven’t even talked about the filibuster as a very concrete way that the Senate itself frustrates merely majoritarian efforts and requires super majoritarian efforts. My expectation is that all of these ideas are going to be part of the political conversation on the left and are going to be very influential in the next Democratic administration.
What I can’t quite figure out is how they fit into actual practical politics. I’m just curious how you see that. Do you think that a Democratic candidate for president in 2028 or beyond should be running on this kind of narrative and saying: look, we need, if not a new founding, at least something along those lines, where if we take power, we really are going to make big changes to how the Senate works?
Nwanevu: Well, I can tell you what I’d like to see happen. I think it would be a mistake to do what we did in the Biden administration again, which is take these reform ideas in isolation and not connect them to a real, material politics that most people come to politics to try to adjudicate.
If we’re talking about the Senate filibuster, and it’s purely a matter of, “Well, this is how counter-majoritarian the system is by design.” And we’re not talking about, “No, this is why we can’t pass the health care reforms that we think we need. This is why we can’t meet your material needs, improve the economy to your benefit” — if it’s merely an abstraction, it’s a waste of time. If you connect it to economic concerns, material concerns, I think there’s real potential there.
At the level of abstraction, most Americans have been told that this system works all their lives, from the time they’re in school, by politicians on both sides of the aisle — up until Donald Trump who said, no, maybe we should — what was it? — revoke parts of the Constitution, and then dialed it back.
Douthat: Everything is negotiable.
Nwanevu: Everything is negotiable. Right, exactly. Most Americans, even to the extent that they might be concerned or be troubled by Donald Trump and are talking about our democracy, have a conception of the system that is: We currently live in a democracy and need to protect and preserve it.
You go out to these No Kings protests and what people say is: I’m really, really upset, and I’m really, really angry that Donald Trump has violated the Constitution.
People say that, I think, with all the sincerity one can have. I think they say it for good reasons. I’m not somebody who believes that the Constitution is wholly bad. I like the Bill of Rights quite a bit. I think that we should have stable procedures to adjudicate how governance works, even as I’m advocating for a new system eventually.
But something about that register has to change in order for us to consider reforms at the level and at the scale of time I’m talking about. I think I’d like to see people, whether it’s candidates or activists, go out there and say: What really makes me mad is that Donald Trump is violating the principle that we have a right, fundamentally, as human beings, to self-governance. Donald Trump is doing things that abrogate our freedom as individuals.
Douthat: As an outsider to these inter-left debates, I feel like you were on the most solid ground a minute ago where you were saying, no, the key is to link debates about self-government to some powerful economic issue.
It seems to me, if you stand up and say: Donald Trump is violating people’s right to self-government — there are people who will care about that — but you have to say: and the concrete effect is this public policy that you want cannot be passed.
Nwanevu: I would say beyond that. I think that you say that because when you talk about democracy on that level as a fundamental human entitlement, you say, I oppose Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, and I oppose that as a matter of principle. And I also oppose our bosses, our executives, our investors in the economy, lording it over us at work and in the wider economic system.
You say that we have a system that is undemocratic, not just because we have broken political institutions, we have broken economic institutions. And we should work toward fulfilling the promise of American democracy, not just by instituting these political changes, but by really reforming the economy so that we get our due from work, so that we’re more empowered, and we have more rights.
Douthat: If you were put in charge tomorrow of a new Democratic administration’s strategy to push some set of proposals that you would think would bring the Senate to a crisis point — like, if you’re going to use the filibuster, these things aren’t going to pass — and this will create the opening to, at the very least, abolish the filibuster, if not to also add new states, what do you think are the most concrete things that Democrats could be promising there?
Nwanevu: I think the first item of economic legislation I’d put forward on the table is the PRO Act. I think that, again, there is a democratic character to arguments for more worker power.
Douthat: This is just for clarity’s sake — this is an act that changes rules around unions and unionization.
Nwanevu: That’s right. It obviates state right-to-work laws. It makes it easier to organize. It fights back against worker — or rather, employer — efforts to make unionization more difficult. That is, I think, the central piece of economic legislation. And you make a democratic argument for it. You say that we are now a party — and the Democratic Party, aptly named — that is going to fight for democracy in all of its forms, in all the ways that we can.
That means resisting authoritarianism from the right. That means reforming our political institutions. That means granting each and every one of you, as workers, what you’re due — in terms of your voice and in terms of what you’re entitled to as a matter of pay — at work. That, I think, is a cohesive argument rooted in, again, a conception of democracy that is not just about casting a ballot every two to four years. It’s a deeper conception of democracy that is rooted in principles about self-governance. That links you up with this whole both political and economic agenda.
And I think it’s a novel way for the left specifically. We’ve invested a lot of time and a lot of energy talking about social democratic programs, whether it’s Medicare for All, Green New Deal — this kind of thing. Labor power, although everyone will tell you it ought to be central to the agenda, and generally I believe that — it’s not been as central to the campaigns of someone like Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani.
Douthat: But partially, that’s just because the labor movement has declined substantially, and so few Americans are in labor unions. So it does seem like you are, in a way, raising your degree of difficulty, as opposed to a debate over Medicare for All, because with Medicare, all Americans — or almost all Americans — expect to benefit from it. Everyone has some contact with it. You don’t have to explain to people why Medicare might be good for them. With labor politics, you do have to explain to the vast majority of Americans who aren’t in unions — you have to sell them on unions because they’re not invested already in this.
Nwanevu: I think that’s right, but I would actually flip it. One of the reasons we don’t have Medicare for all is that it’s been hard for us to do social democratic policy in general. If people actually perceive, “Well, you say, this is for me and for everyone, but you’re taking money out of my pocket to give it to somebody else who I don’t know. Some stranger who hasn’t worked as hard as me” — that’s been the fundamental barrier to the success of social democratic reform in this country.
Most people or workers — most adults, anyway — are usually not bosses, usually not managers. So even if they’re not in a union, I think you’d make a case that they’re entitled to more authority, more voice, more agency than they currently have. And that’s the case even if you’re making a solid amount of money. Even if you’re doing well now, what’s actually protecting you from having your employer lay you off tomorrow or next week, without your say or without any kind of voice or any kind of ability to resist?
Everybody, I think, who works in this country has things that they would complain about at work.
Douthat: Just for the record, not me. I love my job. It’s fantastic. Just in case anyone is listening.
Nwanevu: No, I’m sure the conditions at The New York Times are perfect.
Douthat: Zero complaints.
Nwanevu: So it would actually flip that. I think that there’s more of a kind of cynically self-interestedness within labor politics than the social democratic politics we’ve tried, where you’re relying a lot upon the hope that people are empathetic toward other populations. I think that we can do that, but historically, we’ve been able to do that on the basis of having a strong labor infrastructure.
Labor is one of the key political factions or political power bases for the Democratic Party as they build the New Deal society, as they build the Great Society. So maybe through labor, you can socialize people into having a more capacious understanding of people they should care for.
Douthat: OK. Using this example, I want to ask a question that takes us slightly back toward theories of democracy. Suppose, having followed American politics through a number of presidential cycles, I can imagine a world where a Democratic presidential candidate wins an election, wins 51 or 52 percent of the vote. Has a set of ideas — maybe the PRO Act is one of them — that polls reasonably well during the election.
Then they come into power and they start trying to pass legislation. The legislation gets critiqued in various ways. There are arguments about it. Voters pay more attention to it. And suddenly, if you look at the polls, the legislation suddenly becomes unpopular.
This is one particular example of what gets called the thermostatic trend in public opinion, where ideas are popular, and then they’re implemented, and then the public swings in the opposite direction.
Nwanevu: Yeah. Of course.
Douthat: And I want to know how that fits into your theory of how democracy should work, because we’ve just lived through six months where Donald Trump and Stephen Miller as his aide have repeatedly come out and said: Look, we just won an election with a majority of the vote. We represent the will of the people — not the Supreme Court, not the Senate, and so on.
And there’s a way in which that’s wrong because, if you look at public opinion polls, lots of Trump’s ideas are unpopular, but there is a reasonable point there, which is that you have an election, you govern on the basis of the outcome of the election. It seems to me when we talk about the will of the people, we’re talking about something that is very fickle and changeable, that is different six months after an election and six months before an election, and part of the case for a convoluted counter-majoritarian system like the U.S. is that it’s hard to really get at the will of the people just through elections alone.
Nwanevu: So, I address this in the book by saying I don’t think “the will of the people” is a real thing. When you read polls and you say the majority of American people believe this on taxes, and another majority believes this on environmental policy, and a majority believes this on a woman’s right to choose, and so on — these are not all the same group of people. There’s not one “the majority” that’s being represented across all of those issue spaces. So the concept of “the will of the people” is very, very troubled, theoretically.
One of the reasons I call my book “The Right of the People” is because I think that phrase better encompasses what I think is actually going on in democracy. In a democracy, you have a stable set of procedures where people have an equal chance to contest power, and a majority is the way that we adjudicate who wins a particular contest. If you’re a minority now, you might be in the majority next time. That’s a dynamic process. There’s no one point at which we say we fully, transcendently, spiritually — whatever you want to say — have represented the will of the people in this electoral process. We should understand democracy as something more contingent and fluid than that.
I think that the concept of “the will of the people,” though, has misled people who are well-meaning, but I think it’s also been proven useful for authoritarians, frankly speaking. So Donald Trump or Elon Musk saying: well, whatever we say goes, because we are embodying the true, unquestionable sense of the American people.
Douthat: OK. But what are they embodying then? You’re leaning very hard on the idea that they’re embodying the right of a contingent, provisional majority to choose its leaders?
Nwanevu: I think that’s exactly what happens in a democracy.
Douthat: And that’s all?
Nwanevu: Yeah. And that sounds deflationary, but this is one of the things that makes democracy work and makes it, again, a useful means of governing ourselves with certain advantages over the rule of the few. The fact that it’s dynamic, that things change, you can make an argument today and it doesn’t work; you try a different set of arguments tomorrow and that might work and that might pull in more people, yet form different coalitions.
I think democracy has a character to it to produce and generate and process change. That makes this one of the reasons I think we should value it.
Douthat: I agree that we should value it. I think the deflationary argument, though, does make me personally more comfortable with the tangled, complex system that we have right now, which I completely agree is not one that I think a sensible person would design from scratch.
I think some elements of it are more defensible than others. I would probably mount a stronger defense of some elements of the Senate than I would of the Electoral College. Though I might have a different view tomorrow because, like the public, I can change my views. But if you’re not getting the will of the people, then it seems like the case for revising our entire system becomes a little weaker?
Nwanevu: No, I don’t think so, because I don’t think what we’re deflating is necessarily democracy itself. We’re deflating the concept of the will of the people. But democracy remains important because, again, I think that through these fair contests, you allow people the chance to have a voice and have a say in their society and shaping the conditions of their lives.
I think that’s still a transcendently important idea. I think that’s still a practically useful idea, and I think that we should be troubled when that isn’t the case, when somebody on the basis of a pure accident of where they happen to live has much, much more say over the conditions that shape their lives than somebody else who happens to live somewhere else in the country.
But I think that we should be open to the idea that, yes, we should have a complex political system. Yes, we shouldn’t say, well, because X number of people believe this in a poll and we didn’t get it, that means that we have a broken system. The thing that more fundamentally matters to me is: do each and every one of us really have a meaningful and equal say in shaping this country to the extent that we can as voters? Apart from whatever policy outcomes that you might desire in substance.
Douthat: But those things are linked. Like, how do you tell if public opinion is uncertain and changeable? One of the ways that you tell whether a certain set of people have a say in the government has to be whether at least some of their ideas are represented, right?
Nwanevu: Oh, certainly.
Douthat: So I want to make a less abstract and more concrete question or challenge to your argument. I think the story of the entire Western world over the last 50 or 60 years has been that we have an upper class, an elite class, a managerial class — whatever you want to call it — that is, broadly speaking, to the left of the general public on social issues. Not always in every case, and there’s obviously been a lot of change. But nonetheless, the drama of a lot of debates, whether it’s about abortion, when Roe v. Wade was handed down, or whether it’s about immigration debates — especially in Western Europe, maybe more so than here — has been a case where you have social and cultural conservatives trying to claim more power through the political process and feeling themselves defeated, whether by judges or bureaucrats or antidemocratic systems. And I think Trump himself is a representative of that discontent erupting into the process, into the system, and changing it.
It seems to me that, on those issues, a more democratic America would have still moved, left on a bunch of these questions. It would not have stayed stuck in 1955 or anything like that, but would not look at all like the kind of society that I think most people on the left envision.
Nwanevu: Well, look, you can go back to Donald Trump, again, having won the popular vote in November. I’m not supporting democracy because I think it is the means through which I get everything I want as a progressive tomorrow, and that if we had a democratic system, everybody would agree with me on all the woke issues I believe in. I believe in democracy as a fundamental core value for governing society, like a first-order value. That means that I’m willing to accept the possibility of losing an election or losing many elections in the course of making the arguments that I believe in for the kinds of policies and the kind of social attitudes that I want.
That just means we have to do the work of trying to convince people to agree with us on those issues. And as you say, over the course of the last 10 years, people have actually moved left on some of these issues, within the general electorate, especially after Ferguson in 2014. So I fully accept that we lose sometimes as progressives, and sometimes we win, and that’s all part of the game.
Douthat: OK, maybe you’re conceding more ground than I expected, so let me go a little further here. In the case of Trump himself, watching the Trump experience has given me slightly more faith, for better or worse, in the potency of democracy as a force in American life. Because, from my perspective, one of the ways you can tell if a society is fundamentally democratic is: Do ideas and issues that have a lot of support but are considered disreputable among the great and good, the wise and mighty, have political power and political representation?
In that way, a lot of forms of right-wing populism seem like tests for democracy. Clearly Donald Trump was considered disreputable, not just by left wingers or anything like that, but by a large number of the people who ran the Republican Party when he started running for president. And it just seems to me that it’s proof that America is actually a fairly democratic society that he could win anyway and govern anyway.
It’s been a lesson for me about the perils and dangers of what the public wants, because Trumpism comes with all kinds of perils and dangers. But isn’t that, in some way, a triumph of democracy? The entire Trump experience?
Nwanevu: There was something very odd after 2016 about reading these narratives about populism in academia. This was all the rage for about five or six years, where they were like: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are both sides of the same coin really. We have a burgeoning anti-institutional attitude within the public, and that means that democracy’s unstable and something we should distrust.
They ignored the fact, and I think it remains worth pointing out, that most people did not want Donald Trump to be president in 2016. He spent most of his time as a political figure unpopular. So on that basic level, I don’t know that you can see him as a triumph.
Now, I do think you pointed out something important, though, which is, look, if we believe in democracy, if we believe in political equality, that means that we accept that there are going to be people within the political sphere, within our system, who have very, very extreme views, who have views that we might not like. That’s something you have to accept. You can’t be a fairweather friend of a democratic principle if you want it to work and if you want to defend it from authoritarianism. You have to have a real principled commitment to it within certain bounds.
I talk about in the book how we need liberalism, we need republican values, but I’m not troubled by the reality that there are people in this country who I’m going to disagree with. This country’s going to remain substantially conservative no matter how well I argue and how well people on the left argue. I think that’s just the reality of life in a large and diverse country. And that’s just something you have to accept.
Douthat: Let’s talk about Bernie Sanders for a moment then, because I do think that Sanders and Trump both represented versions of what I’m describing here, where Sanders represented a set of economic ideas that elites, the great and good and whoever else, had disdained and regarded as antiquated and anachronistic — ideas that were also quite popular. And I think clearly, lots and lots of people were very into what Sanders was selling in ways that elites did not expect, and that had a destabilizing effect, and that changed Democratic politics. I do think, even in defeat, Sanders is, in a similar way to Trump, a triumph for a certain kind of spirit of democracy on the left.
Nwanevu: Yeah.
Douthat: I’m curious where you think that tendency is going. In thinking about the concrete side of this. I look at that Sanders eruption and I feel like it was perfectly calibrated to the mid-2010s.
This is a period of low inflation. It’s a period of slow economic growth coming out of the Great Recession, a sense that we weren’t Keynesian enough — we didn’t spend enough money. And it’s just a zone where there seemed to be a lot of room to spend a bunch of money without raising a lot of taxes.
And I feel like the left right now is just in a much more difficult position because of inflation, because of the shifts in the economy since then. Can you get that magic back? Is the case for economic democracy weaker now in 2025 than it was in 2016?
Nwanevu: I think it’s stronger because if you identify economic democracy with empowering workers, one of the nifty fiscal things about something like the PRO Act is it costs zero dollars. You can do these things by statute. It’s not a huge new social program, yet you are, I think, materially improving the lives of ordinary Americans in all kinds of ways, and you’re building a political base so that eventually, when it’s more fiscally sustainable, more popular — whatever it happens to be — you then enter a better position to argue for the social democratic policies that Sanders ran on in 2016. That’s the order of things that I think we ought to take up.
One of the benefits, too, is that it’s novel sounding to people. Talking about worker rights and labor rights in democratic terms is not something people are mostly used to hearing from us. Again, they hear about social programs, they hear about Medicare for All, but empowering you democratically at work because you’re entitled to certain things as a matter of basic principle — it’s a different register, I think.
And again, I think it’s a register that it has a lot of promise, partially because you can take liberals, for instance, who are closer to the center, angry about Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, angry at what they see going on in Washington, fired up about democracy. You could get them to say: Look, there’s another piece of democracy too, and we can join these two things together.
And so the people that Sanders had trouble with, which I think were largely this constituency within the Democratic Party — closer to the center, more kind of MSNBC liberals, to use one of the pejoratives that we on the left, I guess, habitually fall into using — if we can find a way of connecting our agendas, I think that’s really, really powerful and something that we haven’t really tried very much on the left, and it has a lot of potential when it comes to what happens in 2028.
Douthat: But a lot of that is probably tied up with the question of how Americans feel about corporate America.
Nwanevu: Yeah.
Douthat: We had Lina Khan on the show to talk about antitrust and democratic politics. And one of the clear impediments, again, in the last 25 years to this kind of pivot is that Americans have not necessarily felt incredibly hostile to big corporations and big companies. They end up in a position where the left is saying: We need more labor power, we need more worker power. And the big companies are saying: Oh, but if you do this, we won’t be able to hire as many people. People will lose their jobs.
Those arguments have, I think, been more effective than some people on the left want to think. I’m curious, do you think we’re in a more anticorporate moment in 2025 than we were recently?
Nwanevu: I think we’ve been in an anticorporate moment for quite some time now. That doesn’t mean that everybody was going to the polls last November because they wanted Lina Khan to stay on. I think it was strange for people to posit that as a concern. [Laughs]
Douthat: That was a very, very narrow segment of the public.
Nwanevu: I love what Lina Kahn did, but that was a different level of politics. It was something behind the scenes. But general animus toward the wealthy, general animus toward corporations — I think we see that in polls. And we see people supporting, in large numbers, taxing the rich more.
One of the appeals that Donald Trump made, at least the first time he ran, was he was going to take a step away from corporate control of the Republican Party. He wins the primary, I think, partially on his basis to build a constituency like that. So I think that there’s a real potency to that politics if we try it again.
Bernie Sanders remains, I think, among the, or if not, the most popular politicians in America. So I think there’s potential there, but I think you’re also right that people don’t have a natural hostility to Amazon the way the people on the left want, or natural hostility to any of these Big Tech firms we use every single day. But I think that just means we need to make the arguments that there is something unjust about the way this corporation is structured.
I think that there’s a lot of restive understanding that inequality has gotten out of control and that corporations do all kinds of things they can’t in our politics and in society in general, but I don’t think it’s been directed, in the way that I’m advocating for, by the left. And I think there’s still a lot of promise there — myself, anyway.
Douthat: OK, well let’s end by talking about that message and messengers. You mentioned that Bernie Sanders is still very popular — he fills arenas — but no one has come along on the left with the same kind of popularity, the same kind of bond with large numbers of voters. You obviously have figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are seen as potential heirs to Sanders, but even she speaks to a somewhat narrower demographic.
And this is where one element of democracy that we haven’t talked about is — the mystical. There is a religious historian, Molly Worthen, who has a new book out about charisma in American life that I’ve been reading recently. And charisma is the element that, in a way, is hard to defend as a democratic theorist, because it is so weird and hard to pin down.
Like, why did Donald Trump cruise through the Republican primary in 2016? You can run down 17 different issues, but in the end, charisma has something to do with it. Why is Bernie Sanders so much more popular than any other prominent socialist politician? The answer has something to do with his weird, grumpy, mayor of Burlington charisma.
The concrete question I want to ask is about who you like as a future leader of the Democratic Party. But before you answer that question, could you say something about the mystical side of democracy and where it fits into your vision?
Nwanevu: Just speaking personally, this is one of the things I actually like about democracy a lot. A particular kind of conservative will look at something like the British monarchy and say that there’s a kind of mystique to this system and the traditions involved. When Queen Elizabeth died, there was a lot of this.
I remember writing at the time: Democracy is way cooler than that. Democracy is way weirder and more mysterious and more mystical. It is the idea of people coming together from wherever they happen to be in society to make a collective choice. We all do this ritual of elections. That’s way cooler on an aesthetic level to me.
Douthat: Democracy, in the American system, generates charismatic leaders. A constitutional monarchy tries to separate charisma from power. In democracy, you accept that there’s going to be some relationship.
Nwanevu: But it’s not just the charisma of the politicians. It’s the charisma of you going out in the streets as an activist, you convincing your family and friends to do a particular thing in an election, you having debates with your loved ones and your community.
Charisma exists everywhere in the system. That’s one of the things that makes it, I think, spiritual and powerful to me.
But your concrete question, which I cannot answer: Who is going to save the left?
Douthat: And who’s going to save the left, not just in terms of policy proposals, but — we’ve mentioned just in passing, Andrew Jackson, F.D.R., Abraham Lincoln — but who do you think is there who attracts you?
Nwanevu: I can’t say that I know of anybody who is, as of yet, making the kinds of arguments about democracy on the left that I wish people were making in the public sphere. I’m waiting on that.
All kinds of talent — I like Zohran quite a bit. He cannot be president for very stupid reasons.
Douthat: This is Zohran Mamdani, the probable future mayor of New York City. And I agree. I think if you go down his list of policy prescriptions, even in a left-wing city, you would have never imagined him getting elected. But if you watch a two-minute video of him, you’re like: Oh, I can see why this guy might get elected.
Nwanevu: Right. So there’s real talent there. But here’s how I tend to think about the trajectory of the left in general: There is not some kind of natural majority of leftists in the country waiting to be awakened by the right policy proposal or even the right charismatic candidate. I think that we are a movement that needs to build ourselves up by bringing more people over to our side.
People on the left in the last decade or so, to an extent that I don’t think we fully appreciate or say out loud, were shaped by the Obama experience. There’s this comet from nowhere, who comes in, wins the Democratic primary, and then things change — or at least he’s able to capture the attention of Democratic Party and capture this amount of power. That was what was going on when I was growing up and getting into American politics.
But I think it’s clear now that all of that was a transient moment, to a large extent. I do think there have been durable shifts since 2014 on social issues. I think the polls bear that out very, very clearly. But obviously we haven’t won. Bernie obviously didn’t win in 2020 or 2016. So there’s a kind of “what do we do” moment.
Before Mamdani prevailed in the primary, from my own personal experience in talking to people, there was a lot of cynicism. There was a lot of hopelessness and a lack of direction people had, and I think he’s reinvigorated the left in a really, really big way and demonstrated there is still a window here for us, even within the Democratic Party — and evidently, even within the Democratic Party in New York City, the seat of financial capital in the world.
If that is possible, if he is likely the next mayor in New York — and we’ll see what happens if he gets in, how governance actually works — but if that is electorally possible, I think people have been given a new lease on life here as a movement.
Where we go next is going to be determined by the extent to which we take seriously the task of conversion. How do we actually rope in more people who don’t already agree with us, who aren’t already reading Jacobin or even The New Republic?
Douthat: Even The New Republic.
Nwanevu: Even The New Republic.
Douthat: That’s right. If you can win in New York, you can win in New York. But what you need is a Bernie Sanders-type politician who wins a purple state governorship. And when that happens, I will fully believe that the left wing moment has arrived.
Nwanevu: Right. We’ll see, we’ll see. But I think my own perspective, selfishly self-interestedly, is democracy has to be part of the secret sauce here. If you’ve never read “Das Kapital,” but you believe that people have a right to govern themselves —
Douthat: Which you’ve just described most American voters.
Nwanevu: Exactly, right. What is the thing that’s going to actually get you to accept the left’s premises on the lack of power people have in the economy and the extent to which workers should direct the economy? I think that there is a democratic argument that is easier for people to understand, to perceive, to swallow, and to put in line with their existing politics.
And the place to start that experiment for me is within the Democratic Party and utilizing this animus and this anger people have about the state of democracy to push people in our direction on economics. I think there’s a real opportunity there that’s worth exploring.
If I’m wrong, then I don’t know. I’m humble enough to say that I don’t know if we try beyond that. But I do think you’ve outlined the challenge: You win in New York, you win in New York. How do you reach out to the great middle of the country? To most Americans, most voters? I think that’s something we still have to demonstrate that we can do, and it’s something we have to be creative about.
Douthat: And that the mystery of democracy may yet reveal.
Nwanevu: Exactly.
Douthat: Osita Nwanevu, thank you so much for joining me. It’s a pleasure.
Nwanevu: Thank you for having me.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Betanzos and Victoria Chamberlin. Research by Raina Raskin. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker, Sophia Lanman, Efim Shapiro, Morgan Hamilton and Paul Perret. Cinematography by Marina King, Alex Levin and Nathan Shinholt. Video editing by Steph Khoury. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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