Next year, the United States will observe the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. To begin a year of celebration, Donald Trump appeared at the Iowa State Fairground in early July. “We’ve saved our country,” he proclaimed to the crowd of supporters. Trump then announced a “giant patriotic festival” on the National Mall for next summer, and suggested an Ultimate Fighting Championship event could take place on White House grounds. UFC is one of the corporate sponsors of America250, the nonprofit organization that will be overseeing the country’s semiquincentennial celebration. Other sponsors represent different parts of Trump’s corporate coalition: Amazon, Palantir, Coinbase, and Scotts Miracle-Gro, as well as some traditional exporters of American global capitalism: Coca-Cola (soft drinks) and Lockheed Martin (bombs). “I don’t know what more people expect or want from an American president,” gushed Monica Crowley, Trump’s liaison to America250. “He is literally fulfilling the entire job description, and so much more.”
And so much more: A pity that so much is unconstitutional, illegal, or grotesque. A pity that neither the Supreme Court nor a Congress controlled by Republicans has found reasons to constrain his behavior. A pity that a man who incited an attack on the democratic transfer of power was, four years later, chosen again by the public to assume the highest office in the land. A pity that official disappearance has become policy, as the country builds its own gulag archipelagoes for immigrants. “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics,” Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 1, “the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
The United States has one of the oldest constitutions still in effect, but it can seem hard to find true believers. Republicans claim its principles, but let Trump choose its meaning, abrogating clauses and amendments according to his whim. Democrats claim its principles, too, but too many carry on as if those principles are not in danger. We are at a moment of curious inversion, in which the task of thinking seriously about how to make American democracy work well falls to its left-wing political and social critics. It is in this sense that we should understand Osita Nwanevu’s The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding: as an act of compassion for a country that seems too often unworthy of it. It is a moment when some radical thinking is needed to preserve the republic.
Nwanevu is a journalist and writer (and a contributing editor at The New Republic) who, he confesses in the book’s introduction, grew bored of the grind of daily political reportage, “wearied by the ways this industry has failed to meet this political moment.” He decided that taking a step away into a book project would allow for a more thoroughgoing examination of the sources of our contemporary problems. The Right of the People is the measured and thoughtful result of engagement with both political science and political philosophy, updated for our present emergency. Nwanevu makes three main claims: “that democracy is good, that America is not a democracy, and that America should become a democracy through the transformation not only of our political institutions but of our economy.” The “case for a new American founding” of his subtitle is a tip of the cap to the historian Eric Foner, who has argued that the post–Civil War amendments (the “Reconstruction” amendments abolishing slavery and guaranteeing universal male suffrage and equal protection before the law) constituted a kind of “second founding.”
The first piece of this argument, that “democracy is good,” could probably have been left out of this book had it been written just a few years ago. Of course, there are versions of anti-democratic sentiment across the political spectrum: Leninists on the left, anti-populist technocrats in the center, and various authoritarians on the right. But small-d democratic identity used to be central to American political identity, and, until recently, most Americans were reasonably proud of their institutions. Legal scholar Aziz Rana has argued that the Cold War offered Americans a set of axioms (to contrast with the Communist Soviet Union) that buttressed the notion that American institutions were democratic, and that democracy was good. Such thinking obscured much that was undemocratic in American life, and the end of the Cold War eroded that broad consensus on both left and right. Donald Trump’s influence has undoubtedly sent these trends into hyperdrive. His cult of personality is sufficiently strong that he has led his followers to increasingly undemocratic places—especially after his loss in 2020. Repulsion toward Trump is also strong enough to send some of his critics into Brechtian “we must dissolve the people and elect another” sentiments—especially after his victory in 2024. Trump has both made his supporters less supportive of democracy, and made his opponents less confident in its wisdom.
In a time when it is easy to be pessimistic about the capacities of voters to make reasonable decisions, Nwanevu pushes back. Democracy is a good system, he insists. It is Lincoln’s definition of the concept—“government of the people, by the people, for the people”—that most succinctly captures its aspiration. Democracies are freer, happier, and generally wealthier than other countries. They give their citizens a set of procedures for managing social conflict peacefully. They have the potential to be dynamic and responsive; autocracies have many fewer incentives to behave in ways that serve the public.
Part of the benefits of democracy are derived from its implications, not just its outcomes. Many important rights are necessary for democratic self-rule. There must be a degree of equality shared by all citizens. Democracy’s deliberative functions can’t work without a free press and free speech. Nwanevu is hardly starry-eyed about democratic systems. He knows, of course, that the circle of those who have been included as full participants has expanded over time. He knows that voting is an imperfect measure of majority preferences, and that many voters are ignorant. “Democracy isn’t about the will of the people winning out in a given collective decision,” he writes. “It’s about the right of the people to govern themselves through collective decision-making in the first place.” He acknowledges, as Astra Taylor has argued, that “the ideal of self-rule … occupies a distant and retreating horizon, something we must continue to reach toward yet fail to grasp.” But, Nwanevu maintains, we should not hold people’s dissatisfaction with our system against the idea of democracy, because of his second claim: “America is not, in fact, a democracy.”
This part of Nwanevu’s argument is, in contrast to the first, much easier to accept than it would have been a few years ago. But Nwanevu doesn’t just mean that we are sliding into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism: He means that the United States has never really met the definition. “The American people are not equal as political subjects,” he says. Our political system is not very responsive to majorities, giving too many veto points that can be exploited, compounded by economic inequality. He admits that no democratic societies may meet his high standards. But, Nwanevu notes, U.S. democracy “falls far further from the ideal than the governments of our peers … in calling them democracies, one doesn’t subject the concept to quite as much abuse.”
Nwanevu does not expect to inherit a democratic tradition from the nation’s “Founders.” There were important ways that, at the time of its creation, the United States Constitution granted its citizens a more expansive set of political rights than were available elsewhere. But Nwanevu surveys the thinking of the “Founders” at the time of the writing of the Constitution and finds that many institutions—the Electoral College, the Senate—reflected a design that protected the system from demands for wealth redistribution (not least through the protection of slavery). In the first speech at the Constitutional Convention, a delegate from Virginia argued, “None of the [individual state] constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.” There was no formal class system in the young United States, but the political system remained aristocratic in that it was intended to protect against economic leveling.
Whether or not one accepts Nwanevu’s argument about the democratic character of the founding of the United States depends a great deal on how one characterizes it. Political scientist Adam Przeworski’s classic minimal definition is simply that democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. Such systems are quite distinct from autocracies, because they introduce competition for political choice, which has a tremendous cascade of beneficial consequences—including providing incentives for politicians to widen the circle of those who can participate as full citizens over time. In that sense, the United States has had democratic features since the beginning.
But whether the reader accepts Nwanevu’s characterization of the “Founders” is not especially important to the overall argument of The Right of the People. What is most crucial is that it places the traditional “Founders” in context: They were a particular group of people, trying to solve problems in their time. They would have had no way of anticipating what the United States has become. “The Constitution has us working to address the problems of the twenty-first century through institutions designed by men of the eighteenth—people who would have been dazzled by a lightbulb,” Nwanevu states. Regardless of how democratic their intentions were or weren’t, we as a society are responsible for thinking through our own needs centuries later. “Neither what the Founders intended for America nor what America is at present can determine for us what America should be,” Nwanevu insists.
This brings him to the third piece of his argument: that “America should become a democracy.” There are two main groups of recommendations to achieve that end, some having to do with the design of our political institutions, and some with our economic ones. Many ideas on the political side will be familiar: goals such as abolishing the Senate filibuster and the Electoral College that are now widespread in savvy circles, if not in the Senate itself (whose existence is mandated by the Constitution, and thus not ripe for abolition). Other proposals—like expanding the size of the House of Representatives (the ratio of population to representative is now the highest among rich democracies) and extending voting rights to younger people and noncitizen permanent residents—aren’t yet on the agenda but are easy enough to understand.
But some of Nwanevu’s ideas are much bolder and would move the United States in the direction of a parliamentary system. He argues, for example, that we could improve representation and responsiveness via multimember districts. In such a system, to give a simple example, a party getting 60 percent of the vote in a district with 10 representatives would send six representatives to the House, a party earning 30 percent three, and another party earning 10 percent the final one. Such a plan would upend the two-party system, which has become a persistent source of discontentment for the American public.
Not all of Nwanevu’s recommendations have to do with political organization. A major thesis of his book—and one that gets systematic attention only toward the end—is that America’s economic system is a major obstacle to its becoming a political democracy. “All American workers,” Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936, “know that our needs are one in building an orderly economic democracy in which all can profit.” We are very far from that reality. The fantastically wealthy and powerful corporations have too much power. Americans have traditionally prided themselves on high social mobility, but by international standards we actually rank behind Lithuania. There is abundant evidence that more equal societies are physically and mentally healthier. To achieve economic democracy, Nwanevu prescribes not just a reinvigorated labor movement, but major reforms to corporate structure: work councils giving workers input over business decisions, and laws allowing workers to take ownership of the places where they work. Such a system would decrease inequality, empower the labor force, and, he argues, give people everyday practice with the difficult work of democracy. None of these suggestions is utopian: Each exists in countries such as Germany and Spain, both robust democracies.
As Nwanevu acknowledges, getting from here to there will be a complicated process. His basic insight—that political and economic democracy should be advanced together—seems more than sound to me. But systemic reforms require either enormous majorities, which are particularly tough to conjure in our polluted media environment, or a truly massive failure of the old system. It’s worth the effort to prepare for the work of change over decades, but each of these reforms will face substantial obstacles and powerful opponents.
It is more likely that an opportunity might come in the form of an institutional rupture that creates an opening for significant reforms. In 2019, for example, protests that erupted in Santiago, Chile, over an increase in subway fares soon turned into generalized demonstrations against the country’s social model, high cost of living, and high levels of inequality. As with the protests following the murder of George Floyd in the United States, a single event provoked discussion of a larger set of institutional grievances. Chile’s constitutional system was written in the blood of its dictatorship; ours in the United States in the blood of slavery.
Then-President Sebastián Piñera, a conservative, soon decided that calling for a constitutional convention was part of the road to pacifying the protests. The political mood in Chile when electing delegates to the Constitutional Convention favored the anti-institutional left, but by the time the convention had done its work, the mood had reversed—again, not unlike the tides of sentiment in the wake of the George Floyd protests. The draft of a new Chilean constitution represented a positive vision for only about one-third of the country, and voters rejected it in 2022 by a resounding margin of 62 percent to 38 percent. The problems with the country’s social order—high inequality, excessive privileges for the well-connected—remain. Chile missed its chance, probably for a generation.
This is not just a Project 2029, but a Project 2049: imagining what a better country could look like and planning for how we could get there.
How might the United States fare better? If we have a chance to draft a new constitution, its framers will need to aim more carefully—and broadly. A pro-democracy coalition must be capable of articulating what significant majorities wish to preserve about our American system, and what they want to improve. Nwanevu is wise to do the preparatory work; others should take heed and build upon it. This is not just a Project 2029, but a Project 2049: imagining what a better country could look like and planning for how we could get there, so that in a moment of crisis, there is at least a slim chance of success. The amendments that represent Foner’s “second founding”—including the birthright citizenship that Trump hopes to interpret away—could only happen because the slave states had seceded from the Union. Once they were readmitted, they worked to halt the Reconstruction project of building a multiracial democracy.
The United States has been many things to the world in the 250 years of its existence. Sometimes it has been a menace or a cautionary tale. But sometimes, in spite of its contradictions, it has been an inspiration, because the American radical imagination has been able to build from our institutions a more inclusive understanding of freedom. That is our current challenge: to present change as the fulfillment of the American promise. Nwanevu is right. Our third founding should be our Second Reconstruction: the commitment to a multiracial political and economic democracy. If we get it right—and make it that far—it will in 250 years be something worth being proud of.
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