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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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