The Right of the People

Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding

About the Book

A bold case for reimagining the American project and making American democracy real—from a formidable new voice in political journalism

“The first thing I’ve read that provides a rigorous vision of how to refound this nation if we manage to survive the current threats to these core values.”—Chris Hayes, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sirens’ Call

Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic attitudes across the political spectrum, journalist Osita Nwanevu has spent the Trump era examining the very meaning of democracy in search of answers to questions many have asked in the wake of the 2024 election: Are our institutions fundamentally broken? How can a country so divided govern itself? Does democracy even work as well as we believe?

The Right of the People offers us challenging answers: while democracy remains vital, American democracy is an illusion we must make real by transforming not only our political institutions but the American economy. In a text that spans democratic theory, the American Founding, our aging political system, and the dizzying inequalities of our new Gilded Age, Nwanevu makes a visionary case for a political and economic agenda to fulfill the promise of American democracy and revive faith in the American project.

“Nearly two hundred fifty years ago, the men who founded America made a fundamental break not just from their old country but from the past—casting off an order that had subjugated them with worn and weak ideas for the promise of true self-governance and greater prosperity in a new republic,” Nwanevu writes. “With exactly their sense of purpose and even higher, more righteous ambitions for America than they themselves had, we should do the same now⁠—work as hard as we can in the decades ahead to ‘institute new Government’ for the benefit of all and not just the few.”
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Praise for The Right of the People

“The first thing I’ve read that provides a rigorous vision of how to refound this nation if we manage to survive the current threats to this these core values.”—Chris Hayes

The Right of the People is a thoughtful look at the challenges facing our political system—and a timely reminder of what American democracy can still be. It offers a grounded, practical agenda to try and point us toward a better path.”—Congressman Ro Khanna

New Republic political writer Nwanevu offers remedies for an ailing American democracy. . . . His writing is vibrant, even optimistic, animated by a clear belief that self-governance is the best kind of governance, and damn the torpedoes. A resounding, persuasive call for a truly inclusive government of the people.”Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Democracy’s allies have to rethink it both economically and politically, Osita Nwanevu shows, to keep conservatives who are junking democracy from winning, and to keep liberals with little more than hashtags about democracy from oversimplifying the task. With his trademark style, Nwanevu takes readers on a journey, beginning with the Greeks and dwelling on the Founding, to a contemporary America that desperately needs a new democracy to replace its incomplete one.”—Samuel Moyn, Yale University

“Nwanevu has a truly remarkable—almost unique—ability to distill a broad range of academic scholarship into a fully accessible argument of his own about the deficiencies of the present American constitutional system and the drastic need for fundamental reform and, indeed, a 'New American Founding.' This superb book deserves the widest possible readership—and, more to the point, ensuing discussion and political action generated by his incisive analysis.”—Sanford Levinson, author of Our Undemocratic Constitution
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Excerpt

The Right of the People

Chapter 1

The Meaning of Democracy

What is democracy, really? Let’s start with the basics, as most people understand them: A democracy is a form of government in which people come together every so often to decide, usually through elections, what should be done and who should do it. Elected officials—representatives, mayors, governors, presidents, whoever they may be—­are then responsible for carrying out the will of the people. If they don’t—­or if they do and the people change their minds about what they want—­they get voted out and other candidates get voted in. All of this should happen freely and fairly—­no one’s vote should be forced, and every vote should be counted equally by impartial authorities. And a framework of basic political freedoms should accompany and support the democratic process—­people should have the right to speak openly about politics, to seek out information, and to organize themselves politically without undue interference.

This is an outline of democratic society that has long been intuitive to ordinary Americans and scholars of democracy alike. For instance, Robert Dahl, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent political scientists and democratic theorists, argued that democratic countries have six simple characteristics: empowered elected officials; “free, fair, and frequent” elections; free expression; access to diverse sources of information; the freedom of political association; and “inclusive citizenship,” by which he meant the granting of full political rights to all adult citizens. Today, Freedom House, an American nonprofit that studies and promotes democracy abroad, describes democratic government as a system “based on the will and consent of the governed, institutions that are accountable to all citizens, adherence to the rule of law, and respect for human rights.” Each year, it awards countries “democracy scores” that measure whether they have free and fair elections and how well they protect political rights and civil liberties.

Similarly, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which compiles an annual “Democracy Index,” says that democracy, at a minimum, means “government based on majority rule and the consent of the governed; the existence of free and fair elections; the protection of minority rights; and respect for basic human rights.” The Intelligence Unit ranks countries in its Index based on a slightly more complex set of factors than Freedom House’s—­the health of a country’s electoral process and the state of its civil liberties are taken into account, but so are how well its government actually functions, how actively its citizens participate in politics, and the state of “political culture,” by which they mean whether citizens engage in the political process civilly and peaceably.

That’s a longer list of boxes to check off than we began with, but most Americans would probably consider the Index’s metrics reasonable. A government too dysfunctional to implement the policies people voted for wouldn’t be very democratic after all, and a political system in which hardly anyone ever voted—­or in which elections could be regularly overturned by violence—­would hardly be much of a democracy either. Still, as basic as the Index’s requirements might seem, only around 15 percent of the countries in the world today—­containing only about 7 percent of the world’s population—­are “full democracies” by its standards. (Congratulations to Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and their peers.) Around 28 percent of countries—­with about 38 percent of the world’s population—­are what the Index calls “flawed democracies,” a category that has included the United States since 2016. While our report card shows high marks for political participation, civil liberties, and even our electoral process—­President Trump’s coup attempt evidently notwithstanding—­gridlock, polarization, and new voting restrictions have been dragging us down lately.

The Index’s analysis of our current political situation is hard to argue with. But is it really fair to say American democracy is “flawed” overall? That depends on whether we buy the way the Index, and most of us, have chosen to define democracy in the first place.

Defining Democracy

As obvious as the norms underpinning electoral democracy might seem to us today, we should remember that the very concept of democracy was forged in societies with norms and political practices we’d find unrecognizable. Anthropologists believe early human bands of hunter-gatherers also made decisions by a kind of group consensus—­albeit through processes led, surprise, surprise, by male elders. From there, the historical record suggests isolated pockets of proto-­democratic governance sprang up just about everywhere humans settled—­from the Middle East to the Americas. But the word democracy itself comes to us from Ancient Greek—­demos meant the people, kratos meant power, and demokratia described the form of popular rule that probably governed about half of Greek city-­states by the third century b.c.

Athens is the most famous of them. Historians believe democracy in Greece began with elections of a kind—­there were city-­states where leaders were voted in, but they ruled like kings. Then, in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c., political tumult and the reforms of three visionary leaders in particular—­Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes—­produced a new system of self-­government. There was a democratic Assembly open to all full citizens—­a legislature not of elected politicians, but of anyone who happened to show up. There was the Council of 500: a body that met nearly every day to set the Assembly’s agenda and propose legislation, with its members selected annually from the citizenry in lotteries, a process political theorists call sortition. Then there were juries, also selected in lotteries, that ruled over court cases and reviewed the legality of the Assembly’s decisions—­a Supreme Court of sorts, with hundreds and occasionally thousands of ordinary citizens on its bench. Finally, there were officials responsible for implementing the laws—­again chosen mostly by sortition, but with a set of top-­level positions elected by the Assembly, which also chose the military’s leaders.

Clearly, democratic government meant something different to the Athenians than it means to us now. Today, we elect politicians to act on our behalf—­or hope they might, anyway, however dimly. But for the Athenians, democracy meant self-­government in the most literal sense—­the people participating in governance mostly without elected middlemen. It’s not that the Athenians were unfamiliar with elections as a concept—­again, they had them in limited form. But everyday Athenians also took it entirely for granted that they would be the first and final authority on all matters, no matter how complex—­from foreign policy and commerce to basic municipal governance.

The structure and nature of Athenian democracy was a point of deep pride for Athenians such as the military hero and political leader Pericles. In his legendary Funeral Oration, delivered early in the intra-­Greek Peloponnesian War, he rallied his countrymen with stirring odes to the distinctive character of Athenian government:

Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.

This is one of the passages that earned the Oration its reputation as one of history’s greatest speeches. It’s mostly nonsense.

“The people” who ruled in Athens were, again, full citizens—­women, slaves, and free immigrants called metics were excluded, meaning that “the many” Pericles spoke grandly about were a minority of the population. And Athenian citizenship became only more exclusive over time—­in the mid-­5th century b.c., a law backed by Pericles restricted that status to males with two fully Athenian parents.

Obviously, Athenian society lacked many of the social and political values we now take for granted—­given the status of women, slaves, and immigrants, the “equal justice” Pericles spoke of certainly didn’t mean “equal rights” for all. And even the supposed equality between individual citizens in the Assembly was undermined by the fact that some Athenians could afford to pay for instruction in rhetoric and the making of arguments. Moreover, though Athens lacked real political parties, supporters of the rich, the well-­liked, and the well-­connected were able to build important and influential political networks that shaped the city’s politics.

About the Author

Osita Nwanevu
Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a columnist for The Guardian, writing about American politics and culture. He lives in Baltimore. This is his first book. More by Osita Nwanevu
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