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BACK TO BASICS  
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Janet Hook
August 12, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Review of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New
American Founding, by Osita Nwanevu. _

The Signing of the Constitution, Howard Chandler Christy, 1937

 

When anti-Trump forces burst forth in rallies across the country this
spring, their quirky “No Kings” battle cry proved to be a stroke
of genius, a succinct and nonideological way to protest the
president’s authoritarian policies. The remarkable turnout was a
reminder that nothing brings the left and center together quite like
Donald Trump, especially as he rides roughshod over the Constitution
in his second term.

While it was crystal clear what protesters were fighting against, it
was less clear what they were fighting for. Capital-D Democracy?
That’s probably what most protesters would say, but the truth is
that even before Trump, faith in American democracy was fraying.

Polls show that confidence in our democratic system has been in a
decades-long decline. A Gallup poll
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published in early 2025 found that just 34 percent of adults were
satisfied with the way our democracy is working. When the firm began
polling on the question in 1984, 61 percent were satisfied.

Complaints about the political system are often transient, a passing
fury among those who dislike the most recent election results. But
Gallup, in a rare finding, reported nearly equal levels of
dissatisfaction among Democrats and Republicans in early 2025.
Trump’s popular-vote victory in 2024 improved Republicans’
attitude from a year ago, but the poll found nearly two-thirds of them
were dissatisfied with our democracy.

Discontent with our democracy has deep roots that reach across party
lines and national borders. Voters have been ground down by
frustration with a gridlocked political system that has failed to
deliver on its promises to working people, while catering to the
wealthy and corporations. And that has provided fertile ground for
autocrats—in the U.S. and around the world—who promise to “get
things done.”

Osita Nwanevu, a columnist with_ The Guardian _and contributor to _The
New Republic_, is worried that frustration with our political system
is fueling broader cynicism about the idea of democracy itself, and
that we are losing our grip on why it is a good thing. Bored with
superficial political discourse and reporting, Nwanevu has gone back
to basics, to define and defend democracy in his first book, _The
Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American
Founding_.

Nwanevu makes a blunt and provocative argument. “The well-meaning
calls to defend ‘our democracy’ elide the reality that for all the
progress we’ve made since the Founding in the granting and expansion
of political rights, democracy, soundly understood, remains a goal
unachieved,” he writes. The Founders never intended America to be a
democracy, Nwanevu reminds us, instead favoring a republic built to
temper the popular will. Creating a true democracy would require
nothing less than rewriting the Constitution, a “new Founding.”

Nwanevu draws on an impressive array of sources, from Plato and
ancient Athens to the very latest in academic political theory, to
remind us how America’s government is riddled with anti-democratic
elements: a Senate that gives disproportionate power to rural (mostly
Republican) states; an Electoral College that can override the popular
majority in presidential elections; a filibuster that can thwart the
Senate’s majority such that senators representing as little as 11
percent
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of the population can nullify the chamber’s will; a campaign finance
system that empowers the wealthy and corporations.

Indeed, Trump has benefited handsomely from the anti-majoritarian
elements of our Constitution, allowing him to rise to power in the
first place and to leave his mark for decades to come. In 2016, he won
the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. After being
impeached twice, he escaped being convicted—and being blocked from
running again for president—only because the Constitution required a
supermajority to do the job. This president—never polling with
majority support in his first term—fundamentally reshaped the
Supreme Court with three nominees who were confirmed by a Senate whose
Republican members represented only a minority of the U.S. population
and who blocked Barack Obama from filling an open seat for a year.

Nwanevu also finds anti-democratic dynamics throughout our economy,
where unions are weak, bosses have wide latitude, and workers lack
basic protections and privileges like paid family leave that are found
in nearly every other industrialized nation. “We’ve come to accept
a level of unaccountable control in our workplaces that we would never
accept from a state,” he writes.

It’s a grim picture of the toll taken on democracy by constitutional
constraints, political realities, and economic inequality.

Nwanevu’s agenda for change is radical and ambitious, if not
especially original. He calls for campaign finance reform, Electoral
College overhaul, an end to the filibuster, Supreme Court expansion,
ranked-choice voting, labor law reform, worker ownership of companies,
and much more. Some of these changes would require amending the
Constitution, which he acknowledges is not likely to happen anytime
soon and will require the kind of sustained, multigenerational
campaign that our political system is not well suited to mounting.

“If all this seems daunting, it should,” he writes. “We are
still perhaps generations away from a truly democratic
Constitution.”

Calls to save democracy ring hollow when democracy is “a goal
unachieved,” Nwanevu writes. MICHAEL BROCHSTEIN/SIPA USA VIA AP

This is a hard time to be calling for a root-and-branch overhaul of
our political system, when the very existence of our admittedly
imperfect democracy is facing such a crushing attack by Trump and his
Republican Party. It’s a little like proposing renovation of an
overgrown garden when a wildfire is closing in on it. Nwanevu says he
began working on this book in 2021, a time when, with Democrats
controlling the White House and Congress, dreaming of big-picture
reforms might not have seemed like such a luxury.

Still, his book carries an important warning for today’s resistance
movement. Simply stopping Trump and returning to the pre-Trump status
quo will not get at the root of what has allowed his authoritarian
ideas to take root in the first place. Addressing that must start by
recognizing the collapsing faith in a political system where money
rules and gridlock persists, no matter which party is in charge.
Indeed, in a CNN poll
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released June 1 that asked which party could “get things done,”
just 36 percent said the GOP, 19 percent said the Democrats, and 44
percent, a plurality, said neither party.

That disillusionment with both parties has cleared the way for
politicians like Trump who are willing to scrap democratic norms to
shake things up, even if only to aggrandize themselves. “Our
frustrations with our false democracy have corroded faith in the ideal
to the benefit of antidemocratic figures on the right and the
interests they serve,” he writes.

Doubts about whether democracy is itself a good thing reach at least
as far back as Plato, who thought the ideal ruler was a philosopher
king. He saw democracy as dangerous and unstable because it put power
in the hands of ill-informed masses who could not be counted on to
judge the common good.

Today, even Democrats’ faith in democracy may be shaken by Trump’s
popular-vote victory in 2024, finding new sympathy with the words of
H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know
what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nwanevu takes issue with these cynical views, as well as contemporary
political theorists like Jason Brennan, author of the 2016 book
_Against Democracy_, and other academic democracy skeptics who argue
that the average citizen is too disengaged, ignorant, or distracted to
make good choices about public policy and candidates. Brennan and
others cite poll findings—typically one-off, cherry-picked surveys,
as Nwanevu takes pains to point out—showing that most Americans
can’t name all three branches of government or more than two of the
rights listed in the First Amendment. Brennan calls for an
“epistocracy”—government by the most knowledgeable and
competent.

Nwanevu is far more optimistic about the wisdom of the masses, arguing
that polls making voters look stupid are cherry-picked, that people
know their own interests better than an autocrat or governing elite,
and that there is a kind of “collective intelligence” that can
emerge from group decision-making.

In calling for a “new Founding” of democracy, Nwanevu sees a
bigger obstacle not in the relative wisdom of the American public but
in their reverence for the Founders and their intent. But he makes
quick work of demystifying them. “The Constitution has us working to
address the problems of the twenty-first century through institutions
designed by men who would have been dazzled by a lightbulb,” he
writes. What’s more, the Founders’ intent has already been
overridden many times over: by ending slavery, giving women the right
to vote, and providing for direct election of senators, to name just a
few.

A bigger obstacle to amending the Constitution is a practical
political one: If a constitutional convention were called, it risks
being hijacked by a group of conservatives who have gotten a jump on
organizing one, under the banner of Convention of States, aiming to
advance an agenda of their own to restrain federal spending, taxation,
and other powers.

Some of Nwanevu’s proposals don’t require constitutional change,
like D.C. statehood, eliminating the filibuster, and expanding voting
rights. And some of his ideas are percolating at the state and local
level. Seventeen states have joined a compact designed to render the
Electoral College impotent. Some 63 jurisdictions have instituted
ranked-choice voting.

Even if his ideas seem hopelessly out of reach in the current climate,
Nwanevu argues they constitute an agenda that may be more politically
potent in the short term. “The political and economic reforms
we’ve examined constitute a democratic agenda that stands a better
chance of defeating the right than the flimsy and predictable rhetoric
their opponents have offered up so far,” he writes. “It contains
remedies for institutional problems that have undermined confidence in
democracy’s efficacy and bolstered a radical right.”

Maybe. I have doubts about the power of procedural reforms like ending
the filibuster and ranked-choice voting to rekindle faith in democracy
and fire up voters. But this book remains a helpful reminder that as
urgent as it is to rally in opposition to Trump, to find ways to block
his policies, and to clip his party’s wings in the midterm
elections, it will take much more dramatic changes to build a more
democratic American political system. Until that happens, Trumpism may
continue to find a home here.

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Janet Hook is a freelance writer who has covered Washington and
national politics for over 40 years, most recently for the Los Angeles
Times.

* Democracy; Osita Nwanevu; Donald Trump; Trumpism;
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