Illustration by Lily Qian.
Democracy is getting to be one of those words that, at least in our day-to-day political debates, has become essentially meaningless: Because you can’t be against it (openly, at least), whatever you disapprove of must represent a profound betrayal of it.
When Democrats are in power, Republicans think our democracy is imperiled; when Republicans are in power, Democrats do. Specific cases can be difficult to parse if you’re not using this which-side-are-you-on standard. If, for example, President Donald Trump, an elected official, wants to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, appointed by him and confirmed by the Senate, is that antidemocratic?
Is gerrymandering, understood to mean the misuse of a state legislature’s power to draw legislative districts, antidemocratic in principle, or is it merely a correctable misuse of the legislature’s legitimate power? Is the Trump administration’s multifront assault on science and expertise antidemocratic? Are electoral reforms such as early voting and voting by mail essential elements of a democracy?
A great virtue of Osita Nwanevu’s new book, The Right of the People, is that it aims to define democracy in a precise and rigorous way so that it can become clear what it is and isn’t, at least by his lights. Nwanevu is a journalist, with the advantage in felicity of expression that this entails, but unlike most journalists, he is also highly conversant in political philosophy and political science. Having surveyed the lengthy history of democracy as both a practice and an ideal, Nwanevu contends that its American form needs to be remade—or, to be more faithful to his account, it needs to be made truly meaningful for the first time—by linking voting to governance much more tightly than it ever has been. As a result, The Right of the People offers us a view of democracy that is not completely reverse-engineered from the present moment. It also provides a useful opportunity to think about what a much more popular form of government would look like and what its advantages and disadvantages might be.
The Right of the People opens with a useful, though necessarily partial, overview of the idea of democracy that begins in ancient Greece and proceeds to the founding and early years of the United States. Nwanevu argues that democracy boils down to three essential characteristics—equality, responsiveness to the needs of the society, and majoritarianism—that provide the foundation for three values: participation, deliberation, and representation. I won’t go through all of these elements one by one, but it’s obvious that Nwanevu’s ideal version of a democratic government is one that hews very closely to the wishes of a universal voting public—and, he notes, that form of government has never existed, now or in the past.
Nwanevu reminds us that the political thought and practices of ancient Greece were not especially democratic: Aristotle considered elections “oligarchical,” and Plato “described democratic society as chaotic and decadent.” The democracy that did exist in Athens was “mostly nonsense,” Nwanevu writes, because so many Athenians were excluded from citizenship and participation in decision-making. The United States at its founding was not meaningfully better; the idea that the authors of the US Constitution invented modern democracy, he argues, is just as ridiculous as the idea that Athenian thinkers did.
It isn’t merely that the idea of voting rights as being essential was not broadly held among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, let alone universal. The system as a whole was designed to minimize the ability of citizens to select their government officials: Most power was left to the state governments, and in the national government, judges were appointed and senators were selected by state legislators, while presidents were chosen by electors, leaving members of the House of Representatives as the only elected federal officials. Not only was the United States not founded as a democracy, but no other country was either, at least through the very end of the 19th century, because, among other deficiencies, women weren’t allowed to vote.
Nwanevu’s view of the American founding is that, rather than being motivated by caution about majoritarianism (or, to use Tocqueville’s famous phrase, “the tyranny of the majority”), our system’s basic design can most usefully be seen as a successful effort by the rich to establish a nation that would disempower the poor. He believes that fear of the economically struggling mob, triggered especially by Shays’s Rebellion, an uprising of debtors in rural Massachusetts in 1786–87, dominated the thinking of the framers of the Constitution.
The “ostentatiously conservative” Alexander Hamilton and the “intensely alarmed” James Madison, as Nwanevu describes them, persuaded their colleagues (who may not have needed much persuading) that the United States should be a republic rather than a democracy—and the wrong kind of republic at that. Nwanevu proposes that there have always been two kinds of republics, democratic and aristocratic: “Democratic republicanism hopes to reduce domination by disempowering the wealthy and addressing economic inequality. In aristocratic republicanism, on the other hand, reducing domination often means defending the wealthy from others, including the masses.” The United States was and in most ways remains an aristocratic republic, born of “the fear that democratic action had posed a dire threat to property rights and a minority group that merited special protections—wealthy elites.”
When Nwanevu turns to the present, his main foils are writers and pundits who share the framers’ suspicion of direct democracy. Chief among these are Jason Brennan, the author of Against Democracy, and Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, the authors of Democracy for Realists. Both books were published in 2016, the year Trump was first elected president, and they struck a chord with liberals concerned about misinformation, polarization, and populism as forces powerful enough to win elections. For Nwanevu, these writers’ popularity among liberals reminds us that liberals can’t be counted on any more than conservatives to propose a version of democracy that is truly attuned to what voters want.
Brennan presents Nwanevu with the fattest target, because he favors replacing democracy with “epistocracy,” a system that would enfranchise only the knowledgeable, recalling the Southern literacy tests of the Jim Crow era. Achen and Bartels, more moderate as well as more highly esteemed in political-science circles, aim to discredit what they call the “folk theory of democracy”—the idea that we should trust the wisdom of voters as the guiding force in our political system. (Their book’s subtitle is “Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government.”) While Nwanevu would simply consider this “folk theory” as democracy itself, Achen and Bartels present a series of arguments for distancing the government from the voters; they find merit in mediating structures like parties, interest groups, and protected domains of expertise. “In every society, policy-making is a job for specialists,” they write.
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Achen, Bartels, and Brennan can be understood as operating in a larger tradition of American intellectuals who have worried about the tensions between universal political enfranchisement and a government that handles complex issues on the basis of reliable information that voters can’t possibly have. Nwanevu does not share in this skepticism toward the voting public. In a democracy, he contends, people should have the right to vote on the basis of their interests and overall preferences, rather than on whether they are well-informed about specific issues. Poll results showing how little voters know don’t trouble him, because Nwanevu trusts their instincts and their capacity to vote in their collective interest. Just about everything he proposes, once he gets to laying out a program, proceeds from that trust.
The House of Representatives, Nwanevu argues, should have many more members, so that each district would have fewer voters than 760,000, which was the 2020 average. It should also have proportional multi-member districts, so that minority views would be better represented. The Senate could abolish the filibuster, which makes it impossible to pass most bills by a simple majority vote, and it should be redistricted by population instead of by state borders. Or maybe, Nwanevu posits, it should simply be eliminated.
On the Electoral College, Nwanevu is less equivocal: It should definitely be abolished. He is no more enthusiastic about the Supreme Court, whose power to overrule laws it deems unconstitutional he regards as unjustified. He is for expanding the court’s membership, as long as the expansion entails the addition of liberal judges. Territories like Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, Nwanevu adds, should become states. The Constitution should become much easier to amend, but that would be only a temporary fix on the way to the real solution: completely rewriting it to give voters more direct say in their government’s decisions.
As you can see from all this, Nwanevu is confident that if the United States were a true democracy, it would move to the left. This confidence rests on his assumption that democratic politics is essentially materialist, so that a system that gives every citizen a truly equal voice would naturally skew away from policies that favor the rich in the way our system does today. True political democracy will naturally lead to economic and social democracy. The best way to help the country achieve the latter, he contends, is not only to empower citizens at the ballot box with a greater range of choices and decisions, but also to make civil society and the economy more democratic. The long-declining union movement should again be empowered to play a vital role in shaping labor relations, through laws that remove the barriers to organizing, mandate worker participation in corporate governance, and encourage employee ownership of businesses. Besides their obvious advantages, these changes, Nwanevu argues, would accustom workers to participating actively in the pursuit of their interests and so would build the skills that would then flow into the realm of politics.
The Right of the People is obviously not a hastily produced book. Much of it is historical, but its more contemporary arguments also clearly took time to develop, and as a result they reflect the moment when the book was written: during Joe Biden’s presidency, when we were still powerfully in the shadow of Trump’s first term and the January 6 insurrection.
But the moment we’re in now, with Trump back in power, feels different. In the Biden years, it was possible to argue confidently that Trump could not become president in a true democracy of the kind Nwanevu has in mind—after all, he lost the popular vote in 2016, and then tried to overturn the election results in 2020 when he lost that vote again (as well as the decision in the Electoral College). In the Biden years, it was possible to think, or at least to hope, that the Republican Party wasn’t actually making significant inroads with the working-class voters that Nwanevu puts at the center of his ideal version of politics. And it was also still possible to think of nonelective institutions within and adjacent to the government as being of secondary importance, compared with the centrality of those government institutions closely tied to the popular will.
But now, with the democratically elected Trump administration waging war on the law, on democratic norms, and on the rights of citizens, it no longer seems inarguable that lowering the guardrails the Constitution put around direct democracy would be wonderful. Working-class voters don’t seem to be reliably on the left—at least without further political organizing—and on the economic issues Nwanevu cares about most, neither does the Democratic Party. As he points out, the presidential candidate who effectively ended the practice of federal funding for campaigns, because he thought (correctly) that he could raise more money without it, was Barack Obama. In 2016, Hillary Clinton raised more money from rich donors than Trump did. Even Zohran Mamdani, in his version of socialism, stresses generous government benefits far more than the union organizing and worker empowerment that Nwanevu considers essential. Some working-class voters, especially if they are white men, also privilege cultural conservatism over economic liberalism in choosing whom to vote for.
Nwanevu is unshakably confident that a political democracy reengineered to be far more responsive to voters’ political preferences will produce a more economically and socially democratic country. But to feel so certain requires believing that any political energies that would be unleashed by such a process of dramatic democratization would be progressive. It also requires feeling certain that the ruling elites of today, faced with a political system more directly responsive to popular opinion, would not find new ways to manipulate it to their advantage.
Without descending into democracy skepticism, it’s possible to wonder if we should be more cautious, less sanguine, about purifying the connection between government and voting through a more direct-democracy model. Better organizing efforts are a necessary precondition to winning elections, and they help create a landscape of countervailing forces to centralized, autocratic power. Our system, for all its original flaws, has the advantage of being designed to protect the country from a malign king.
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Nwanevu is not wrong in asserting that the Constitution was written by members of colonial America’s wealthy elite, but simply protecting wealth does not represent the totality of the framers’ thinking. Also on Madison’s mind, and presumably on the minds of the other framers, were the divisions not only between the wealthy and the rest of the people but also between the various categories of the propertied. Southern slaveholders were free traders and wanted global markets for cotton. Northern manufacturers were protectionists because they didn’t think their fledgling industries could survive against open foreign competition. Agricultural interests were debtors and financial interests were creditors. There were also smaller geographic and industry-specific economic interests. What Madison and the other framers were seeking, as much as generalized protection from the propertyless, was a set of compromises among the propertied. They were endeavoring to create a republic in which no one interest or group dominated the others.
The political system they designed therefore threw a lot of sand in the gears. Today, wealthy interests still fight with one another, but to the extent that they have interests in common, they can usually make the system produce the results that favor them, especially on economically consequential but arcane issues like regulation and taxation. That might still be the case if our system were more directly democratic: People with tons of resources tend to get the political results they desire, no matter how the system is designed. Protection from bad outcomes can come from building a stronger civil society, and from distributing power not only within the government but also between the government and other kinds of institutions that have the public welfare at heart.
Such institutions are the ones Trump is attacking directly today, and for good reason. Research universities, regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, trade unions, foundations, think tanks, nonprofits, and news organizations—all have become the objects of a furious and largely unanticipated assault during the second Trump administration. Many of these institutions have their roots in the Progressive and New Deal eras and were founded on the conviction that modern democratic governments require bureaucracy and expertise—that, as Herbert Croly put it in The Promise of American Life, we could improve the American system by pursuing Jeffersonian principles through Hamiltonian means. Nwanevu would surely be skeptical of Croly’s argument, but in the current moment, it has become clear that any diminution in these institutions’ independence or influence only works to make Trump himself more autocratically powerful. Even if their stated purpose is to perform specific, often technical functions, together they stand as a bulwark against a quasi-dictatorship based on personal whim. It’s fair to think of them as democracy-enhancing.
Conservatives have never much liked these institutions, suspecting both their founding purpose and their supposed political neutrality. But few seem to have anticipated this year’s fierce and destructive attack on them (apart, of course, from its authors). One of the many alarming aspects of this assault is that it doesn’t seem to be as upsetting to many in the public as some of Trump’s other actions. The idea, instead, is that these institutions are also “elites,” and that does speak to a problem with how they have organized themselves and functioned, especially in recent years. But even if they ought to become more democratic and more engaged with everyday concerns, is a more directly majoritarian constitutional system the solution to their flaws?
Preserving our democracy seems like a more urgent task than ever. What that entails is not just directly empowering voters but also protecting the essential—but not directly democratic—systems and structures that the country has created over the years from right-wing populist assaults.
Nicholas LemannNicholas Lemann teaches at Columbia University and is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book is Transaction Man.