Note: Due to technical difficulties, my conversation with Osita was split into two Substack Live broadcasts. Click here for Part 2, and you can stop the video above at around the 34 minute mark.
Osita Nwanevu’s new book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, calls for a reimagination of the American project to make our democracy real. It couldn’t be more timely.
We had a rich and wide-ranging conversation about what democracy means; how our institutions and the design of our Constitution thwart the equality, agency, and majority rule that real democracy requires; and what it means when we look at democracy as a project we have to actively construct.
This construction will be a generational project that won’t be completed tomorrow, or in five years. But rather than get depressed over how undemocratic our system is, Osita argues, we should be galvanized at the idea that we have the power, the ability, and the right to create the kind of society we want based on our values—not those from the late 18th century.
We also discussed why so many Americans don’t see “democracy” as delivering for them, and how it can; why the idea of a single “will of the people” is a flawed idea that authoritarians exploit for their own ends; and more.
In Part 2, we discussed a fascinating topic from Osita’s book that is almost always left out of discourse—economic democracy, and how labor and unions help guarantee it.
