On Our Own Liberation

Osita Nwanevu is a journalist, pundit, and scholar who writes for The Guardian, The New Republic, and more. Jake Grumbach of the Boston Review aptly described his writing as work that “weaves together political economic theories, political philosophy and history, and a reporter’s groundedness in actually existing politics to diagnose the root causes of our democratic malaise and plot a path forward.”

In early 2025, he published The Right of the People, a book aimed at “reimagining the American project and making American democracy real.” An excerpt from the book captures his project well:

Democracy isn’t about the will of the people winning out in a given collective decision. It’s about the right of the people to govern themselves through collective decision-making in the first place. The rules that determine what collective decisions get made won’t be perfect. The decisions made will rarely, if ever, satisfy everyone. And the notion that the decisions made will reflect the wishes of a definitive majority is, essentially, a fiction. But to believe in democracy is to believe that the people, nevertheless, should have the right to come together, in equal standing, and make collective decisions in systems designed to respond to majorities.

We had an incredibly helpful conversation on what makes democracy the standard in the first place, what a “refounding” could look like, what democratic questions we need to raise in the face of AI, and how to better couple economic reforms to questions of democracy.

This interview was conducted by Noelle Forougi for franknews, and condensed for clarity. Help keep franknews free and for the public by subscribing below.

Do you mind starting by introducing yourself and how you came to this book?

Sure. I am a contributing editor of The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and I’ve been covering American politics for about 10 years. I’ve really thought, over the last 10 years, that democracy was really at the heart of a lot of our political goings-on.

Hearing people talk about ideas on health care, or on climate change, or on gun control … I knew were probably not going to pass unless some democratic norms were enacted that would allow them to get those policies through Congress. It came to a point where I thought that I owed it to readers to explain why that was the case. Why is our system set up in such a way that it’s so hard to pass legislation? Why are the courts set up the way they are? Why do we elect presidents the way that we do?

How much do you think the American public cares about democracy?

There’s been a lot of polling about this, fortunately. In 2024 there was polling that suggested it was the first or second issue people went into the polls to vote on. But that can mean all kinds of things. Trump supporters thought that Kamala Harris was a threat to democracy. Harris’s supporters thought, I think more rightfully, that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy. If you ask people what democracy means, they’ll give you different kinds of answers and different perspectives on what’s most important. Democracy is something the American voter does care about, but what they actually mean by it, what they actually expect from democracy, is a little bit more complicated.

I think the people who are out there right now saying it was a mistake to run on democracy, that democracy was a bad message, disconnected from people’s material concerns, I don’t think have it quite right. I’m presenting a view of democracy that’s about agency: the amount of control we have as individuals over the lives that we lead.

What would you characterize as the immutable part of democracy?

I think democracy in general has three basic characteristics: equality, responsiveness, majority rule. These are the things I think any good democratic system tries to instantiate. I don’t think there’s a system anywhere that gets it perfectly, but I do think the American political system is very, very far out of whack on all of those fronts.

The book calls for a new founding. There are points in our history where we’ve made things better, reformed the political system in dramatic ways. I think you can talk about Reconstruction this way; you can talk about the civil rights movement that way. I think we’re at a point where our political institutions have gotten so distorted and so inequitable that it really is incumbent upon us to consider real, meaningful, and pathbreaking change on this front.

Do you mind walking through, for those who haven’t read the book, some of the reforms you look at?

I think the easiest one sell to the American people is getting rid of the Electoral College. There’s a proposal called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: states agree to give their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. So once states totaling 270 electoral votes join, the popular vote winner automatically wins the Electoral College too. Over 200 votes are already committed, so hitting 270 within the next decade is entirely plausible with more organizing.

For the Senate, I talk about adding new states. The chamber’s imbalances are regional, biased toward rural, less populous, more conservative parts of the country, and there’s no easy structural fix. But adding more diverse, populous states helps mitigate it. Adding D.C. and the territories, if they choose it via referendum, would help solve that and diversify the Senate.

I also talk about court reform, proposals range from adding justices to rotating them in from lower courts to reduce politicization. There’s real debate among progressives about the best approach. But having a court with lifetime appointments of nine justices who can invalidate legislation on their own…that’s not a situation you have anywhere else in the world. The Supreme Court we have is kind of uniquely medieval.

And you also point to economic change…

Democracy to me is not just the ideal that should apply to politics in the political sphere. If we believe in democracy because it allows the governed to govern, then we should be thinking broadly about all the different places in our lives where we’re governed.

And I think that it makes sense to say that we’re also governed within the economy. We spend about a third of our lives at work. The decisions that are made at work often affect us more directly, intimately, and immediately than decisions made in Washington, D.C. or at a state capital or city hall. But we tell ourselves we’re not entitled to democratic agency in the workplace or within the economy. On that basis, that should be very strange to us.

Why is it the case that somebody who works at Starbucks can go and vote to have their say on what our foreign policy (which I think they should), but has no place in their life where they can say, ‘This is how I think Starbucks should be run…”

I talk about bring democratic values to the economy, and I think that should be part of having one large conversation about democracy again. Democracy is not just defending Congress, defending political norms, defending the way things used to work in Washington. Democracy can be saying to the American people, “Look, you deserve more control over the society and your own lives than you’re presently given.”

We are at a point now where a lot of people feel — politically and economically — that our current system isn’t working for or representing the wants of most people. Do you think that is a feature of a bug?

I think this is how the system was meant to work. I mean, we’ve changed and improved certain aspects of our political system — expanding the right to vote, the direct election of senators. In spite of all of that, though, we have a political system that, in its basic infrastructure, is just about the same as it was when the founders set it up in Philadelphia in 1787. And we know that they wanted a system of government that would be difficult for majorities of the ordinary public to influence.

They excluded a vast majority of the American public in the first place. We have documentation from them that they expected the Senate to be the chamber that would be protecting wealth, most explicitly. We know that they wanted some kind of insulation between public opinion and the election of the presidency. They didn’t want to create a system where people could reliably make policy on a majoritarian basis, and certainly not economic policy.

Obviously the ones benefiting are scared of change, but do you think people are scared of change as well, of what might come from re-looking at the foundations of our political system?

The American people are aware that Washington doesn’t really work, that their institutions are broken or dysfunctional, but they don’t necessarily know why. We’ll change parties, we’ll change who’s in the White House, but things aren’t getting better on the policymaking front. The things we aren’t changing are these basic institutions, and that they’ve been designed in such a way that it makes it very hard for us to enact sensible solutions to the problems we face.

As scary and as apprehensive as people might be about large-scale change, I do think there’s a readiness for it. But you have to explain to people that the reason why things aren’t working isn’t necessarily because there’s a villain in Washington, or a set of villains you just have to replace. The reason why things don’t seem to get any better is that we’re not actually changing the institutions. The institutions are not set up in such a way that they serve the American people well.

Right, and I do I feel like we are at a moment where we need to decide what we want from a life, from a country, from a government. It feels like we’ve handed our vision of the future over to companies only interested in the bottom line. And the question I keep asking myself is: what is a society for, what is a government for, if not to help us get closer to some ideal of human life.

A thousand percent. I mean, I think we’re very good at asking ourselves in this country, “what did the founders want? What did the founders intend? What were their aspirations for the country?” We’re very bad at asking, “okay, what are human beings entitled to? What kind of society should we live in? What kind of country should we be, on the basis of our own principles?” Which is, ironically, the set of questions the founders themselves asked when they were founding this country.

This AI question is an obsession of mine now. The fundamental questions driving the American economy at the moment are questions like: what does it mean to be conscious? What is human life for? What is creativity? What is art? These are the scale of the questions we’re being confronted with now, and you don’t get answers to them purely by looking at the way we’ve done things in the past, or our existing political norms or habits. We’re in a moment of a kind of refounding, and it’s just a question of whether ordinary people are going to make the decision about what kind of society we’re going to be, or whether that’s going to be left to tech executives and fascists. That’s a point of decision.

We are in a moment now where the country is being remade and the world is being remade. The question is just who’s going to remake it. And I think we can’t really set ourselves up to do it ourselves if we’re not asking ourselves what society is for, what human beings are all about, what human life is about, and making arguments, and offering ourselves visions, on that basis.

It’s also confusing to me why politicians, who seem so power hungry, are seemingly so willing to cede their power to the tech companies…

I think it’s very hard to understand anything that happens in Washington if you don’t come to the realization that maybe 75% to 80% of the people there are not actually there because they want to exercise power. Some of them are, some have a vision, but a lot of people are just there to be there, to be told by lobbyists and their superiors within the party infrastructure what they ought to be voting for and supporting and thinking about.

I was listening to an interview you did where the interviewer asked you, basically, whether, “the working class can be trusted to vote in their own self-interest.” On a personal level, that feels like such a frustrating question, but it is certainly a common one. There’s a fear, on both sides, it seems, of the masses.

Yeah, I mean, I think you see this even on the left. You’ll hear disparaging statements about the intelligence and the wisdom of the average voter. I just don’t think it’s warranted. Yeah, people make bad political decisions. We had a bad election this last election, where Donald Trump legitimately won a plurality of the American public. That’s tough. But I also think that’s sort of the cost of self-governance.

I would not trade any of that, though, for a system where we are told what to do by elites, or rich people, or a king. In fact, I think it’s through making mistakes that we learn, even as individuals, how do we improve ourselves? It’s by taking risks and trying new things, attempting things, and figuring out that we did something wrong and trying to do better next time. I think if there’s any prospect of the general public improving, of humanity improving, it has to come from learning by doing in this way.

I just don’t think there’s very much reason to doubt our capacity to govern ourselves. I’m quite confident in our ability to continue improving and to exercise our power and agency for ourselves, and I wouldn’t trade the promise of our own liberation for anything.