Osita Nwanevu, author of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding joined me for a discussion about democracy.
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.
Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and the Democratic Institutions fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is a former staff writer at The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Slate, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, In These Times, Flaming Hydra, and Gawker. His first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, was published by Random House in August 2025.
