957 - Democracy Soon! feat. Osita Nwanevu (8/4/25)

All I'm gonna be is ill jumble.

All I wanna be is ill jumbo.

King Don't tell Bristol.

All I wanna

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, August 4th.

Welcome back to Chapo.

On today's episode,

we consider democracy.

As the great Leonard Cohen once sang, democracy is coming to the USA.

Joining us to describe this delayed arrival, we are very pleased to have back on the show Osita Nuevo, whose new book, The Right of the People, explores this very question.

Osita, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for asking me again.

Osita, in the introduction to your book, you sort of have a survey about the state of democracy in America and around the world.

And given the state of things, you conclude that perhaps people are not as reverent of democracy or

don't care as much about the idea of democracy given the state of what it's produced or the state of things in this country.

And you lay out three statements that I'd like to examine.

And And you write in the introduction, in the spirit of the Declaration, this book moves from first principles, an exploration of what democracy means through three main ideas, that democracy is good, that America is not a democracy, and that America should become a democracy through the transformations not only of our political institutions, but of our economy.

I want to examine each of those statements and the claims or what you mean by each of them.

But I think it would be useful to begin with:

could you give us a sort of a historical perspective, like philosophically and historically, about how you define democracy and what democracy actually means?

Sure.

So I read a lot of really boring books to this end that, and we hope people appreciate that I did that work for you.

You don't have to go trawling through a lot of dusty academic philosophy and a lot of formulas on this stuff.

But, you know, the...

most succinct definition that I was able to come up with was democracy is a system in which the governed govern, right?

So it's the people themselves who are subject to governance who get to govern.

They're not giving that over to some higher authority or king or class of oligarchs.

They themselves determine the direction of their society.

And, you know, that principle sounds kind of intuitive to people, but one of the first conceptual problems we have to wrestle with is, you know, democracy can look all kinds of different ways.

So we tell ourselves in the Western tradition that Athens was one of the precursors to democracies we know today.

But Athens, as folks kind of know, was a system that had much more participation directly from the citizenry.

So you could go to the assembly if you were a citizen and participate directly in the making of the laws, laws that would then be implemented, carried out, often by people chosen by sortition.

They would have seen elections as we know them today as actually a kind of aristocratic substitute for real democracy.

I mean, I think that representation has a lot of things going for it, we can get into, but I think the common principle between those systems is democracy is a system in which the people themselves in a given polity are actually doing governing.

And it was important to me to approach the issue from first principles because I think it actually radicalizes and expands our conception of what democracy is and what it could be in practice here.

And I wanted to do that for a lot of different reasons directly related to the existing political situation in this country.

I mean, we just had an election that was,

I think, could be fairly said, a referendum on democracy, a particular understanding of democracy.

You know, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden talked talked about how Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, how they should vote for the Democrats, people should vote for the Democrats because they're going to protect American democracy as an ideas and as a project.

People looked at that and they said, well, I actually think that I'm going to vote based on my economic interests or my sense of Donald Trump's going to be better.

I think they did that for a couple of reasons.

One,

there's a lot of cynicism, not only here, but around the world about the extent to which democracy actually works in the interests of ordinary people.

I think people in this country believe, and it's been polls on this, that what we call democracy is actually a system dominated by the wealthy, dominated by people who are already powerful.

So that's one reason.

There are people who doubted that there was a democracy to save from Donald Trump in the first place.

And the second thing is,

talking about democracy in the way that the Democrats talked about it was an abstraction,

was a set of principles that people could not see, again, as strictly connected to their own material and economic lives.

And what I do in this book, and I think the most important thing I do in this book is say, look, if we are entitled to democracy because we're entitled to some measure of control of the conditions that shape our lives, it's power that we want for ourselves, it becomes immediately obvious that that's not just the principle that should govern our political institutions, you know, the ballots, but also the economy.

I don't think that we have fully embodied what democracy can be.

If it's the case that an Amazon worker, Walmart worker, McDonald's worker can vote on political issues, sure, can vote on things all the way up to our foreign policy with Russia or China, but cannot say anything anywhere with authority about their own working conditions, their own working lives, what things that Amazon should be like, what things that Walmart and McDonald's should be like.

That, to me, is the next frontier of democratic thought, democratic thinking.

And you can only get there by taking this very kind of first principles approach that nonetheless, I think, gets you to a conception of democracy that ends up being more materially connected, actually, to people's economic lives and their own economic interests.

You know, if you grew up in this country or were educated in this country, it's like it's taken as sort of just as read that America is a democracy and America is good because it's a democracy, like, you know, in contrast to other countries that don't have democratic freedoms or the consent of the governed in terms of who they are ruled by.

But to go with your first principle, that democracy is good.

And like the broadest sense,

what are the benefits of democracy?

And then how do you, and what would the critics critics of democracy, including many of our founding fathers who like supposedly bequeathed us this democracy, like what is that interplay between the benefits of a democracy and its critics?

Yeah, so I think you can think about the benefits of democracy on like a very kind of like metaphysical kind of level, at the level of what it means to be a human being.

That's kind of what resonates or has come to resonate the most with me, just the idea that we live for such a short time and in that time, how much of our lives are really under our control?

How much are we the helpless victims of some circumstances that we can't control or subject to hierarchies, the wealthy and powerful ending up dictating how we spend our time?

Democracy is a way to wrest some power back, some agency back for ourselves.

So that's like the basic metaphysical rendering.

You can read people like John Dewey, you can meet people like Walt Mitten.

You can talk about democracy in this kind of way.

But practically, for people who are nerds, there are three

sort of more,

I guess, tangible benefits I think are worth talking about.

The first that I discussed is agency considered as a practical thing.

You're not waiting for some of the authority to tell you what your problems are and how to solve them.

You and your own experience, you and your own life, coming together with other people can decide, actually, we have an issue here.

We need to solve it now.

We need to deploy our own powers.

We need to sort of develop our own resources to solve this.

It's not waiting for some rich guy or some king to decide what's wrong and doing things on a basis.

You have real agency to do things on your own.

The second thing is dynamism.

So democracy is really, really good at facilitating change.

It's a process with inbuilt points where you evaluate things that have gone on and you reassess.

You have to canvas the public over and over and over again.

And that is a lot of opportunity for change, kind of flexibility to certain situations.

A king or a class of oligarchs conceptually could have as a value that we want to reevaluate things and change things.

But democracy has that built in.

And it's built into the point where you you can actually change over the representatives, leaders that you select.

And the last thing is procedure.

So there are stable ways of adjudicating disputes and generating new policies.

You are not waiting for some guy to marry some person,

you know, the democratical system to have a changeover in government.

You don't have to, at least...

The hope is, you know, engineer some kind of violent revolution every time you want anything at all to happen.

There is a kind of process that's available to you within democracy, again, built in.

These are, I think, very, very practical reasons why democratic governance is better than the alternatives.

But I think

overall, for me, again,

the idea of being empowered to direct the conditions, shape the conditions of our lives is kind of the bedrock principle.

I think it touches people on the level of beyond theoretical, whatever, nuts and bolts.

So the question of American democracy, the way that people classically argue about this is,

you know, you'll talk about all kinds of problems with our political system.

Conservatives will say, well, actually, that's fine because America is not supposed to be a democracy.

It's a republic.

It was designed as one.

And then liberals will say, no, that's actually wrong.

All that the founders meant and understood by a republic is a system of representative governments as opposed to Athens, which is, as we discussed, a more direct democracy.

That is not true.

The liberal response, I think, is historically not compelling.

I think conservatives actually have the better side of the argument, which is one of the provocations of the book.

Conservatives designed our institutions with reference to certain republican ideals.

And republicanism,

at the time of the founding, was not intrinsically democratic at all.

You can go back to the Roman Republic, had certain popular features, but was not a representative democracy in a familiar sense at all.

The Italian maritime republics in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were systems where you had a class of merchant oligarchs voting and

adjudicating things on the basis of sort of fair procedures from their perspective.

But it wasn't democracy.

All republicanism means, as I get into the book, is you have a kind of stable set of rules, you have procedures, maybe you have a written constitution that govern how power is distributed and that ideally protect certain interests or certain people in society from the domination of others.

But that's not intrinsically democratic.

In fact, the founders were part of what I think is a Republican tradition that was principally concerned or largely concerned with protecting property and protecting the interests of the wealthy from the masses.

So the faction that they're trying to protect from domination is the wealthiest people in society, and they create institutions that help them do this in the middle of a political situation, as I talked about in the book also, where they thought that ordinary working class people in this country had done too much to threaten the stability of property, stability of contracts.

By contrast, you can can have a democratic republic where you say, no, we're actually interested in representing, reflecting the interests of most people in society, and we're actually afraid of the domination of the wealthy over the masses more.

So that's kind of the,

without getting into too much of the history lesson here, that's the broad strokes overview of why I think the system is fairly characterized as Republican, but not democratic, at least from a historical and theoretical perspective.

Yeah, our Constitution has all all of these sort of counter-majoritarian locks and dams because, yeah, I agree with you.

I think that they were terrified of the idea of like a show of hands determining government because, you know, they understood themselves as being a minority.

And if, you know, the people who don't have property realize you can just vote for

more rights or more property or their property, they were terrified of that.

And you focus in particular on the Constitutional Convention and figures such as Madison, Hamilton, and Edmund Randolph and their deep distrust of democracy.

Can you talk about how the Constitution was often a bulwark against democracy rather than its enshrinement as a sacred value?

Sure, thanks.

I think the context people need to have is that the American Revolution, which we talk about as...

you know, this exchange of letters and documents and

people with cool pens writing a lot.

It was actually a war.

It was the most deadly war as a percentage of the population of any war in American history but the Civil War.

25,000 people die.

And it totally devastates the colonial economy or the early economy of what becomes the United States.

In the first 15 years of our existence as a country, I think juris national product falls by like 50%.

So it's a huge depression, the worst until the Great Depression.

And in response to that, poor people, farmers around the country, are appealing to their state governments for relief.

They're petitioning for the ability to pay for their goods or pay their debts off and their taxes off in kind with goods.

They're asking for the circulation of paper money because there's so little hard currency in the country.

And the wealthy people in the country, you know, the people who became the class of people that ended up in Philadelphia in 1787 to write the Constitution, are horrified by this.

They think it leads to the, you know, as I said, violates contracts, it undermines creditworthiness.

And it also lets people, from their perspective, get lazy, slothful.

Maybe you're spending too much money on gambling and whiskey.

And there's one document that the historian Woody Holton talks about where women in particular are being blamed for buying high fashions and

indulging in...

Women bee shopping even in the revolutionary times.

Women bee shopping specifically, as you said, for artificial rumps.

This was a

loosh

importation from Europe that was getting people to spend more money than they should.

So, you know, familiarly, people are responding to real real economic discontent with disdain and a refusal to really give people relief.

Fortunately, though, in the

state legislatures, people are petitioning for relief pretty successfully in most states, with the exception of Massachusetts.

And in Massachusetts, you actually have a tax increase.

Legislature defies.

the popular revolt.

This leads to an uprising, which people may remember from school, you know, Shane's Rebellion.

That's eventually put down, horrifies the founders even more.

And we have letters from Washington and other people saying, well, this is giving us reason to doubt that democracy or democratic governance is sound.

Maybe we should move to a monarchical system of government again.

These are direct quotes from doctrines you have that people don't really talk about.

So the project of the Constitutional Convention, 1787, is to fundamentally rework the country's governing order.

You have at the federal level, before then, the Articles of of Confederation, which were very, were truly stupid.

I mean, people are making that up.

That's not, you know, you had to get supermajorities to pass anything of note.

You need unanimity to amend the thing.

You couldn't really do it, force the states to do anything.

You were asking for them to comply with federal policies.

That really needed to change.

But the thing that the founders thought they needed to change the most was, you know, the federal government had been kind of inactive, impotent, relative to these far more democratic state governments.

The federal government had no capacity to act directly upon the American people and had no capacity to ask them for taxes directly either.

And so they want a different political order where there'll be a sovereign federal government that is not democratically accessible.

That's the kind of balance that they're trying to strike.

And they talk openly from the very first speech at the convention about how what had brought them there was an excess of democracy, or in Hamilton's words on the draft of the Constitution in 1787,

a system designed to fight against, his words, the depredations which the democratic spirit is apt to make on property.

Hamilton at the Constitutional Convention.

So none of this is hidden.

None of this is conspiratorial.

We have Madison's notes to the convention.

We have letters that people were writing back and forth.

We have the Federalist Papers.

I mean, a lot of this stuff is open

or sort of open to read even today.

But we have a way of talking about the Constitution, obviously in the founding, that is reverential and it treats a thing as a sacred compromise put together by men of principle.

And that's just not what happened.

They were men, political figures responding to a particular political and economic situation on the basis of their, you know, their own position in American society.

These are the wealthiest and most educated Americans, or among the most wealthy and most educated Americans in the country at the time.

So they crafted a system that served their interests.

Another thing you talk about in the book is the folk theory of democracy.

Can you explain what that is and what's wrong with it, at least according to its critics?

Yeah, I mean, so the folk theory of of democracy, this is a phrase that is used in this book called Democracy for Realists by Christopher Aiken and Larry Bartles.

They came out in 2016 to, I think, more praise than I think I've ever seen for a political science book in the popular press.

People reviewed this thing all over the place.

every publication, you know, right-wing publications, liberal publications.

And the basic theory of it is that this idea that in a democracy where we have a system where people come together and they think about their policies

and think about their interests and vote on that basis for what they think will be good in a kind of rational way.

It's not what happens at all.

Democracy is riven with all kinds of problems, from tribalism to people voting for arbitrary reasons.

And we should come away from all that understanding with a more cynical view of whether democracy works in the way that we believe and more kind of humble aspirations for it.

I get into the arguments pretty deeply in the second chapter of the book.

A lot of it's kind of like technical and not

going to bore people.

One thing I will say is that

examples, one of the examples that they lean on in this book is there were these shark attacks in the early 20th century off the coast of New York.

Amity.

Right.

Well,

right.

you know they they they they did an analysis of like results in that presidential election and concluded that the shark attacks had had actually motivated people's voting to a certain extent which proves that people are stupid and shouldn't be trusted with the vote, like implicitly.

There was a researcher at the University of Chicago who looked at their analysis and saw that they literally made certain basic mistakes.

It didn't seem like shark attacks ended up mattering in that election at all.

But that example is

indicative of the whole thrust of the thing, which is that people are dumb, democracy can't do all we expect it to, and so on.

And

I would absolutely concede that people are often misinformed and they make mistakes, and it's both ethical and

informational when they go to the polls.

I think Donald Trump is the president today, partially for that reason.

But we also do very, very little relative to other countries to improve that situation.

We have very few investments in the public media in this country.

The few that we have are being attacked and destroyed right now.

I mean, NPR was basically just...

NPR is done, pretty much.

Yeah, it seems like.

No more antiques road show.

None of that.

We'll see.

We'll see.

And, you know, NPR, PBS, these were not

by no means perfect institutions.

But the point is, like, in other parts of the world, in Europe, there's an understanding that we need a public, non-commercially funded media infrastructure to augment or supplement what we have in the public that's profit-driven because you get better news that way.

It improves the informational environment.

We could be doing that.

We're not.

We could be investing more in informing the public in all kinds of ways from their time in school up to their time as adults.

So we have no reason to believe that

there's no capacity to get people to the polls with

better information, better ideas.

But also, you know, one of the things I wanted to challenge too is

this fetishization of expertise and people needing a certain knowledge base in order to participate meaningfully in politics when

to my mind, one, experts are wrong about a lot of things.

Experts disagree about a lot.

A lot of destructive policies were enacted over the last 20, 30 years in this country by experts from a foreign policy that killed hundreds of thousands of people, is killing thousands of people as we speak, to economic policies that led to the ruination of a lot of ordinary working people in this country.

Experts can be wrong, we should take that seriously.

So that's one critique.

But also,

we all have values.

Whether or not you know exactly how much we spend in a given year on Medicare, you do have certain basic intuitions about what people are or aren't entitled to when it comes to healthcare, what should or shouldn't be a public responsibility.

I think it's fine for you to come into politics with that content, that material, and actually vital that you do so.

You say that, and then like, I was just thinking about this the other night in terms of like the way I see a lot of Democratic politicians arguing against democratic socialist principles or a candidate like Mom Dani.

They're just sort of like, oh, his ideas sound great, but like, how are we going to get it done?

Like, is this realistic given the current rotten political system that we all live under?

And I just think, like,

I find that to be sort of a dodge to, like, sort of artificially constrain the limits of people's values and imagination within this exact present moment.

So, like, whether something can get done given the make current makeup of Congress is to me less important than the values that like the policy represents in the person promoting it.

And that by its promotion in a democracy, theoretically, is the process by which it becomes possible.

Do you think that that's like, do you find that something similar or do you think that's a reasonable way of thinking about values versus expertise?

I think so.

I think so.

And that's one of the things that I think motivates the approach the book takes in general because I am trying to get people to think again about like first principles.

What are the actual ethical principles, first

initial background values that we're bringing to our politics in the first place?

Once you do that,

you end up taking the institutions we have for granted less, and your capacity to imagine changing them as a practical matter expands.

But yeah, I mean, there's something perverse too, I think, about, you know, again, the way we talk about the founders and the founding generation of this country and the constitution.

You know,

I'm not a fan of the founding generation of this country,

as might be obvious.

But I think the one thing you can take from that moment is, well, these are people who saw themselves as having the right to sort of refound society, remake society on the basis of principle.

They broke from an empire, they write a constitution, they scrap that constitution, write the one we have, all because they had certain ideas and principles.

And

two centuries later, it seems like the lesson that political establishment or people who are centrists or more conventional liberals want us to take from that moment in the founding is a respect for institutions, which is weird.

Like

we have, we have the entry we have now because they were not respecting institutions.

In fact, they violently broke from them.

And so I think that part of the motivation of the book is to give people the sense that they have a right, on the basis of their own values, principles, their vision for a better world, to sit themselves at the table and consider themselves people who are also founders, who also have the ability to determine the direction of this country and to expand its political possibilities.

So yeah, that's part of the overarching reason why, or one of the overarching reasons why the book exists in the first place.

I remember reading something from Peter Onoff, who's, I think, like one of the leading Jefferson scholars in this country.

And he made the point that what we think of as the American Revolution was not really a revolution in the like historical sense that most revolutions, like the French Revolution, for instance.

He described it more as an insurrection that changed management of the British Empire in the New World.

And then like to expand on that, I think like Eric Foner and others, or Matt Karp, who we've had on the show, has argued that it was the Civil War, in fact, in this country that was the first real American revolution.

and that that ongoing process, and that revolution is still unfinished.

Could you expand a little bit more on those ideas?

Yeah, so I mean the Foner, the Foner idea that the Civil War ends with these amendments to the Constitution, 13, 14, 15, that are so fundamental that we end up in a different society afterwards.

I mean, that's, I mean, he writes us in the second founding, and that's one of the reasons why the book is subtitled The Case for a New American Founding.

Just this idea that it is within our capacity and certainly our prerogative to to fundamentally reconstitute this country in accordance with the beliefs that we now hold and our aspirations.

Yeah, I mean,

it's the idea that everything

of value in this country was accomplished in 1787 and our job as citizens is to sort of go over it with a feather duster every now and then.

It's just stupid.

It's not true to like the American historical experience, but also it's not

the Constitution's like, don't touch grandma's humble figurines.

You may break it down.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

You know, and especially at this point now where it should be obvious to people, and I think it is obvious to a lot of increasing numbers of Americans, that we are in the mess we're in because these institutions are set up the way that they are.

They make it difficult for us to solve basic problems, to give people their due in the economy.

They're part of the reason why Donald Trump became a viable political figure in the first place.

And to have this kind of reverential, sacralizing attitude in the midst of all that, even as everything falls apart and

we're lurching towards oblivion, I think is insane.

I mean, like, so you engage with like the sort of the critics of democracy, like from our founding fathers.

And I did say I did get a kick of one of the names of these critics was a man named William H.

Riker.

Speaking of nerds, any relation to the fictional character William T.

Riker?

I don't know.

I don't know.

You're going to have to do that research yourself.

But no, I guess where I'm going with this is, do you see a through line or is there a like a lineage that connects the

sort of the foundational critiques of democracy like embedded in our Constitution with the contemporary, like that are conservative critiques of democracy, with a present day, I would say, like right-wing movement and their

critique, if not outright hostility to the idea of democracy.

Do you see a through line between those?

Like, what connects them and what separates them, if anything, in your point of view?

I mean, I think they are connected in that, I mean, conservatives will tell you they're connected.

And I think that the substance of that is, you have a conservative movement that is fundamentally about, you know, one of its major goals is to protect the wealthy people in the country, corporations, people with, you know, what would have been called property then, and I guess now, you know, wealth

more generally.

That's what the movement is about.

They want to frustrate our ability to address, change, regulate any of that on a democratic basis.

And so there's this consonance between the impulses that drove the founders to Philadelphia in 1787 and the conservatism we have today, for sure.

And I think that's at the root of why conservatives will tell you straight up.

America is a Republican, not a democracy, and that is, ought to determine the ought.

But the other thing I forgot to say, too, when I was talking about skepticism about democracy is that for as much panic as we have about the right and fascism and authoritarianism and like very, very straightforward repudiation of democracy,

the technocratic skepticism of people like Riker, of people like Akin and Bartles with democracy realized, I think is also corrosive in its own way.

The sense that maybe we're not deserving.

of as much democracy as we believe we are because we're not worthy enough, we're not virtuous enough, you know, we're not informed enough, whatever it happens to be, we're too tribal, we're too angry.

That has its own, I think, negative impact on our capacity to solve our problems democratically.

It undermines our own faith in our own agency, and it's unjustified.

One of the things I point out in the book is, look, if you have a kind of skepticism about uninformed people joining a political system, you have to grapple with the fact that when we gave African Americans the right to vote, and when we gave women the right to vote, these populations would have been, by virtue of the fact they were excluded from politics, less informed on average,

less clued in on average, what was going on in the political system than white men who had the right to vote and had had it for

generations.

And yet, America didn't collapse, actually,

when we brought those people in.

In fact, things improved not only for women and African Americans, but for the country as a whole.

I don't think you could really make sense of that with a kind of fatalistic understanding of how informed people are or whether people are passing civic knowledge exams.

So there's this kind of wonky centrist anxiety about democracy that I think is reflected in

latently in a lot of policy debates.

We can talk about the abundance stuff too.

And I think that also matters to talk about is like a democratic conversation.

It's not just the right we should be challenging and questioning.

It's people close to the center who might not seem outwardly or say outwardly that they're opponents of democracy, but implicitly kind of are.

Well like how do you see how do you see that from a liberal or democratic side?

Like, how do you see their hostility to democracy manifesting, for instance, in the abundance rebrand in the Democratic Party?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the basic idea is that democracy is a bottleneck, that when you have a transmission line you want to build or an affordable housing project you want to construct, the need to get public input on these things is intrinsically damaging.

to the viability of those projects and you need to sort of be able to circumvent democracy where you can and just sort of plow things through.

Now look, I'm not here to defend

the millionaire retiree or whatever who goes to like a public hearing and says they don't want an affordable housing development in their neighborhood, right?

Which is the person that they want you to imagine.

But I also don't think that it's intrinsically the case that democracy has to be an obstacle to sort of active and empowered federal governance or state governance, whatever it happens to be.

In fact, if you don't build buy-in for the projects you're constructing, if you you don't actually make a case to people and have them participate in the process, you undermine the political viability and stability of whatever it is you're trying to do, which is one of the reasons why all the technocratic things they did under Biden are now gone.

They lost the election.

I mean, were they selling those to the public in a democratic way?

Was there a real political effort to rope in the American people on those power projects and other projects?

No, there wasn't.

And so they lost them.

So this idea that democracy stands in opposition to getting things done and that smart, wonky people have a better sense of how these things should function than ordinary folks.

I mean, it's just not politically tenable.

It's not practically tenable.

And I also think it's not just in principle.

Yeah.

And speaking of not politically tenable,

I would say it's...

anti-democratic for the quote democratic party to be uh promoting and trying to rebrand around an agenda that essentially has zero popular constituency.

Yeah.

And like, you know, like we can get to zoning laws, but I think, as I said before, Medicare for all would be a good place to start in terms of making this country an actual democracy.

And like, and that's where I'm going to go now, because you like in right around like the fourth chapter of the book, you get to the thesis that I say

at the beginning, that America is not a democracy, you know, like despite what you may feel about it, and that the conservatives are essentially right about that.

So talk to us about why America's history has, despite progress towards that goal, still has, you know, sort of created a situation that is not a democracy.

And what are some things that we could like, the continued revolutions to get closer to that goal?

Yeah, so I mean the most straightforward thing that I end up talking about a lot because I've doing some events in D.C.

now is, you know, we have about 4 million Americans who don't have full representation in Congress, full indirect representation.

So in DC, for instance, DC has a delegate, El Holmes Norton,

who is in Congress but cannot actually cast a vote on the final passage of legislation.

The four million Americans for whom that is true, they are governed by the federal government without a really full, meaningful say in federal government.

There is no definition of democracy in which those people, those four million Americans, are living in a democracy today.

They're not.

They're living in a basically colonial arrangement.

So that's just straight up.

You know, there's a lie within that reality that we rarely discuss and

have to be acknowledged.

But even beyond that,

as your listeners might already know, those of us who have full representation on paper have the representation very unequally distributed, even by international standards.

So

in the Senate,

a person in Wyoming is represented about 60 times more, 67 times more than a resident of California.

California, you know, has about 40 million people.

If it were its own country, it'd be one of the 40 largest countries in the world.

It is one of the largest economies in the world.

Exact same representation in the Senate as Wyoming with fewer than 600,000 people.

So this makes the Senate, I think, the most malapportioned of any upper house in the world, with the exceptions, I think, only of Argentina and Brazil.

They're the only countries that are worse.

And that matters.

You're told in school that this is balanced out by the House.

It's not in any meaningful way.

The Senate alone shapes the judiciary and the executive branch.

So the inequities in the Senate reverberate elsewhere in the system.

And obviously the bare fact you need both houses to pass legislation means that the smaller states, the less populous states, have a kind of functional veto over federal policymaking.

You know, I think people have talked about this stuff for a long time.

I don't want to, my readers, with the things that they've already heard about the Electoral College and the Senate and so on.

But

You know, there's a point at which we're going to have to confront these basic inequities or the country is going to fall apart, break apart.

Inequities in the center particularly are only getting worse because of population dynamics and

it's a real problem.

It's a real hurdle for us in getting the things we want out of our economy, in passing the social policies we want and protecting them from a Supreme Court that is now dominated by conservatives.

But also I think it fuels a kind of, or at least incentivizes the kind of right-wing extremism we've seen from the Republican Party.

If you are not really beholden to most Americans in any meaningful way, but you're beholden only to the people in safe states and to Republican primary voters, that pulls your politics in an insane direction.

It pulls the country in an insane direction.

Osita, I had a question for you, and

it's kind of a bitch of a question because it is

a problem that like every

pretty much every system currently going on earth has kind of failed.

Yeah.

But I was wondering, in your mind, I guess, what is the democratic solution to the

modern habits of media consumption and modern modes of media consumption?

Because

a lot of this reminds me of conversations that I've had with more,

you know, people who are into the Democratic Party, let's say,

since the election in November.

And the conversation has been, you know, I feel like I'm...

you know, talking to a brick wall at points because I'm saying to them, you think this is a matter of like uh

you know winning the executive branch again and trying to set things up so that is at least as uh dependable

an accomplishment as it may have been under obama but i see that i don't know just that current habits of media consumption where like I'm not going to say it's like all Americans, but a significant portion of Americans like

have the same beliefs as medieval peasants, which is to say that they people have checked out entirely

out of consensus reality.

And that seems like I don't like, how do you get them back?

What is the democratic solution to that?

Because the only solutions I've come up for it are like

people, I guess, would call authoritarian, even though I think that's kind of a meaningless.

moniker.

But yeah, again, it's a bitch of a question because no one's figured it out.

No one's figured it out.

I certainly have it, but it is a question I think about a lot.

My thoughts about it are not in this book.

They're just thoughts that I have.

I guess what I would say is that it's important not to like

catastrophize about the current media environment given historical context.

Right.

So like for most of American history and really most of the history of...

the world and the history of politics, the information environment has been truly insane.

100 years ago in this country, you have a local newspaper print something that's totally untrue, and then people are lynched for it, and the whole town comes out and has a barbecue.

That's the history of most of this country.

I think what happens for people who are like,

especially people who are running the media now, people who run

New York Times, The Atlantic, and Washington Post, and these kinds of institutions, they grew up during the Cold War.

They grew up in this kind of post-World War II environment where for certain technological reasons and economic reasons, you for the first time have like a cohesive mass media that is concentrated

to like a few key nodes, right?

So you have like a key couple of major networks, and they reach the entire country and everybody watches them.

And that's the shared information environment.

But that's like a very historically unusual situation.

And it seems like, you know, for me, and I'm not a media historian, but my intuition is that we're returning to something more like what politics was in the past, like a gazillion different sources of information, a lot of total nonsense, a lot of peasant brain stuff and kooks and quackery and so on, and people selling snake oil out of the back of not a wagon, but on Instagram.

I mean, it's like the same kind of we're returning to that world, you know.

And the thing about it too, that I think is important as far as democracy is concerned, is like

we had that world and people still did.

politics, people still did democracy.

It was just a matter of like having the kind of fortitude to understand that

the world is insane and people don't often have good information and people are driven by crazy things.

But you still go out there and you do the work of organizing and people together.

But like, I think that people have this aspiration of like, there's some way we can put the genie back in the bottle of the internet and social media and return to like Edward R.

Moreau or something.

And that's not going to happen.

I think we had a kind of brief, very, very strange moment.

And now we're in the thicket of Charlatans and P.T.

Barnum again.

I mean, I would say, though, that

I mean, I think a lot of that

is a good way to look at it, that none of these things excuse anyone

from the role of like organizing or

just not appealing to

whatever part of people's brains makes them

buy into the guy going town to town selling snake oil out of the back of a wagon.

But I would say that

there is an unprecedented aspect aspect of this current environment of media consumption because, you know, whatever people had in like 1850, they did not have like a device that just occupied all their thoughts at any given moment.

Something that was just bombarding their brains that operated off of the same logic as slot machines.

And I think...

I mean, I think you're completely right.

Like, you can't really, there's no foreseeable way to put the genie back in the bottle

unless you're prepared to do things that haven't really historically been done on a national level in this country.

Well, what I'd say too is, and

I think that's definitely a good point.

I mean, the key difference is like these devices, as you say, and like the sites, I mean, these are controlled by a couple of major corporations.

So there's not...

There's not concentration at the level of like, here are the publications and here are like the affirmed sources of like good opinion.

But there is a concentration in terms of like every way that you get

your information, whether it's from like a news organization or like some guy, is being filtered through you to you through algorithms, apps, whatever you want to call them, devices.

They're controlled by just a few entities.

So that's like a big difference.

But it also means

that the solutions I don't know.

I think that that means that there are available remedies and that these are just a few companies.

And conceptually, we could regulate social media, these devices, in ways that improve the information environment somewhat.

It's just a matter of wanting to do that as a matter of policy.

I don't know what the right policy is, or how exactly to get there is a matter of politics.

But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, whether it's TikTok or Meta or Google, we're in a place now where you know, the responsibility to rein them in and to sort of have the public impose itself on them has been advocated.

We need to

give that a shot.

Maybe it doesn't work, and maybe we're doomed, and maybe

we're all just going to have our brains kind of oozing out of our ears with another 10 years of social media.

I don't know.

But I know that we haven't really tried to regulate them in any kind of serious way, and we should.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not entirely pessimistic on that.

You know, I don't think

that our doom is

written in the stars.

I do think that

if there was one thing that I could,

if one wish could be kind of granted, just as far as

something that we accomplish over the next, you know, 20, 40, 50, 60 years, it would be that we figure out a way to reconcile our lives

and everything that that means with technology in this way that we haven't really thought of.

I think you're right.

I mean, I, you know, I don't know that I'm a doomer, but I've gotten more pessimistic in the last six months about tech stuff.

You know, like the book, the book is written in a very optimistic register, and I think that's completely true to how I feel about democracy in general and its promise and whatever.

But

I came out of the thick of writing that book in the ordinary way that people used to write books, which is like you have ideas and you just use your brain and you type a lot.

And I come out of that hole into a world where like ChatGPT is, I think, one of the now one of the ten most visited sites in the world.

It's like up there with Amazon and Netflix.

People are talking about the supplanting of humanity and the end of humanity and transcending humanity through superintelligence that's supposedly like five, ten years.

Like in the last four years of my working on this project, it feels like the tech stuff in a way that I am was ambivalent about and kind of blase about and maybe sanguine about has gotten really really troubling and it's less like the social media

things than it is AI.

AI, I think, troubles my heart and my soul in a way that feels new.

And I don't know what the political response to it is, but it's just something, to your point, Felix, that is already so pervasive in people's lives without any real conversation about what it means or any sense that we ought to be democratically controlling the development of this technology.

So I don't know.

I am feeling kind of bleak about that specifically.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

What answer might be to like take away all the wealth and power of the shitheads who own promulgating all of this garbage.

That's the best thing you can.

And I see that

gets into a lot of what you write about economic democracy and about how

representational democracy can only go so far when the workplace and people's control over the economic life of the country is so prescribed.

Is socialism another word for economic democracy?

And what would economic democracy begin to look like?

Well, I think you can use a lot of different words to describe it.

I think that

when I'm talking to just ordinary folks about these ideas, I tend to just say democracy or economic democracy.

But the principle is what I was saying at the beginning.

Like if we like democracy because it gives us some control over conditions that shape our lives, well, we are governed not just in politics, but in the economy.

So there's this book by Elizabeth Anderson called Private Government, which I'd really recommend people read on precisely this point.

We spend a third of our lives at work, roughly speaking.

The decisions that are made at the top of corporations often affect us more directly and immediately and intimately than decisions made in Washington, D.C.

or the state capital or city hall.

But we don't tell ourselves we're entitled to democratic voice.

And that's really, really weird theoretically, and also, I think, really, really damaging for workers.

We did have in this country a measure of economic democracy, giving ourselves some economic agency, when unions were strong.

I mean, a union is a democratic institution, as far as

I can see.

I mean, it's formed either by majority assent or literal election, depending on what happened.

And people use that power to Ocina, how can it be a democratic institution if the bosses can't join?

That's right.

Yeah, I mean that's a question the bosses ask all the time, but you know what?

It's not up to them to determine.

I mean they were institutions that literally did offer people obviously material gains, literally did reduce inequality.

That was important.

But also plugged people into politics.

It was responsible for being an advocate.

Unions were advocates for working class issues in Washington, D.C.

They were countervailing power to corporate lobbyists and lobbyists for the wealthy.

So when unions were active and strong, and about a third of percent of the workers in this country were in unions by the 1950s, we saw economic and political benefits to that.

As they've declined,

can't really be that much of a surprise that both our economy and our

political system seem to be

in a total mess.

And so the book makes the case for reviving economic democracy in that sense, but it goes beyond just reviving traditional unions, although I talk a lot about the PRO Act.

I talk about different ways to instantiate worker power above and beyond traditional unions from sectoral bargaining.

Yeah, actually,

I wanted to ask you about sectoral bargaining because

we've talked a lot on the show about unionization.

But yeah, could you just walk us and our listeners through

sectoral bargaining, like what it is and what its benefits are.

Sure thing.

So like in a traditional union process, I mean you're going through workplace to workplace to workplace to get workers organized and unionized.

And that is a completely,

very daunting and exhausting and resource-intensive way to get working-class people together in unions.

It's just easy to frustrate.

You know, the process at each particular workplace, as people know, takes a long time.

Employers do everything they can to frustrate them.

Sectoral bargaining is a system, though, in which basically everybody a particular sector has agreements that cover them all.

So you're not going from Walmart here to Walmart there to Walmart there, but like everybody in retail is covered by the same basic agreement.

And then on top of that, you know, at the level of the individual workplace, you can have more specific contracts, too.

I don't think these systems are mutually exclusive at all.

They can be layered.

In fact, there are ways in which sectoral bargaining can...

aid and abet the process of forming a traditional workplace union.

But the main benefit is you're covering a lot of workers at once.

And I think that there are ways in which you can make sectoral bargaining democratic, too.

So basically, it's a system where you have representatives from employers and representatives from workers come together to hash out these agreements.

You could elect or have workers elect their representatives.

I think that would be really, really generative of a kind of political agency.

And it would ensure, you know, that the people who were elected or...

could ensure that the people who were elected are truly representing the interests of workers rather than somebody that the state appoints or the government appoints.

So that's the general idea and why I think it's kind of democratic in character.

Do you think that like the way we imagine and the way we talk about work in this country is sort of stuck in the past?

Like it does seem that like when we imagine work and workers or like the people who do the work in this country or like who needs who needs policy to support them.

A lot of the times like we're talking about like, you know, agricultural subsidies to farmers or like this idea of like factory workers and manufacturing.

And No shade to farmers or factory workers, but it is like an undeniable fact that in the current state of the American economy, the vast majority of workers are in like retail service and healthcare.

So how does that change the way we talk about work and like what needs to be done to address the working class who like populate those industries?

Well, I think it's been a real trick of Republicans under Trump, especially.

to sort of circumvent basic issues of worker power by saying, well, you know, if we just raise the tariffs to like a gazillion percent and we couldn't buy things from China anymore, good jobs would kind of just sprout out of the ground in Michigan and like new factories would just come out of there, you know, and everything would be solved.

And we'd rebuild manufacturing, we'd rebuild these sectors that we've lost.

But what made those jobs actually good in those regions when they were around

was not you know, the magic of sweat.

You know, there's not the magic of working at at a plant.

It was that they were unionized.

People had mechanisms that drove wages higher, that improved working conditions, that got them benefits.

In places where we have auto plants in the South that are not unionized, they're not like the jobs of legend and lore and historical memory in the audio industry in this country because they're not unionized.

Workers don't have power.

They end up getting paid less than they're due.

They get injured.

And I think the whole conversation we have about manufacturing and

agriculture and these industries that are being taken away or that we've lost to other countries,

it feels like it's framed almost explicitly to alive the fact that what makes jobs good is not

necessarily the sector you're in, but whether or not you have power as a worker.

And so even if people are now working in the service industry and retail industry, in these other fields,

Those could also be solid, well-paying, good-paying jobs with conditions and benefits.

It's just the obstacle to that is that we're not taking labor power seriously, not taking the need to empower unions seriously.

Instead, we have this kind of fantasy economic discourse that is premised on ignoring all of those facts.

And it's built on a kind of cultural memory that isn't plugged into what made the economy so good for workers when unions were around.

Well, to return again to

institutions of American government and features of our Constitution that are, you know, historically or at present anti-labor, right-wing, and opposed to democracy.

I think we have to talk about the Supreme Court.

And could you just walk us through Marberry v.

Madison and its After Effects and just like the general sense of just how bad the Supreme Court is for our country.

And even if people who don't care about or are skeptical of electoral politics, why should they be on board with just packing it in and getting rid of it entirely?

Yeah, so we now have a conservative dominated court, court,

6-3, on the basis of conservative, or the Republican Party, you know, really angling to use every available opportunity to fill those seats.

You know, you had the blockading of

Merrick Garland's nomination during the Obama administration.

You know, if Merrick Garland had ended up on the Supreme Court, I couldn't tell you on the basis of his subsequent actions that he'd be that great of a justice.

But, you know, but that was indicative of how determined Republicans have been to fill a corps because very unusually in international context, we have our judges selected for life.

This whole thing we do where every time

Supreme Court justice falls down the steps, there's these news alerts that tell us whether or not people are going to have abortion rights, maybe depending on how well they're doing in the hospital.

That's an insane reality that is basically exclusive to the United States.

I mean, I read every day about how Claudia Scheinbaum is moving Mexico into a dictatorship because she's like, I don't know, shortening the terms of federal judges in Mexico?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, look, I mean,

our judges, our judiciary for life, and it's a very politicized position.

I mean,

elsewhere in the world, justices are more kind of like in the civil service infrastructure.

This competition we do where we're kind of doing this gamesmanship of who gets to control.

judiciary and who gets to control the courts on the, you know, from election to election is not how the judiciary works.

Most other places, I don't think it's really

how it should work in an ideal system.

But the reality is, even to the extent that judicial review exists in other countries, and it does, its outcomes are especially perverse here because of the inequities that feed into the system.

Again, the disparities in the Senate end up shaping the judiciary and also are perverse because our justices serve for so goddamn long.

And there are easy fixes for this.

I mean, you can, as people, your listeners might know, literally just add justices to the Supreme Court as regular legislation.

If Democrats wanted to do this next time, they control a government, they could.

They could have done it under Biden.

That kind of rebalances things in a more liberal direction.

But

it moves the tilt back and establishes, hopefully, a court where people will be standing up for democratic rights.

And it also puts them on notice that they're not untouchable by Democratic processes.

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

And then if you want, after a couple rounds of switching back between Democrats and Republicans, doing that,

I think you'd eventually come to a kind of consensus maybe on the ideal way to set up the judiciary.

So yeah, I mean, I think the section about the judiciary was one of the harder parts of the book to write because I think there's like real disagreements between intelligent people and like what an ideal judiciary would look like what the role of the judiciary should be.

Yes, we believe in democracy, but we also believe that people shouldn't vote minorities.

rights away.

And so what is the infrastructure that you set up to prevent that from happening?

Do you really need one?

Should we leave that to democratic choice or not?

I think that people have real serious and good debates about those issues.

But I hope that we can all agree, wherever you land on those questions, that the existing system is insane.

It does not actually do a very good job protecting the rights of minorities.

It does a better job protecting the wealthy and the powerful from democratic control.

And there are very obvious and very

ready and available reforms we could make to the judiciary to solve some of that.

Osita,

to get you out of here on today's episode,

I'd like to ask if you were made supreme democratic dictator of the United States, a position I would be happy to nominate you for.

Sure, sure.

What would be like two or three things that the supreme leader would enact immediately to begin the process of completing the revolution started in the Civil War that was then forestalled, of course, by the abandonment of Reconstruction?

All right, three things.

Two political and one economic.

First political is the abolition of the Senate.

I don't think this is even necessarily a radical position anymore.

So John Dingell,

this very, very ancient old man, long holder serving member of Congress.

He's from Michigan, right?

He's from Senate.

He's from Michigan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Before he died, writes a speech for the Atlantic calling for the abolition of the Senate because in his experience and all he'd worked through in Congress, it became more and more obvious, even to him, not a radical left-wing Democrat by any stretch of the imagination,

that Congress as currently constituted was not tenable and the Senate had to go.

Now, you could go from there to like a unicameral body of some kind, but you know, there are some ideas that I consider in the book, like, you know, maybe the Senate is actually like a pool of ordinary people who have their voice heard on political issues.

It's like a consultative body of like 100 or 500 or however many Americans.

And you're like randomly selected for this.

I think that'd be a cool thing maybe to think about and try out.

But the Senate is as currently currently constituted, obviously, has to go.

The second thing I would say is in the House, we should be moving to proportional representation.

I think most political scientists who look at proportional representation, so this is, you know, we're not electing individual representatives in these specific districts that we've gerry-mantered to death, but you have districts where multiple people are elected from each district.

So you're like a party that gets like 70% of the vote gets 70% of the seats, but you also have the other parties represented.

Most people who look at that system say it would actually lead to the development of third parties.

We'd break the duopoly.

So you're not confined to the Democratic or Republican Party, but you'd probably have a left party come out of that system as well.

So that's another thing I would say.

And then the economic change that I implement, I mean,

there are a lot of things I would do, but the idea that I've been most inspired by in the last 10 years of politics is probably Bernie Sanders's plan, which nobody really talked about in 2020, to have companies of a certain size transfer 20% ownership over to their workers.

So that would give them payments from the ownership of stock dividend payments, but also give them a vote on corporate boards.

You could ratchet that up 20, 30, 40% up to 50% or an ideally in the

ideal world of worlds, majority ownership, if we're

willing to broach that as a subject.

But

the Democracy Collaborative did

polling on this question in 2019, I believe.

And they asked Americans, what do you think of this idea of companies of a a certain size basically becoming part worker-owned?

There's majority support all the way up to 50% ownership.

So the American people, intuitively, I think when you ask them questions like this, say, well, hell, I work at this company.

I build it.

I make it do what it does.

I make it possible.

Why am I not entitled to a measure of voice?

That sounds kind of commonsensical to me.

Why is it only that executives and investors get a share, an ownership share here?

Shouldn't I be entitled to one on the basis of my labor?

I think that's where people begin to approach the from.

And they don't see it as like an intrinsically left-weight thing.

I think they see it as commonsensical.

And I think one of the intuitions behind that is, again, democracy.

And that's why I've been so committed to framing these questions that we talk about in all kinds of ways on the left as democratic questions.

I think that's where you meet people, ordinary folks who might have fuzzy feelings about democracy as a concept.

That's how you get them to think economically about reforming things

in dramatic and ambitious ways.

Osida Nuevo, I want to thank you so much for your time.

The book is The Right of the People, Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

It will be available in bookstores on August 12th.

You may order now.

Links will be available in the show description.

As long as I'm pitching books, Chris, I know

our listeners can no longer pre-order our comic book anthology, but what should they do?

Aside from atoning for their debasement and betrayal of us for not doing so.

Well, we have a life raft for you fools and recalcitrants who have not pre-ordered the comic by August 1st, which is that our publisher has determined that we can extend the pre-order another week and still hit our September printing deadline.

So we now have until August 11th to get those pre-orders in for year one, a Chapo Trap House comics anthology.

The link will remain in the description.

And we have a nice write-up on the comics journal today, including a very nice interview with Will.

And just do that.

And to touch on today's conversation, listener, you might be interested to know that my story deals heavily with New York City in the American Revolution.

So a little bit of history, a little bit of a history in my horror comic as you experience the ongoing horror of American history.

That does it for today's show.

Once again, thanks so much to Asita Nuevo for joining us.

Until next time, everybody, bye-bye.

It's coming from the silent summer, dark of the bay, from the brave with old, but battered, hard of Chevrolet,

the marked seals come

to the U.S.

state.