Democracy is too important to be left to the Democrats

Not just in the United States, but around the world, authoritarianism is rising and people’s faith in the concept of “democracy” is collapsing. “In the absence of clarity from its defenders and amid the failures of our putatively democratic institutions,” Osita Nwanevu writes in his new book, The Right of the People, “democracy has become a specious and suspicious platitude, equally useful to marketers and would-be dictators—a hollow idea for a hollow, unserious time.” How did we get here? And what will it take to revive working people’s faith in democracy, not just as a philosophical ideal, but as a real, practiced force that will improve their lives? In this podcast, recorded at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Cafe in Baltimore on August 12, 2025, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Chris Lehmann, DC Bureau Chief for The Nation, speak with Nwanevu about his new book and the fight to reclaim democracy in an age of rising authoritarianism. 

Guest: 

• 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, Columbia Journalism Review, In These Times, and Gawker. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Additional resources: 

• Osita Nwanevu, Random House, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding
• Osita Nwanevu, The Nation, “To make democracy work, give more of it to workers”

Credits: 

• Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
• Audio Post-Production: David Hebden

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