Portside

When anti-Trump forces burst forth in rallies across the country this spring, their quirky “No Kings” battle cry proved to be a stroke of genius, a succinct and nonideological way to protest the president’s authoritarian policies. The remarkable turnout was a reminder that nothing brings the left and center together quite like Donald Trump, especially as he rides roughshod over the Constitution in his second term.

While it was crystal clear what protesters were fighting against, it was less clear what they were fighting for. Capital-D Democracy? That’s probably what most protesters would say, but the truth is that even before Trump, faith in American democracy was fraying.

Polls show that confidence in our democratic system has been in a decades-long decline. A Gallup poll published in early 2025 found that just 34 percent of adults were satisfied with the way our democracy is working. When the firm began polling on the question in 1984, 61 percent were satisfied.

Complaints about the political system are often transient, a passing fury among those who dislike the most recent election results. But Gallup, in a rare finding, reported nearly equal levels of dissatisfaction among Democrats and Republicans in early 2025. Trump’s popular-vote victory in 2024 improved Republicans’ attitude from a year ago, but the poll found nearly two-thirds of them were dissatisfied with our democracy.

Discontent with our democracy has deep roots that reach across party lines and national borders. Voters have been ground down by frustration with a gridlocked political system that has failed to deliver on its promises to working people, while catering to the wealthy and corporations. And that has provided fertile ground for autocrats—in the U.S. and around the world—who promise to “get things done.”

Osita Nwanevu, a columnist with The Guardian and contributor to The New Republic, is worried that frustration with our political system is fueling broader cynicism about the idea of democracy itself, and that we are losing our grip on why it is a good thing. Bored with superficial political discourse and reporting, Nwanevu has gone back to basics, to define and defend democracy in his first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Nwanevu makes a blunt and provocative argument. “The well-meaning calls to defend ‘our democracy’ elide the reality that for all the progress we’ve made since the Founding in the granting and expansion of political rights, democracy, soundly understood, remains a goal unachieved,” he writes. The Founders never intended America to be a democracy, Nwanevu reminds us, instead favoring a republic built to temper the popular will. Creating a true democracy would require nothing less than rewriting the Constitution, a “new Founding.”

Nwanevu draws on an impressive array of sources, from Plato and ancient Athens to the very latest in academic political theory, to remind us how America’s government is riddled with anti-democratic elements: a Senate that gives disproportionate power to rural (mostly Republican) states; an Electoral College that can override the popular majority in presidential elections; a filibuster that can thwart the Senate’s majority such that senators representing as little as 11 percent of the population can nullify the chamber’s will; a campaign finance system that empowers the wealthy and corporations.

Indeed, Trump has benefited handsomely from the anti-majoritarian elements of our Constitution, allowing him to rise to power in the first place and to leave his mark for decades to come. In 2016, he won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. After being impeached twice, he escaped being convicted—and being blocked from running again for president—only because the Constitution required a supermajority to do the job. This president—never polling with majority support in his first term—fundamentally reshaped the Supreme Court with three nominees who were confirmed by a Senate whose Republican members represented only a minority of the U.S. population and who blocked Barack Obama from filling an open seat for a year.

Nwanevu also finds anti-democratic dynamics throughout our economy, where unions are weak, bosses have wide latitude, and workers lack basic protections and privileges like paid family leave that are found in nearly every other industrialized nation. “We’ve come to accept a level of unaccountable control in our workplaces that we would never accept from a state,” he writes.

It’s a grim picture of the toll taken on democracy by constitutional constraints, political realities, and economic inequality.

Nwanevu’s agenda for change is radical and ambitious, if not especially original. He calls for campaign finance reform, Electoral College overhaul, an end to the filibuster, Supreme Court expansion, ranked-choice voting, labor law reform, worker ownership of companies, and much more. Some of these changes would require amending the Constitution, which he acknowledges is not likely to happen anytime soon and will require the kind of sustained, multigenerational campaign that our political system is not well suited to mounting.

“If all this seems daunting, it should,” he writes. “We are still perhaps generations away from a truly democratic Constitution.”

Calls to save democracy ring hollow when democracy is “a goal unachieved,” Nwanevu writes. MICHAEL BROCHSTEIN/SIPA USA VIA AP

This is a hard time to be calling for a root-and-branch overhaul of our political system, when the very existence of our admittedly imperfect democracy is facing such a crushing attack by Trump and his Republican Party. It’s a little like proposing renovation of an overgrown garden when a wildfire is closing in on it. Nwanevu says he began working on this book in 2021, a time when, with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, dreaming of big-picture reforms might not have seemed like such a luxury.

Still, his book carries an important warning for today’s resistance movement. Simply stopping Trump and returning to the pre-Trump status quo will not get at the root of what has allowed his authoritarian ideas to take root in the first place. Addressing that must start by recognizing the collapsing faith in a political system where money rules and gridlock persists, no matter which party is in charge. Indeed, in a CNN poll released June 1 that asked which party could “get things done,” just 36 percent said the GOP, 19 percent said the Democrats, and 44 percent, a plurality, said neither party.

That disillusionment with both parties has cleared the way for politicians like Trump who are willing to scrap democratic norms to shake things up, even if only to aggrandize themselves. “Our frustrations with our false democracy have corroded faith in the ideal to the benefit of antidemocratic figures on the right and the interests they serve,” he writes.

Doubts about whether democracy is itself a good thing reach at least as far back as Plato, who thought the ideal ruler was a philosopher king. He saw democracy as dangerous and unstable because it put power in the hands of ill-informed masses who could not be counted on to judge the common good.

Today, even Democrats’ faith in democracy may be shaken by Trump’s popular-vote victory in 2024, finding new sympathy with the words of H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nwanevu takes issue with these cynical views, as well as contemporary political theorists like Jason Brennan, author of the 2016 book Against Democracy, and other academic democracy skeptics who argue that the average citizen is too disengaged, ignorant, or distracted to make good choices about public policy and candidates. Brennan and others cite poll findings—typically one-off, cherry-picked surveys, as Nwanevu takes pains to point out—showing that most Americans can’t name all three branches of government or more than two of the rights listed in the First Amendment. Brennan calls for an “epistocracy”—government by the most knowledgeable and competent.

Nwanevu is far more optimistic about the wisdom of the masses, arguing that polls making voters look stupid are cherry-picked, that people know their own interests better than an autocrat or governing elite, and that there is a kind of “collective intelligence” that can emerge from group decision-making.

In calling for a “new Founding” of democracy, Nwanevu sees a bigger obstacle not in the relative wisdom of the American public but in their reverence for the Founders and their intent. But he makes quick work of demystifying them. “The Constitution has us working to address the problems of the twenty-first century through institutions designed by men who would have been dazzled by a lightbulb,” he writes. What’s more, the Founders’ intent has already been overridden many times over: by ending slavery, giving women the right to vote, and providing for direct election of senators, to name just a few.

A bigger obstacle to amending the Constitution is a practical political one: If a constitutional convention were called, it risks being hijacked by a group of conservatives who have gotten a jump on organizing one, under the banner of Convention of States, aiming to advance an agenda of their own to restrain federal spending, taxation, and other powers.

Some of Nwanevu’s proposals don’t require constitutional change, like D.C. statehood, eliminating the filibuster, and expanding voting rights. And some of his ideas are percolating at the state and local level. Seventeen states have joined a compact designed to render the Electoral College impotent. Some 63 jurisdictions have instituted ranked-choice voting.

Even if his ideas seem hopelessly out of reach in the current climate, Nwanevu argues they constitute an agenda that may be more politically potent in the short term. “The political and economic reforms we’ve examined constitute a democratic agenda that stands a better chance of defeating the right than the flimsy and predictable rhetoric their opponents have offered up so far,” he writes. “It contains remedies for institutional problems that have undermined confidence in democracy’s efficacy and bolstered a radical right.”

Maybe. I have doubts about the power of procedural reforms like ending the filibuster and ranked-choice voting to rekindle faith in democracy and fire up voters. But this book remains a helpful reminder that as urgent as it is to rally in opposition to Trump, to find ways to block his policies, and to clip his party’s wings in the midterm elections, it will take much more dramatic changes to build a more democratic American political system. Until that happens, Trumpism may continue to find a home here.

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Janet Hook is a freelance writer who has covered Washington and national politics for over 40 years, most recently for the Los Angeles Times.