Is There Really Democracy in America?

The Politics Guys

Michael Baranowski

Politics, News

4.4 • 783 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike talks with Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, columnist at The Guardian, and the Democratic Institutions fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He’s also the author of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, which they discuss on this episode Topics Mike & Osita cover include: why democracy is the best political system the ‘folk theory’ of democracy if Americans actually care about democracy democracy and demagogues grounding principles for modern democracy the Framers’ views of democracy reforms to make the US system more democratic The Politics Guys on Facebook | X Check out the excellent Sustainable Planet podcast. Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible. You can support us or change your level of support at patreon.com/politicsguys or politicsguys.com/support. On Venmo, we’re @PoliticsGuys. The Politics Guys is part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Atheists, agnostics, long-haired widows, short-haired widows, vandal,
0:04.9	Luggan.
0:05.1	I love the government, hug the government, hug the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government.
0:12.0	Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy.
0:18.7	I'm Northern Kentucky University political scientist Michael
0:21.4	Baranowski. My guest today is Ossita Nuevo, a contributing editor at the New Republic,
0:26.5	a columnist at The Guardian, and the Democratic Institutions Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
0:31.6	He's the author of The Right of the People, Democracy and the Case for a New American founding,
0:36.4	which we'll be discussing today.
0:38.1	Well, Sita Nuevo, welcome to the show.
0:39.9	Thanks for having me.
0:41.0	You know, I think if you asked most people to define democracy, they'd say something like
0:47.0	rule of the people.
0:48.5	And if you push them a little further and said, well, how does that happen?
0:52.1	They'd maybe say free, fair, and frequent elections. Does that leave anything out? I mean, what do you think about that kind of definition? Well, I think that you're right that that's the definition that would come to mind for most people quite easily. You know, you go to the polls every couple of years, you vote for a guy, the guy goes into office. They hopefully do the things that you want. that you want. And the basic conceptual tangle there, one of the first ones you run into when you
1:14.2	try to think about this. vote for a guy, the guy goes into office. They hopefully do the things that you want. And the basic
1:11.2	conceptual tangle there, one of the first ones you run into when you try to think about this,
1:15.1	seriously, is what we told ourselves in the Western tradition, the democracy began with a quite
1:19.3	different system in Athens. So this is a system in which people directly went to the assembly as
1:25.2	citizens, participated in lawmaking. The things that they passed,
1:28.5	they were often implemented by people who were selected randomly by law. And so this is a system
1:33.2	which people directly participate in governance in ways that we would find very, very strange
	...

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