The Case for Democracy (w/ Osita Nwanevu)
Know Your Enemy
Matthew Sitman
4.7 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | All right, welcome listeners to episode 120 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host, |
| 0:05.9 | and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam other bell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. We are introducing |
| 0:11.3 | an episode we recorded earlier this week with Ocita Wenevoo, who I'm sure his writing will be |
| 0:17.8 | familiar to many of our listeners. He's been on the podcast before |
| 0:21.4 | to talk about Tom Wolfe, the novelist. He's a contributing editor at the New Republic, |
| 0:26.8 | a columnist at The Guardian, and the Democratic Institutions Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. |
| 0:32.3 | And he came on to talk about his new book, The Right of the People, Democracy, and the case for a new American |
| 0:38.2 | founding. Great book. Really enjoyed reading it. Really enjoyed talking to Ossita. We end up |
| 0:43.9 | talking a lot about why democracy is good, whether America is a democracy, how it might become |
| 0:50.8 | one, if not. There's a lot of meat to chew on in this one. It's kind of a mix of history, political theory, arguments about democracy. I think everyone |
| 0:59.5 | should read this book. There's so much useful kind of weighing of arguments. I was impressed |
| 1:05.4 | with it in that sense, and I just want to say, too, even if some listeners don't like the book. |
| 1:10.0 | Or, you know, in this conversation, |
| 1:11.6 | I had some quibbles, you know, he took a pot shot at Tocqueville. Maybe, yeah, I wanted to nuance his |
| 1:16.5 | reading of the Federalist papers here, there. But I want to say, like, we should be encouraging |
| 1:21.5 | more books like this that are ambitious. I just think that's, like, a noble and worthy approach to a book. Be ambitious. |
| 1:29.6 | Yeah, I think this book is really a serious accomplishment, like that one of the things |
| 1:33.1 | that's so admirable about it is that it really does translate an enormous amount of |
| 1:37.1 | sort of potentially abstract or abstruse kind of political science literature about democracy |
| 1:44.0 | into a really popular and, like, |
| 1:46.8 | readable idiom in the prose in this book. And I think that's like a really great service to do for your |
| 1:51.9 | reader and for American readers in general. So buy this book. Yes. And before we get some housekeeping |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Matthew Sitman, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Matthew Sitman and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

