Time for a New American Revolution
America has always had a sadistic streak. From the very beginning, this so-called land of liberty was built on slavery and genocide. Yes, the Founding Fathers were less “philosopher kings” and more “sweaty men in wigs who owned human beings and thought democracy was something best kept away from women, the poor, and anyone who wasn’t them.”
Fast-forward 250 years, and the far-right is still running the same playbook: cruelty as ideology. Immigrants? Cage them. LGBTQ+ kids? Target them. Women? Control them. The planet? Burn it. What Republicans call “policy” is really just sadism with a tax cut.
Our Constitution was carefully crafted by white elites terrified of ordinary people voting. Thanks to the Electoral College and the Senate, minority rule is baked into the system. In fact, the last two Republican presidents to win the White House actually lost the popular vote. Democracy? More like demo-crazy.
Joining us this week to build a real democracy from the ashes of Trump’s MAGA dumpster fire is Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor for The New Republic, a columnist for The Guardian, and the author of the new book The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.
If America truly wants to live up to its mythology, it needs to finally make good on the promise of liberty and justice—for all.
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Andrea Chalupa (00:21):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. The film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see. So be sure to watch it.
(00:36):
Today we're joined by Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, and a columnist for The Guardian. We're talking about his new book, the Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.
(00:50):
Yes, please. Let's go. So I want to ask what made you want to write this book? The book that I've always wanted to write by the way. So thank you for writing it. I'm just glad it exists.
Osita Nwanevu (01:02):
Well, thank you for having me. What made me want to write this book? I mean, I think that we've all had a rough 10 years or so, so we're recording now, I think a day after the 10 year anniversary of Donald Trump coming down that escalator. And so I think that the last decade or so has been an education for all of us in Democratic principles. What makes democracy important? All of these things have kind of been in the air for me. They've been in the air since I was a kid. One of the first political stories I remember ever following was a 2000 election. I remember being really real incense that George Bush won for reasons I don't think I fully understood, but kind of got trickled down to me from...
Andrea Chalupa (01:46):
There was a Brooks brother Riot. The Supreme Court just came in and just sealed the deal for the Republicans and the Democrats didn't put up the fight they needed to put up. Yes, it was very traumatic, especially for us young people who were just learning, being told, oh, you can vote now, or you get ready to vote the power of your vote, and you're like, wait, do I have the power of the vote? Go ahead.
Osita Nwanevu (02:06):
Right, right, right. So I mean I was in second grade, so I feel like there's a lot of that I didn't understand, but I did get this sort of basic sense of unfairness from the whole thing. More people voted for this person, why is this other person president?
(02:17):
By 2016, I'd learned a lot more and to see it happen again I think was really kind of radicalizing for me and I think for a lot of people. And so that basic flaw there of our system, Thero College twice so far this century has brought somebody to the White House who lost a popular vote. That's a problem in both cases that had catastrophic consequences for the country that was in my head. But also as I covered the 2020 Democratic primary and I covered the beginning of the Biden administration, I found myself having to say over and over again, well, yes, most Americans want this to happen on immigration reform or gun control or on wage.
(02:58):
Probably not going to happen because of the Senate. And even if it does pass Congress, it's going to run into this buzz, the Supreme Court maybe in many cases. And having to say that over and over again frustrated me. And it frustrated me again as somebody who, as all of us are sort of brought up to believe that this is a democracy. This is a country in which what the people want as opposed to prevail. We sort of Lord ourselves over other countries on this basis. And we told these great stories about what a great democracy this is, but it seemed more and more I was having to write about things and explain things that really undermined that self-perception. And that was sort of the first impetus for me to sort of dig into what democracy meant in the first place. And the other thing too was when you raise some of these issues to people, especially people on the right, they'll tell you, well, that's fine because America actually isn't democracy.
(03:45):
We're a republic and there are reasons why we should distrust actually democratic authority being given to the masses. And this is something you'd hear on the right all the time. But I think actually more and more so, especially actually since November, you do have people asking themselves this question, if people are broadly misinformed or they're biased by misinformation or we're polarized, we seem to be, should we even trust and have faith in democracy in the first place? Isn't there something to the idea that there should be limits on democratic power? You see this more and more or hear this more and more I think from people in the center or even liberals. And so that was another thing that I wanted to confront too. And overall, I think this is an important conversation to have because for those of us who are committed to democracy, it's not good to have the general public doubting its possibilities and doubting that it can work, which is I think one of the reasons why so many people did take an interest in Donald Trump. They saw a political system that wasn't working in their interests. They weren't sure what democracy was doing for them. It was this thing that people told them was important in civics back whenever, if they were lucky enough to have civics, but they didn't really understand or sort of take for granted is many of us did, that democracy is worth preserving and keeping. And I think that we have to have an affirmative case for it if we really want to defend it from authoritarians.
Andrea Chalupa (04:58):
So in your book, The Right of The People, you basically present a bit of a grand plan. What would you say? Because my listeners, they come to me very frustrated. What should we all be doing? What is the best use of our time? We go to protests, we vote, we try to get out the vote, but what are we really doing? It feels just like we're going through the motions in a time of hypernormalization and that everything's crumbling around us and we're just spitting at a house fire while trapped in the house. So what do you see as sort of, if you could assemble all the democracy fighters, all the coalitions that are on the front lines and bring them all together, give them bottles of wine, so suddenly everyone's getting along and everyone's talking to each other, what would you advise them to do? This is what we should all be working towards this sort of roadmap. What would you like to see in terms of reforms and rebuilding?
Osita Nwanevu (05:49):
Well, that is a massive, massive question.
Andrea Chalupa (05:51):
These are the conversations we're having.
Osita Nwanevu (05:53):
These are the conversations that we're having. Of course, I think the most difficult for people to accept, I feel is the scale of the change that's required. I think that we're thinking too small and I think that thinking bigger can feel daunting, but if you're not thinking at the level or the scale of the challenge, you're going to wind up perpetually frustrated because you're not actually getting anywhere. It has been really, really heartening in the last week especially to see so many people come out from the No Kings protests or other demonstrations and talk about the ways in which Donald Trump is flouting the rule of law, violating the Constitution, doing things that an executive is not supposed to do. I think all of that is true. All of that is great. At the same time, I think that we're not going to get very far in improving our political situation and preventing the rise of another Donald Trump if we don't also confront the ways in which the Constitution has brought us to this point.
(06:47):
And I know it's extremely hard. I was out there in DC on Saturday that one of these protests, it wasn't No King's protest, but it was another protest. And you have people coming up passionately saying, you know what? I took an oath to defend the Constitution. I swore I would defend the Constitution. It hurts me to see Donald Trump doing these things. All of that is very true. We need a rule of law. We need a set of procedures to govern. But the reality is Donald Trump is where he is because in 2016, the Constitution elevated him to the White House over the wishes of most of the people who went to the polls that year when he was in office. It was difficult to remove him because the Constitution, even though most Americans thought that he had done wrong and posed a very, very high threshold for moving him from office fact that the Republican party had amount of power in the Senate that makes it easier for them to frustrate both legislation and things like impeachment proceedings also helped him.
(07:39):
And I think that this all created a kind of sense of invulnerability amongst a lot voters. Well, the institutions didn't really prevent, Trump didn't stop him, seemed if anything, to abbet him. So why should we really care about the integrity of these institutions? Donald Trump obviously can beat them all and we should just vote on the basis of our feelings about the economy in this particular moment. I think that's partially what happened in 2024. So Donald Trump, we are dealing with as a political figure and not also ran who had it not been to the electoral college would've lost. He's here because of the Constitution in many important respects, our inability to solve some of our basic problems, whether that is the immigration issue he's taken advantage of or other economic problems that are frustrating people. That's also a consequence of how difficult it's to pass policy now at the federal level because of the Senate and because of the Fed and filibuster.
(08:26):
So there are political challenges that we're facing kind of perversely because of these institutions, and I feel like there's a reluctance amongst liberals and amongst people who are rightfully incensed and angry about Donald Trump to sort of take fed on and to say to ourselves, we need not just to kind of movement to get rid of Donald Trump, although we obviously need to do that. We need to confront the ways in which our institutions have radically empowered a right that doesn't believe in democracy, and that's going to continue to challenge us whenever Donald Trump leaves the field. So that's not a concrete, this is what you as a voter needs to do tomorrow to fix the situation. But I do think that understanding the problem correctly is going to help us instead of on the right path. We need to be ask our leaders, not just to talk about Donald Trump, but hey, let's talk about the way that Supreme Court has been really crazy over the last 10 years and the amount of power that the Supreme Court has in general to overturn things that people want. Let's talk about the fact that a voter in Wyoming has 60 something times the representation in the Senate that something in California does, and how that leads to situations like Donald Trump sending troops into Los Angeles to overturn things because he doesn't like their immigration policy. There are basic structural questions that I feel like people aren't really confronting yet and that we should, because if we don't, again, I think that we're going to find ourselves even absent Donald Trump staring on the barrel of a really, really undemocratic and increasingly deranged and difficult political situation.
Andrea Chalupa (09:57):
We do have the 14th Amendment, which could have barred Trump and other members of Congress who were inciting violence on January 6th.
(10:08):
January 6th. Believe your eyes, believe your ears. We watched on live television as the MAGA movement incited a violent attempted overthrow of our democracy. And we had a mechanism. We did have a mechanism. We had the 14th amendment of the US Constitution, Colorado, a group in Colorado tried to get that enforced and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said, we don't think a state can oversee a federal election. Okay, well then where's Congress? This was an act of Congress in the courts, but Congress when it was under democratic control following Biden's victory in 2020, the Democrats didn't touch the 14th Amendment either. And they held two years of hearings, which were extremely compelling. They showed a lot of chilling montage footage of that violence, but they didn't. It was sort of like a distraction. They punted on the 14th Amendment and they gave themselves credit forcing Merrick Garland, attorney General to take up this case. Why would Merrick Garland need to be pushed in the first place when he was sworn in right after one of the most violent attacks against our democracy? So the whole thing just seems like a yes. Our system isn't imperfect because given who built it, slave owners and men, and so it was imperfect from the start, but also there's a dereliction of duty to even exercise the levers of power that we do have in the Constitution. What are your thoughts on that?
Osita Nwanevu (11:29):
Well, I think that's true. Look, I think that people in Congress and obviously in the judiciary have fallen down on the job of protecting us from this madman. I don't think that there's any argument to be had about that. I do think though, that one of the reasons why they have the Republicans especially have in Congress, Congress isn't doing their job because Republicans have the amount of power that they have in Congress. It's because they know that they can get away with it. Republicans in Congress are not beholden to a broadly representative segment of the public. It's an institution, a chamber that was designed to grant equal representation to each particular state, right? And we know political scientists have studied this, legal scholars have studied this. We know that this has benefited the Republican party for a long, long time. It's a more durable bias than the electoral college even.
(12:15):
And so I think there are a lot of Republicans who've been looking at Donald Trump in general even before January 6th, and so themselves, well look like maybe I don't like what's going on in principle, but I'm beholden to Republican primary voters in Nebraska and nobody else. And so my particular responsibility here in my perspective is outweighed by the basic electoral situation to buy face as a representative. You would expect them or hope that they would have the courage to do the right thing. But these are politicians I don't have very high, I don't have a very high evaluation of politicians and their incentives in general. You won't come away with from the book I think feeling more confident about politicians. But look, I mean the Republican party doesn't have to do the right thing. That's the long and short of it. It's in this political situation where as much as it backs Donald Trump to the hilt as much as it backs his unpopular policies to the hilt, we have this big beautiful bill quote-unquote, it's advancing through Congress now, terrible, terrible policies than most Americans don't like.
(13:10):
Republicans are insulated from the blow back from a lot of those things because of the Senate, because of gerrymandering, the house. And so the lack of responsibility that they're taking I think is shaped by an influence too, by the structural conditions that they face within our system. If they don't have incentives to do the right thing, and if they're not facing penalties for not doing the right thing, they're not going to do the right thing. They're not going to resist Donald Trump. And again, I think that this is a challenge that's going to continue to undermine governance even after Donald Trump leaves and we're left with the Republican party that he has radicalized these polls to drive. One of the things I think is worth mentioning too, actually, is political scientists are also now telling us that one of the reasons why the Republican parties moved to the right so often is what of saying to begin with, they're not facing representative groups of voters, and that means that the things that they say about immigration, things that they say about crime, things that they say about climate change being fake, the misinformation they put out, if your only real election is the primary and you're only really talking to voters who watch Fox News, that is going to pull your senator, your representative further and further and further to the right, more so than if we had a genuinely democratic system where people had to care about voters from different parts of the country, not just rural voters, not just conservative voters.
(14:24):
But if Republicans had to win the votes to win a presidential election or to control the Senate or to control Congress if they had to take the vote to people in New York City or Chicago or places like Baltimore where I have more seriously, you wouldn't have this temptation of this slide to the right. We've seen over the last, not just 10 years, but I think since Obama's term in 2009, 2010. So I think it's true that we're not seeing our representatives, our leaders, doing the right thing, especially on the Republican side. But I think that we should also take seriously the fact that they have a lot of reasons on the basis of their own self-interest not to do the right thing. And we should be trying to change those structural incentives and hope that they might pull the Republican party closer to where most voters are.
Andrea Chalupa (15:07):
So if we roll up our sleeves and we establish a new American Revolution, a new American founding, would you recommend that we put our energy towards the National Vote Compact, which is just a few states away from getting enough states in the union to sign on to basically give their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote and that the National Vote Compact will ensure that the popular vote winner gets the election, the presidential election, and this would circumvent the electoral college and it's a very legal route to do it and it's got bipartisan support. Is that an effort that you would endorse people get involved in?
Osita Nwanevu (15:46):
So, National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, I'm not sure how much your listeners know about it, but just as the briefest possible summary, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an attempt to institute the popular vote in presidential elections by getting a number of states that totals the two seven that you need to win to say, okay, we're just going to throw our electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote. If that happens, you functionally invalidated the electoral college. As we know today, you've moved to a popular vote system. We're very close to actually having the number of state legislatures we need do this. The last remaining states are actually pretty mixed politically Purpleish states. Liberal states I think have already mostly gone ahead and done this. I would 100% endorse this effort. It's a mystery to me why Democrats haven't pushed it harder. I think there are legal questions.
(16:38):
I think it's inevitable that this would face some kind of challenge if the Supreme Court eventually. But look, this is the only game in town as far as changing the electoral college system that I've really seen anybody come up with. The process of Constitutional amendment now is impossible. You're never going to get the requisite number of states to voluntarily give up. Their electoral college votes are influencing the system with the threshold they need to pass a constitutional amendment. It's just too high. So that leaves the N-P-V-I-C and I think it's a no-brainer reform that I think more money should be invested in. As best as I can tell when I wrote about this a few years ago, it's a pretty small group of people who are trying to push this through without any institutional support.
Andrea Chalupa (17:18):
But it always is though, that's the story of progress. It's always a small group of people that are like a dog with a bone and they win, and that's how we have these rights today. But go on.
Osita Nwanevu (17:30):
That's right, and I think honestly, that is kind of the model we need to be looking towards. As difficult as it may seem, we need to be finding reforms that actually deliver us the large scale changes that we need and just kind of push for them in any way we can think creatively about what they might be. This was a very, very creative workaround and solution. People like college that I'm glad somebody came up with and as off the walls, it might've seemed at the time we're now close to a point where it actually might make a difference if people keep churning away and working at it. One other thing that I recommend in the book and might sort of help us think through what people can do immediately is think about political reforms at the state level. State constitutions are actually much easier to amend than the federal constitution is.
(18:14):
You already see states and localities too, experimenting things with rank choice voting and other forms of voting, creating different kinds of bodies. These are things that I think people can do even in their own communities and in their own states that might provide a kind of proof of concept for expanding democracy at the federal level, making people practice that they need to push for these reform at the federal level too. So check out, I would say provisions of your state constitution or your city charter, the structure of government where however you happen to live and see if there are things you can do to begin democratizing your own community and getting people more involved, getting people more engaged, that I think builds up to hopefully a pro-democracy movement nationwide that can actually push for federal change once you've demonstrated the people again, because I think we're at a point where this needs to be demonstrated and proven, it will help people see that democracy can work if you can democratize a community, deliver gains that build the case for larger scale change throughout the entire country.
Andrea Chalupa (19:10):
Absolutely. So the drugged up psychopath, Elon Musk, who happens to be the richest man on the planet because we're in hell, he was went on stage famously with a chainsaw and he's slashing all this government waste and fraud that he claims he's finding, and Republicans MAGA world is cheering him on until it's their job that gets chopped by Elon Musk. But you saw this sort of right wing movement of cut taxes, cut government waste. Well, it seems then we can make it a bipartisan issue to abolish the Senate. That's a ton of savings right there, paying for all those senators and their staffs and their lunches and their office space. So I feel like just like the National Vote Compact seem like a farfetched idea now it's gaining traction and we're close abolish the Senate could be the next big bipartisan moonshot that we could start normalizing. What are your thoughts on that?
Osita Nwanevu (20:10):
Well, I would hope it would be bipartisan. I didn't know that it would be, but look, I mean there was a piece in the Atlantic written by John Dingell, the Congressman before he died, longer serving congressman that made this case. This was not some wild haired radical from the outside. This is somebody who knows Congress, worked in Congress for a long time saying the Senate as we know it today is not tenable. We have to get rid of it. Eventually, I think it would save money. That's not an angle that I'd thought of, but I think it would certainly be appealing to a lot of voters on that basis. But look, I mean, I think the key thing to say about the Senate is that it has been such a hurdle in terms of getting things that most Americans want through, and that's very basic things like again, raising minimum wage, high levels of support for that, raising taxes on the rich high levels of support for that.
(20:55):
The Senate is where ideas like this go to die, and I don't know that the American people should be expected to accept that for much longer. This was an institution that we should say too, as much as people like the founders think that the founders were smart, I think that they certainly were deeply, deeply intelligent men who had a lot of important things to say. This was a body that people said from the outset, this is the chamber that's going to represent the rich people in this country. It's going to represent property. It's going to be the kind of check on ordinary people implementing the policies that they want, especially economic policy. One of the stories that I tell in this book is about how the economic depression that we faced after the Revolutionary War, the largest economic crisis we would face until the Great Depression actually, it led people to pursue basically relief policies at the state level that a lot of the wealthiest people in the country didn't like.
(21:48):
They thought it was going to undermine, destabilize their own wealth, and they opposed it on that basis and the construction of a federal government that was less accessible, they thought to democratic authority that would sort of clamp down on democratic movements at the state level. That was one of the reasons why they wrote the Constitution in the first place, and the Senate was kind of the cornerstone of that entire project, and to this day, it remains a body of many millionaires who are telling us we can't do this or that, and I don't think that the American people should be expected to stand for that for much longer. I think that as pie in the skies, it might seem, look, we are one of very, very few countries with an upper house as unequal as the Senate is. I think only Argentina and Brazil mathematically have upper houses that are as distorted as ours is in terms of how equally people are represented no matter where they live in the country.
(22:39):
The Wyoming-California example, it because it makes things very, very clear. This is not a body that has worked in your interests ever. If you live in a big city, if you live in a place like Baltimore where you have so many challenges that we hope in federal government will take an interest in eventually, one of the reasons why they won't is because we have a Senate that privileges the interests of rural and pretty conservative people. Those people absolutely matter. We absolutely have to have a politicians and policymaker take the interests of people who live in small towns, rural communities, seriously, but those people don't matter more than any other American. They shouldn't have their votes count dozens of times more than those of us who happen to live in urban areas. Yeah, I think that this is something that hopefully a hundred years from now, 50 years from now, people will see as obvious. Why did they persist for so long with a system that was so obviously unequal and unjust? Yeah, I don't know. I think that we are in a place where we can start asking ourselves these questions and thinking more ambitiously about reforming the very structures of our government
Andrea Chalupa (23:37):
And it'll energize people too.
Osita Nwanevu (23:40):
Yes.
Andrea Chalupa (23:40):
We need the power of imagination now. And so I want to also ask, we have neutralized the threat of electoral college with the National Vote Compact. We've abolished the Senate through a bipartisan cost savings grassroots movement, and that leaves us now the house which is so skewered towards the, which is so tilted towards the Republicans thanks to gerrymandering. What have you seen that is promising in terms of undoing the damage of gerrymandering?
Osita Nwanevu (24:14):
Yeah, so I mean there have been a number of states that have moved to independent redistricting. So having this kind of bipartisan body draw the maps instead of having it as kind of partisan game people play every census. It's a good idea. I didn't know that we've seen the impacts that people had hoped for with that, but certainly I think that we should be moving towards having districts drawn in a nonpartisan fashion. I think the things that will pay off more is, again, thinking deeply about the very structure of the thing itself. So one of the dynamics beyond gerrymandering that shapes control of the house is the fact that you have these agglomerations of people in particular urban districts that end up meaning that more districts spatially are controlled by rural representatives, right? You have what they call this phenomenon of wasted votes. If people had been more spread out, they would've had more influence across a greater number of districts and would've had kind of equalization of representation that you don't have when all the districts are, all the people are concentrated into urban areas on the democratic side, that dynamic even above and on top of gerrymandering is something that I think advantages the right that we should look at.
(25:21):
But the reform that I think is most promising would be moving actually to a system of proportional representation. So Leadman writes about this, other political scientists have written about this. Instead of having one representative or district maybe have a system in which people go, and there are multiple representatives per district, they have what they're called multi-member districts, and so maybe the majority of people or a variety of people vote for the Democratic party and they win like 40% of the seats. And then you also have Republican representatives in that same district who win 30% of the available seats there. So each district has this kind of melange of different people from both parties and that actually people have said might lead to the flourishing or the development of other parties because now you have a chance of winning some representation in Congress even if you're not winning the 40% or the 50% that you have to win now in order to get even one representative.
(26:16):
Now, even small parties might send people to Congress. This I think would be a healthier way of doing politics than we're used to now, and I think it would help heal some of our political divides too. Honestly, if you look at a rural district in this country and you see not just this one Republican representative who's only representing conservatives there, but you see some Republicans and some Democrats that changes your picture of who even lives in these districts. You have different perspectives on how to solve that district's problems. Instead of a system in which we look out at the map and we say, oh, this is a red area, or this is a blue area. You see that the country is actually much more divided and diverse. You get more voices in the mix. So I think the portion of representation would be a good thing to move towards for all kinds of reasons. On the half side, and again, this is another big pie in the sky kind of reform, but one that I think we should be inching our way towards, we're not going to get there if we don't even tell ourselves that that's somewhere we should be looking to go.
Andrea Chalupa (27:11):
But how unsexy does proportional representation sounds? How do I sell that? I'm phone banking. I've got this mom on the phone who's cooking doesn't want to hear from me. Like, listen, have you heard about proportion? What is the sexy way? Give me, I know you're a journalist, you're not a spin doctor, but what is the heart of the matter on proportional representation? What is the burnt out mom? How do you get through to somebody who's sleep deprived and try to explain this to them that this is in their own best interest?
Osita Nwanevu (27:45):
I'd say that we need to fix Washington, and that means that we need to break away from the system that is preventing Democrats and Republicans from actually coming together to solve this country's problems. If we had proportional representation, you'd have a more diverse set of voices. What is it? What is proportional representation? I mean, it is a system in which everybody's voice matters. That's the way I could put it. If you come to an election and you vote and the person who wins 40% of the vote in your district is a Republican and you voted for the Democrat, you don't get anything, right? You don't send anybody to Congress. If you have proportion representation, you would send fewer people to Congress than Republicans do, but you would still have your voice heard. So proportion representation is a system in which every vote truly matters and every vote truly counts. So it would require, that's the simplest.
Andrea Chalupa (28:31):
You'd have to redo the maps, you'd have to redo the map, then.
Osita Nwanevu (28:34):
You'd have to change a lot of things. Definitely not going to get into it here and now, but I think the simplest way to say it's that if you've ever been frustrated by paying attention during election, engaging with your community, getting out there, maybe even voting early, doing all the things you're supposed to only to see some other party win and you not getting anything for your effort, proportional representation fixes that because you will send somebody who represents you to Congress. That's I think, the easiest, simplest kind of elevator pitch for it. Don't be political scientist. I think it sounds good to me.
Andrea Chalupa (29:09):
Sounds good to me. And so I want to also ask a final question on us together launching a revolution through the show and through your book. And so we fixed all of these issues, but then we still have oligarchs owning increasingly our mainstream media. We have hedge funds destroying journalism as you know too well. You've watched this as much as I have play out over the years, and then we have Sinclair turn local news into Fox News. It's pretty Russian what's happening to our information space across this nation, and there's a lot of local news deserts as well, and then social media, of course, big tech, and they're just selling us all out with their algorithms that are white men dominate the big tech world, are the majority of the engineers out there, and their algorithms show that with the manosphere getting all these booths and brain rotting, especially young Gen Z men. So what is the solution to that then? And that's private. I mean, obviously you could have government regulations step in, but then that's a slippery slope of free speech and it could work against us too.
Osita Nwanevu (30:15):
Okay, so I think this is one of the biggest questions of the book, and I think one of the places where the book is probably the most provocative, so I would actually flip this. I don't think that you actually get to the political reforms that we've just been talking about without addressing the economic inequality that sends somebody like Elon Musk into governments in the first place, or that leads to the domination of these media companies. There has been a lot of important work people have done to draw attention to things like Citizen United to draw attention to the ways that lobbying influences policymaking, to draw attention to campaign finance reform. And these are definitely always at the wealthy end up shaping political outcomes, determining even gets to contested and compete in an election in the first place. And we should also obviously fix all of those things.
(31:03):
I think one of the reasons why it's been so difficult for us to actually do that is because the wealthy people have so much power and influence on the basis of their wealth in the first place. They can send people to Washington who will prevent us from passing those laws in the first place so they can influence elections in the way that prevent us from enact those political reforms in the first place. So the wealth inequality that we're facing in society I think actually has to be confronted as its own problem in issue, right? It's not something that we can just expect to send people to Washington to fix because they will then be influenced by wealth and equality in the first place. You have to sort of understand the economic situation from my perspective as underlying some of the political problems that we're facing to begin with.
(31:48):
How does Elon Musk even acquire the 400 billion that he has, so that spending 250 million on election or however much he spent to elect Donald Trump is available for him to influence a political process? How does somebody garner that much wealth and power in the first place? If we don't resolve that? I think that our efforts to foster and build up and protect political democracy are going to falter. And so a large portion of this book is about confronting economic inequality, and they make the case for certain policies that I think also bring democracy into the economy. Back in the ancient world, I think people took it for granted and understood that you could not have political democracy sustain itself in the society in which people have vastly, vastly more money, vastly, vastly much more wealth than ordinary person. Obviously, the influence of ordinary people is going be undermined by that inequity.
(32:38):
We've lost sight that we convinced ourselves that you can actually sustain a democracy when somebody is on their way to having a trillion dollars at their disposal. I don't think that that's true. I think Elon Musk has done this, a service in showing us that that is going to be a challenge. And so there are ly ways that we rest power and wealth from these people before they enter politics in order to protect democracy and also sort of improve our own economic situation. So I talk about unions a lot in this book. I talk a lot about different reforms we can take or sort of borrow from Europe that allow working people, ordinary people, more of the same corporations that would have them influence where money is going, how much money CEOs and investors are allowed to accrue that would allow them to shape corporate decision-making in such a way that corporations would have less authority to influence our elections or to fund Super pacs and so on. If workers were at the table making these decisions themselves and not just CEOs that wanted to get wealthy on the basis of policy making in Washington. So long story short is I think the key challenge there is figuring out how to empower ordinary people, not just in Washington but within the economy where people are moving from their wealth, from their power to Washington or to our political system in ways that undermine our capacity to actually fulfill even political democracy.
Andrea Chalupa (33:52):
Thank you so very much. Osita Nwanevu, the author of the Must Read just out book, the Right of the People Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. Alright, I have a few extra questions for you that we do for fun. Very rapid fire. It's called the Gaslit Nation Self-Care Q-and-A. There's no wrong answers. It's like the PSED questionnaire updated for these times. What's a book everyone should read and why other than yours.
Osita Nwanevu (34:20):
Other than mine? Let's see. A book everyone should read for sure is called Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. It's a book that was written in 1922 and it's about democracy to a large extent. It's about all of the ways in which people have a hard time getting the information that they need to make good informed political decisions, all the challenges that make that difficult. Now Walter Lippmann ends up proposing certain solutions that I don't think are right. I think he ends very kind of pessimistic about democracy and are you in the book Why? I think he was wrong to go down the road that he did, but it still remains, I think one of the clearest depictions of the challenges of maintaining an informed electorate that I think I've ever seen. I mean, this is a man writing in 1922 about the ways that technology would make it more difficult for us to get accurate information. He was talking about radio back then, right? All of those challenges have obviously multiplied tenfold, but the same dynamics are in play. Some of the same things he was talking about in 1922 are the same things we're dealing with in social media today. I think it's really, really fascinating and people will definitely get a lot out of reading that and it'll help them understand what we're going through.
Andrea Chalupa (35:26):
What's a documentary everyone should watch?
Osita Nwanevu (35:29):
Oh boy. Documentary everyone should watch. I'm really fond of the documentary. Well, I'm fond of the subject of the documentary itself. It's kind of cheating, but there's a documentary called Best of Enemies by I think Morgan Neville and I forget who else did it from 2015 I want to say, and it's about the debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. It's really entertaining. He began to see some of the currents of contemporary politics play through their arguments over the course of those debates. But those debates are also some of the first instances of basically political television as entertainments, the kind of talking head media ecosystem that we take for granted today. This was one of the sort of beginning points of all of that developing, and I think people will find that really interesting to see.
Andrea Chalupa (36:17):
What's a dramatic film or comedy everyone should watch?
Osita Nwanevu (36:21):
Oh my goodness, dramatic film or comedy on the same theme. I think everybody should watch Network from the mid seventies. Again, it's about the media. It's about some of the beginnings of the world that we now live in. News is entertainment. I think it's a tremendous, tremendous satire and yeah, I think people find a lot about our contemporary situation by the things that are said that happen in that movie.
Andrea Chalupa (36:49):
Who are some of your historical mentors who inspire you?
Osita Nwanevu (36:52):
Historical mentors that inspire me. I mean, I like a lot of the mid-century writers. I like Joan Didier and a lot, a lot. I mean, I don't know that I would know anything about writing if I hadn't taken to reading her closely and understanding how her sentences worked.
Andrea Chalupa (37:09):
Which book specifically of hers.
Osita Nwanevu (37:11):
I like the essays and Slouching Towards Bethlehem a lot. I mean, I think that those were especially formative to me some for coverage of the elections in the eighties. I think what she wrote about Jesse Jackson, that's when I go back to, there's one essay that I read about her growing up in Sacramento that I recently reread. There has a sentence in there that I've always taken with me because I think it is an encapsulation of so much that's emanated out of California even in the last 20 years. It's where she says that California is shaped by faith or desire to believe that anything is possible there. That is where we run out of continent. So all of the energy of the westward expansion and all of the optimism of it just sort of thrashing up against the edge of America, and there's a sense in which I think that that explains Silicon Valley. I think that that explains so much of, explains Hollywood from a present perspective. So anyway, I like her because I think that in sentences like that, she encompasses so many different ideas at once and just a line or half a line, and I've been tremendously inspired by her writing.
Andrea Chalupa (38:19):
What's the best concert you've ever been to?
Osita Nwanevu (38:22):
The best concert I've ever been to was My Bloody Valentine's tour stop in Chicago. I want to say in 20, whenever that last album they did was 2013, I want to say. Yeah, so My Bloody Valentine is a shoegaze band from the early nineties. He put out this one classic album in 1991 and didn't put out anything else until 2013 and people had been waiting for it, wondering if it was ever going to happen. The first album had been years and years and years in the making itself and was involved in this deep, deep production process, but they finally come up with a second one when I was in college. It was this first concert I'd think I'd ever been to, and it was also the loudest concert I'd ever been to, and I'd expect that to remain the case for the rest of my life. They're very, very loud band. They passed out earplugs during the shows. You could see pieces of the ceiling falling during the concert. It was so loud, but it was beautiful. I mean, it's music that is crushingly loud but also really, really beautifully layered and pretty honestly. So I really will treasure that concert for the rest of the way.
Andrea Chalupa (39:28):
What are some songs on your playlist for battling the Dark Forces?
Osita Nwanevu (39:33):
Oh my goodness. One song that I added to my playlist recently is a song called Underdog by Sly and the Family Stone. We just lost Sly Stone, I think in the last week or so. Yeah, I mean that was a group that embodied, I think a lot of progressive ideals back at a time when music was just beginning to get a little bit al. But still, it was unusual to hear bands talk about racial equality as explicitly as they did to have a racially integrated band. But they have this song called Underdog that is about keeping the fight alive and keeping the hope alive as you wish for progress. And I think that that's one people should listen to for sure.
Andrea Chalupa (40:09):
Who or what inspires you to stay engaged and stay in the fight?
Osita Nwanevu (40:15):
Stay engaged and stay in the fight? I mean, I've been inspired by again, just sort of seeing the number of people who came out this past weekend from No Kings protest, especially I know the individual was a big part of that. Ezra Leave and Lake Greenberg, they've been doing just unbelievably good work since Trump came in the first term, and it's been really inspiring to see what they put together, but also the number of people from all walks of life coming together to say no to what's going on right now. It made me feel that there is a hope and a real chance of us moving forward and dramatic forward and dramatically different direction. As dark as things seem now, I think that we ought to be inspired by our own energy in this moment too.
Andrea Chalupa (40:58):
Beautifully said. What's the best advice you've ever gotten?
Osita Nwanevu (41:03):
Best advice I've ever gotten. That's pretty hard. I mean, I don't know if it's a particular line of advice or anything, but my parents always told me it's going to sound corny that I could do or be anything that I really send my mind to. Now, this is not true. There was no chance of me ever becoming a ballerina or an astronaut or a nuclear physicist. There are certain things that I couldn't have done, I think even if I had worked really, really hard to do them. But being told that or something close to it by people who love you is extremely important to have this sense of possibility that says to each and every one of us that there is some kind of deep innate potential for something really, really great if we just find it. I think that's the important thing to carry with you, and frankly, it's informed my politics too.
(41:54):
One of the reasons why I care so much about democracy is that it's a system that allows us to develop in this way. We're not just taking it for granted that the people who should tell us what to do are aristocrats or kings or wealthy people. It's a system that takes for granted that there's something of value in each of every one of us that should give us the right to shape lives at our own direction and not the direction of somebody else. And yeah, I think that my politics are informed by that deep sense of human possibility. There is something valuable and worthy in all of us no matter who we happen to be, no matter what circumstances that we find ourselves in, we ought to create a society where we can be the people that we want to be in and could be if we're given a real shot and a real chance.
Andrea Chalupa (42:35):
What's your favorite place you've ever visited?
Osita Nwanevu (42:38):
I really love Chicago. I didn't really visit there. I lived there for several years while I was going to college. I mean, it's a tremendous city with a lot of history, a lot of great food and a lot of extraordinary people. Great city to learn about politics. Yeah, I don't know. There's something about Chicago that always tugs at me where since I went to college there, it's just a city that contains so much of what America has been in can bay. There's a lot of, you can tell a story about this country just by sort of telling a story about Chicago, and I think that's really special. And even the kind of layout of the city culturally is this kind of patchwork quilt. You have communities historically where Eastern European people came to settle or cities now where there's a large Hispanic population, immigrant population. And to be able to go to different parts of one place and have such different cultural experiences, and I dunno, there's something really, really special about that place and I think something that captures a lot about this country.
Andrea Chalupa (43:42):
What's your, final question? What is your favorite work of art and why?
Osita Nwanevu (43:47):
Favorite work of art, I guess if you're defining work of art broadly. My favorite film is Lawrence of Arabia. I was on a podcast talking about it recently. I think that it is that medium operating firing on all cylinders in every front. The music is perfect, cinema photography is perfect, performances are unbelievable. But also I think that the more that you see that movie, you also appreciate how well written it's as a character study, it is difficult to pull off a movie that is so epic and sweeping and is operating a large scale that is also an intimate study of one person. And I think it does both of those things. Also, the politics that movie are underrated too, think's an anticolonial movie that tells us about the follies and the prity of imperialism. And I think it's not often read that way by people, but I think that it's a movie that I think ought to resonate with people who have any kind of anticolonial orientation. So yeah, I really, really liked that film. It's one of the films that convinced me for a time that I would get into film myself. Actually, it was one of the first adult movies that I ever watch with my dad, and it's always stuck with me ever since.
Andrea Chalupa (44:57):
That's one of my dad's favorite movies, and I'm actually staying with my parents right now, and as you were talking, I was like, oh, it's...
Osita Nwanevu (45:02):
A big dad movie...
Andrea Chalupa (45:04):
As you're talking. I was like, for Father's Day, which just happened, I got my dad a bunch of lush bath products, and then my dad's in this tennis group with all these old Ukrainians, and I think one rubbed it in his face about all this cool things his daughter did for him, made him brunch. All the things that I didn't do because busy. And so I'm like, I got to make it up to dad. We're going to watch Lawrence of Arabia this week again. What do you think was driving Lawrence as a character? Said, what do you think was when you watch that film, and this is what you'd have to get down pat as a filmmaker, by the way.
Osita Nwanevu (45:43):
Yeah. The jokes that I now tell about that film is that it's a film about why you should never give gifted kids any power, but they'll turn into war criminals.
Andrea Chalupa (45:53):
Hundred percent true. I just don't interrupt you really quickly. Reading The Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman for Gaslit Nations book of the Month, and she talks about that. She talks about the tension between the mainstream activists and the street fighters, but the street fighters were all trust fund kids that had the luxury to be radical because they had financial safety nets. But go on.
Osita Nwanevu (46:14):
Yeah, I mean there's something about, it's a joke obviously, but he believed that he was destined for greatness. He also at least told himself that he was sympathetic to the plight of the Arabs. I think he told himself that that was what he was driving him. But I think in the background, he knew that he was really smart. He knew that he was really good at languages and his actual life to you, Lawrence is fascinating. He was very, very precocious, very gifted to a lot of things. But the issue there is that that doesn't necessarily give you wisdom. It doesn't give you certainly the right to sort dictate to people how they ought to conduct themselves. And it shouldn't allow you to sort think of yourself as this kind of uniquely singularly empowered or enlightened person. I think that movie also operates as a kind of, I dunno if metaphor is the right word, but that is the disposition I think the United States has had towards so much of the world that we are this blessed and uniquely gifted nation that can sort of go around and go to the Middle East too and sort of rearrange things.
(47:15):
And this is a movie that shows you the folly of believing that. But I think he was motivated by this kind of sense of this deep, deep, deep sense of self regard, which was maybe partially justified by intelligent. He obviously was, but it left him blind to a lot of things. And I think it left him blind to deeper parts of his own humanity and humanity of the people he was leading around.
Andrea Chalupa (47:45):
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up at the Truth Teller level or higher on Patreon. Discounted annual memberships are available, and you can also give the gift of membership all summer long.
(47:58):
Gaslit Nation created with Love and Anger has been presenting a special series featuring leading experts on how to smash the patriarchy and the oligarchy to make the world safer for everyone. Trump didn't happen overnight. Let's plant Seeds of Hope together for the hottest of hot takes. Join the conversation at the Gaslit Nation salons every Monday at 4:00 PM Eastern. I'll be there with our global community of listeners. Come for deep dives into the news. Learn from fellow listeners and share what's happening in your corner of the world. Can't make it live. Recordings of our Monday salons are available on Patreon, along with our monthly Gaslit Nation book Club, access the Salons bonus shows.
(48:50):
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