Extreme inequality and democratic decline aren’t separate crises—they’re the same crisis. This week, Osita Nwanevu joins Paul and Goldy to explain how America’s constitutional design, corporate power, and decades of upward redistribution have eroded both political and economic freedom. He outlines what real democratic governance would mean inside government and at work, why the concentration of wealth threatens stability, and how a long-term movement for a more representative system could finally deliver the policies most Americans want.
Osita Nwanevu is a journalist and political writer whose work focuses on democracy, governance, and the intersection of politics and power in America. His reporting and essays have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, Slate, and The New York Times. He is the author of The Right of the People, a sweeping examination of why American democracy is faltering and what it would take to build a more just, inclusive, and genuinely democratic society.
Further reading:
The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New
By the Workers, for the Workers: Building Economic Democracy
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative?
Paul Constant:
Middle out economics is the answer.
Goldy:
Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Paul Constant:
That’s right.
Announcer:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Paul Constant:
Hey, Goldy. Guess what?
Goldy:
Oh, it’s Paul. You’re not Nick, you’re Paul.
Paul Constant:
I am Paul, yes. Sorry about that. I have a little gift for you, Goldy. We’re getting up on the holiday time, holiday season, and so I thought I would do something nice for you.
Goldy:
The war on Christmas season.
Paul Constant:
Uh-huh. I am giving you the opportunity. In the office, you are commonly regarded as the grump and the person who wallows in pessimism. And I am giving you the opportunity to wallow for almost a full episode of this podcast because we are getting into some subject matter that I think will appeal to your wallower self.
Goldy:
I like to think of myself as a cockeyed pessimist, Paul.
Paul Constant:
I know. So I think obviously we cut you off sometimes when we talk about how bad politics are and the current state of the United States under Trump. And so I think it’s important to address that the world is on fire. And I also think it’s important to address solutions to that. And I think that today’s guest sort of bridges that gap perfectly. I think that we will be able to talk about the condition of the world and we’ll also be able to talk about his very thoughtful and interesting ideas for how to solve those problems.
Goldy:
Well, I appreciate this opportunity, Paul, because the problem with the podcast medium is that the listeners can’t see the constant eye rolls that I get from Nick and others in response to my doom and gloom take on current events, which by the way, all proved to be right. Today, Paul will be talking to Osita Nwanevu, a journalist and political writer whose work has appeared in the New Republic, The New Yorker, Slate, The New York Times. But most importantly, the point of this podcast, he is the author of the recent book, The Write of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.
Osita Nwanevu:
I am Osita Nwanevu. I’m a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at the Guardian and the Democratic Institution’s fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, also author of The Writer of the People: Democracy in the Case for New American Founding, which came out in August. And that is a book about democracy broadly conceived. I also have a newsletter. You can find it ositanwanevu.com.
Goldy:
Great. And we’ll provide links in the show notes to make it easier for our listeners to find you. I got to say, I saw your book and democracy is a very depressing topic to me right now because I happen to be… I like to say that this is a two-party system in the US. We have the Democratic Party and the anti-Democratic Party, and the anti-Democratic Party has been winning. I guess we should start off by letting you just state the thesis of your book for us briefly.
Osita Nwanevu:
Sure thing. So I’ve been covering American politics for close to about 10 years now. I started in the 2016 election and around 2020, 2021, it really occurred to me that so much of what I’d written about had democracy as a kind of latent subject. Obviously, Donald Trump comes in 2016 with an electoral college victory rather than a popular vote victory. The second time this century this has happened, the first time was in 2000. I was in second grade, actually. And I didn’t really understand why people were so angry, what my parents were so mad about, but it was told to me that actually we had an election where somebody got more votes and the other person seems to have won. And I think I retained my basic sense of outrage and unfairness about that up through 2016. But obviously beyond that, we have the attempt to obviously overturn the 2020 election.
We have the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And on top of that, I was covering the Democratic primary in 2020. I found myself having to say then and when Biden eventually won over and over again. Yes, it seems like most voters want this on healthcare or immigration policy or gun policy or climate policy and so on. And Democrats now control Washington. But it’s very, very unlikely that a lot of the policies people have put forward are going to pass absent some structural reform. And I found myself having, I guess, to describe that without explaining it fully. And I really wanted a chance somehow in writing to work through why that was. Why do we have a system where it seems like the things that many Americans want don’t really stand a chance? Why is it do we have a system where presidents can get elected without most Americans voting for them?
When Republicans are confronted with these challenges, they’re often heard refrain is, “Well, we’re Republic and not a democracy.” I wanted to sort of unpack that. What does it mean to be a democracy? What does it mean to be a Republic? And so I came to this book. I really wanted to tackle democracy from first principles to understand what it meant fundamentally and to use the definitions that I came up with to annualize our political system and economic system.
Goldy:
And what the word democracy means fundamentally has changed over time. The founders mostly would not have considered themselves Democrats in the way of we think of it small D today.
Osita Nwanevu:
That’s absolutely correct. And so the fourth chapter of the book is about the founding specifically and the lead up to the Constitution, the drafting of the Constitution ratification. And one thing that is made abundantly clear in a lot of the research that I did, a lot of the writing from scholars like Michael Clarman, Sanford Levinson and others, the founders considered themselves in opposition to democracy as many people I think casually understand it today. They did not really trust majorities of the public as good decision makers of peoples who would be empowered by the institutions that they were setting up. They thought that democracy more specifically was a threat to property rights and that this had been demonstrated by the efforts at passing populist reforms after the American Revolution. And so they set up a Constitution that was Republican in character. It had distributed power, it had checks and balances, institutes rule of law and all these kinds of things that we think are important, but they didn’t see that system as a democratically responsive system.
And the institutions that they built, argue in the book, are still retaining that function today. I mean, you’ve improved the system in many respects. Obviously we expanded the range of people who can vote and participate in political process, things like the direct election of senators and so on. But I think the fundamentally anti-democratic character of the Constitution still persists today and is an obstacle to passing many of the reforms I think would improve the country.
Paul Constant:
You make a distinction between political democracy and economic democracy, or at least you described them differently. And I was wondering if you could unpack that a little bit since this is an economics podcast.
Goldy:
Oh, Paul, staying to our theme.
Osita Nwanevu:
Well, I mean, I think that the central argument book is actually these realms are intimately connected. It is very difficult to cleave apart the political from the economic. They are intertwined in ways that I think we don’t address or take seriously at our own peril. So I think that the way to sort of get to why I believe that is to sort of think through what the definition of democracy and offering is. Democracy, as best as I can tell, and I think this is the simplest definition I could come up with, is a system in which the governed govern. The people who are themselves subject to governance are the ones who are doing governing. Governance is not something that’s transferred over to some king. It’s not some class of elite’s responsibility. People who are governed are the ones governing themselves. Or in Lincoln’s construction, government of by and for the people.
And I worked through in the first chapter of the book, different ways you can tell whether the system is democratic. I use those characteristics to assess our political system and come to the conclusion that we’re not really a political democracy. But one of the other things the book does, it sort of tries to open the reader’s mind to all the places in which we are actually governed. Is it just something that happens in the Washington DC or state capitals or city hall or are we governed in other parts of our lives? And I think it’s hard to argue that there are other places in our lives where you’re actually subject to control in ways that are actually more direct and immediate and intimate than political control. And I think the most significant in those realms is work. We go to work, spend about a third of our lives there.
Decisions that are made at top of corporations affect the way we conduct ourselves at work, increasingly affect our private lives, but we don’t really have a real democratic say in what happens at work on that basis. Somebody who works at Starbucks, for instance, and I think this is just, they can participate in political system and have their voice heard in what our foreign policy should be with respect to Russia or China or Iran. There’s no place in their life where they can say, “This is how I think Starbucks ought to be run,” except for a political system that is dominated by their bosses at Starbucks. It is a democratic question to me. It’s something that Democratic theorists have thought some about, but not with, I think, a whole kind of robust seriousness or the kinds of attention and focus that they give to political system.
There are exceptions to this. So Elizabeth Anderson at the University of Michigan wrote this wonderful book called Private Government several years ago that gets at a lot of these issues, the ways that workers are more and more being subject to levels of coercion and surveillance that we should see as functionally authoritarian. So for those reasons alone, I think there’s a kind of principled reason to take seriously the idea of democratizing the economy and bringing democratic rights into the workplace, but even beyond that kind of abstract ideal, the political equality that stems from the lack of power, authority, control, bargaining power workers out in the economy obviously has implications for the function of political democracy. It has implications when it comes to lobbying, campaign finance. Who gets to influence political system? Well, it’s people at the top of the economy and people who are at the top of the economy because they have these structures of the economy that give them more wealth and power than the ordinary people.
I don’t think I could construct a better example of the extent to which inequality matters than the spectacle of having seen the wealthiest human being on the face of the earth this year, because he donated $260 million to Donald Trump’s campaign last year, get rewarded with a position in the executive branch where got to rework the entire branch to his liking, fire thousands of people and programs. This is now a very kind of serious, unavoidable issue. It’s a threat to the stability of our existing system, let alone the prospect of becoming a more democratic society in the future.
Goldy:
Right. Well, this gets all the way back to Brandeis’ observation that we can have extreme wealth inequality or we can have democracy, but we can’t have both. I love that you brought up Elizabeth Anderson’s book. I love that book. We had her on the pod. The way she describes the modern workplace as the communist dictatorships in our midst really struck something with me because I’ve always felt that there was something wrong about wage labor. The idea that, well, Paul will know from working with me. The idea that the people that pay you, you have to do what they tell you to do to keep your living. And the title of the book, Private Government, she makes that distinction between private government and public government. And private government is that government within the firm, within the workplace that we have no democratic rights in. But public government, that’s the one that’s supposed to be a democracy.
There’s always been this tension really from the nation’s founding, from the Declaration of Independence on between the aspirations, these Democratic aspirations versus the reality of the Constitution they wrote. The reason why it was so depressing to actually even approach your book, I had written a chapter for an upcoming book in which the current draft starts, the US Constitution is fucked, but it’s always been fucked. I mean, it was designed in a certain way-
Osita Nwanevu:
It’s a much more succinct way to put it than I did. I think I should have gone with that maybe.
Goldy:
I mean, it’s been broken from the start and you know it was broken because 70 years later, we had a bloody civil war because of the flaws in this constitution. It was designed to preserve the power of the slave holding elites in the South. It’s filled all the compromises, the three-fifths compromise, the Missouri compromise, the compromise of 1850. This was a union that was kept together with anti-democratic compromises until by the 1860s, the demographics were too great, that there was too much population in the north for the South to maintain its control. I despair that there’s any way to fix this. I mean, we can’t fix it through constitutional amendment or a constitutional convention because the small red states have disproportionate power in those constructs. So what do we do?
Osita Nwanevu:
Well, we can’t fix it in the near term in those ways, but I do hold out the possibility that at some point in the next decades, hopefully within my lifetime, we do come to a point where a convention seems plausible. I don’t think it’s something we should do now or in the next five years or 10 years. You have to kind of build a consensus that there is this kind of grand structural problem that demands democratic solutions, and we haven’t really gotten there yet. I think the American people need to be brought into this conversation and convinced of the things that I’m already convinced by. But the reason why I don’t really despair is because in the grand scheme of things, American society today looks radically different than it did a hundred years ago.
1925 was a world that would’ve been unrecognizable, I think to any of us today. We’d just gotten women the vote, right? We still had a long way to go to actually make them equal citizens. Obviously, goes without saying we did not have real racial equality in this country. The chaotic time in American life, you had lynchings and bombings and levels of political corruption that make Donald Trump look kind of like a softie, like actual ballot stuffing and people trading votes and so on.
This is a completely different society, but I think people through all that, reformers of all kinds, with a level of determination and resolve and vision that I think verged upon madness, really dedicated themselves to creating a more progressive and just America and had a tremendous amount of success. We always have a long way to go. But the point is the idea that we might come to 21, 25 and have a different legislature seems much more modest of an aspiration than people who thought themselves that they were going to create a racial egalitarian American society a hundred years ago. That level of structural change actually seems quite achievable when we consider the level of change we’ve seen in the last hundred.
So I think change is possible. It’s just a matter of seeing this as an ongoing struggle, the movement that has to be built, like the civil rights movement or the women’s movement. A movement for a more democratic America is I think a generational project and one that we can embark upon now as daunting as things might seem. I think more and more people are primed for this too. I think that we’re coming to a less reverential attitude about the founding, about the Constitution. We’re asking ourselves new questions and we can go in different directions on that basis. We can veer further towards fascism or we can have a more progressive alternative. But I think the ground in a weird way has been paved by Donald Trump. I think people are alarmed by what he’s done to the Constitution already. They are kind of seeing the ways in which it’s been unable to restrain him, ways that I think they might’ve embedded his rise, as I argue in the book.
They know that people know the institutions aren’t working. There’s a poll that was done last year that said 70% of Americans not believing American democracy function in their interests and functioned well. So people are ready for this conversation to begin. They just need leaders and advocates willing to begin it and set them in the right direction. And once we’re in the right direction, I do believe that we can eventually succeed in creating more Democratic America.
Paul Constant:
So one thing that I think that we’re missing from this is a powerful and affirmative alternative vision. I think that for most of the 2010s, I think one of the dominant pop-cultural narratives was the dystopian story, the Hunger Games, The Road, all these things were prominent. And I think that our leaders have done a very bad job of explaining what a better world might look like to people and getting people to believe it.
Goldy:
You want a utopian story, Paul, because there’s a lot less conflict intention there.
Paul Constant:
Sure. Yes. Although Star Trek was a utopian story and that was very popular throughout the 20th century. Anyway, I’m not asking you to write a Star Trek for the new generation. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit, for instance, what democratic governance of work would look like. I think identifying the workplace as an increasingly dystopian space is useful, but I think we also need to talk about what an ideal workplace under a truly democratic system would look like.
Osita Nwanevu:
Well, economically, I think it means more rights and more power for workers at work. You have a problem, you’re being underpaid, you have some situation that work you need to resolve, you have a union that’s able to act in your interests. You don’t have employers that obstruct and prevent you from getting together with your fellow workers to address those issues and to get what you deserve at work. You also have structures within work, whether that’s a works council or court determination seats on the corporate board where you are actually at the table or a representative you choose is at the table making decisions about the way the company you work for ought to be run. I also think it means ideally, if we want to be pie in the sky, we have an economy where workers actually own and control a large share of every major corporation in this country.
Bernie Sanders put out a plan in this vein in 2020 where he said that companies with a certain size, I think it’s about a hundred million more on their balance sheets or at companies that are publicly traded would be required to put 20% of their shares into a fund that would be owned and controlled by their workers, would pay them out dividends like shareholders on Wall Street, but it’s something that they would be entitled to as people who actually work at the company and would give them voting rights on corporate decision making. Those kinds of ideas where workers are actually in the driver’s seat and economy, not rhetorically, because there are structures in place that give them meaningful say about how the companies they work for ought to be run. That’s kind of the place I think we ought to go. And we should see that as part of a democratic project.
Again, we believe in democracy because we believe we’re entitled to a measure of control over the conditions that shape our lives. We are not here to be enthralled to people who happen to be born wealthier and more powerful than us. We’re not here to be mere victims of circumstance. We deserve the right to live the lives that we want to live and to direct them in the ways we’d like to direct them. And having that level of authority and power in the economy is a very concrete and material way of making that possible for more and more people. And I think that’s a way of delivering on the promise of American democracy. This does not just seem like something your civics teacher told you in high school. You’re not just talking about institutions, you’re not just talking about norms, you’re talking about concrete ways in which every American will have more money in their pocket and more agency to live the lives that they’d actually want to live.
That’s the vision, that’s the ideal. And I think it’s a democratic vision. And it’s a way of talking about democracy I don’t think people are used to hearing in this country. So that’s the economic piece. We could talk for a long time about the political piece and the extent to which we’re now in an authoritarian situation and we needed constitutional order that doesn’t abet the rise of people like Donald Trump. It gives people more actual agency over politics and real equal say in the way American society should function there too. But the overarching vision is American democracy is this ongoing project. It’s not something that people finished and did in 1787. They now just have to go over it with a feather duster. It’s a thing that we ourselves should find a real role in creating. We should consider ourselves founders and a more democratic society.
That to me is a vision. That’s a project. That’s something that’s galvanizing. It’s not just you’re just caretaker of this old order. You are shaping a new order and new America for the benefit of your own material interest, but also for the benefit of this country as a whole. If we talk about democracy in that way, I think it’s something that’s potentially compelling. And it also I think answers the key problem that Democrats had in the last election. To talk about democracy purely, again, as this kind of wooly abstraction, people didn’t really understand as connecting to the extent to which they could pay their rent or the mortgage or pay for childcare or healthcare. Talking about democracy as this kind of empowerment, as a material dimension, I think is very, very important.
Goldy:
You riff off of Eric Foner’s idea of the second founding, the idea that there’s basically been two periods of American history in terms of governance, the idea of what the government is before the Civil War and after the Civil War, and you call for a third founding. And key to that idea, I think, is that that doesn’t require rewriting the Constitution. That requires reconceptualizing our relationships within at least the fiction of the current Constitution. In your mind, what would these changes look like in a third founding?
Osita Nwanevu:
Well, and you talked about the economic piece a little bit. I mean, I think seeing that as part of a new founding is very, very important. I mean, I write in the book about the extent to which the political institutions that we have that are troubling us, things like the Senate and so on, were products of economic concerns that the founders had. They thought that ordinary people had been given too much power by state legislatures and the African African American Revolution, and they wanted a political order that would clamp down on those kinds of populist demands, and that’s why they had created institutions they did. So seeing the economic piece as part of what it means to reconceptualize America and to develop more Democratic American society is important. But on the political side, I mean, I think that we’ve gotten as far as we can with political reform, and we’ve gotten pretty far.
Again, we’ve expanded rights, we’ve democratized the system in certain ways. We’ve gone about as far as we can on that trajectory without addressing the fundamental design of the US Senate. There are all kinds of things I talk about. The book, the judiciary, the electoral college, the interesting battles that we’re having now and so on. But the Senate is, I think, the main and major obstacle here. The idea that we have equal representation of every state, regardless of population, distorts policymaking in all kinds of ways, and is truly an egalitarian. The fact that somebody in Wyoming, a state with fewer than 600,000 people, has the same number of senators as somebody in California. So they would be on its own, one of the largest countries in the world, is one of the largest economies in the world. And that means functionally that somebody in Wyoming has about 67 times representation.
Somebody in California does in the Senate. We’re told in school that this is balanced out by the House, but it’s not really. The Senate shapes the judiciary, it shapes the executive branch. You do need both houses to pass legislation. And so those distortions really reverberate throughout the policymaking process at all levels. I don’t think we can go on like this. The population dynamics are only making those inequities worse and worse with time. And so having a differently designed Congress is I think part of what I’m really, really advocating for here, but there are all kinds of political reforms. I mean, it’s hard to kind of talk about them succinctly, but I think that’s one that I’d focus on.
Goldy:
Obviously fixing the Senate and the electoral college, but that is politically impossible because there’s no way that those democratically elected senators in those small red states are going to give up the outsized power that those small red states have. You’ll never get a constitutional amendment that can fix the Senate. And I suppose you talk about years in the future and maybe a convention, but I mean, obviously if we went to a convention now, the result would be disastrous.
Osita Nwanevu:
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t really see a reason to say never. It’s like somebody in 1890, whatever, saying, “Well, we’ll never have a vote for African Americans that’s equally forced in the South. We’ll never have equal rights.” We can play this game. There’s a capacity, I think, to really move to a different system. Now, I talk about things we can do in the interim before this kind of long horizon to improve the situation. People have already been talking about adding states. People have explored ways you could maybe disempower this and then make it more like a House of Lords. As far as the electoral college is concerned, there’s a very viable path to changing that without a constitutional amendment. I talk about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact where states can decide on their own to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.
And if a number of states with a total of 270 votes does this, you’ve functionally done this and run around the electoral college where about 200, I believe and nine electoral votes that have already been dedicated to this process. The last states are a slog, but it’s doable. I think there are things that we can do here without resigning ourselves to a kind of despair. The point is, and I think the project is the American people have not been told that these things need to happen. Even the Democratic Party, which is pro-democracy, obviously standing against Trump’s authoritarianism, has not been very vocal about the need to implement a lot of these reforms. You had a reform push that did not succeed under Biden administration, things like before the People Act and so on, which are pretty modest, but they were defeated by internal divisions within the Democratic Party.
So there has to be a kind of movement here to actually put this at the center of the political agenda and to also to convince a lot of the people in the progressive movement right now that whether your priority is healthcare or abortion rights, your climate policy, your immigration or gun control, none of those things actually have a chance of happening and sustaining themselves if they do happen without these reforms happening first. All of that, I think, is not really within the center of political discourse right now. And I wrote the book partially to provoke that change. But absent a sense that this has to happen, absent a kind of blueprint or set of policies that we might pursue, yeah, you’re right, nothing’s going to change and we’re going to have a Senate that will be the way it is for the rest of time. We have to actually do the work of convincing people and bringing them along with this agenda first before we throw up our hands and say it can’t happen.
Goldy:
What would you think of the idea of re-imagining the power relationship between the federal government and the states? You mentioned that California is essentially a nation-sized state. It’s the fourth-largest economy. You throw the entire West Coast together, throw Washington and Oregon in there, and you’ve got the third-largest economy in the world. You see states defying the federal government all the time, whether it be with recreationational marijuana or the way Southern states have basically defied court orders for years on redistricting and voting rights. It’s just the old, you’ve made your ruling, now go enforce it.
And you see the Trump administration now trying to use physical force to impose its will on these states, but outside of an actual military occupation, they don’t really have the policing power to do that. So I see there’s a lot of a space there for states and confederations through the use of state compacts and interstate agreements and uniform legislation, et cetera, to kind of work together to provide the things for their own people that the federal government is no longer willing or able to provide for the American people as a whole. Have you thought about that as a short-term solution to the current crisis?
Osita Nwanevu:
I have. And I’ve actually been of two minds on federalism in general. I mean, I think for a long time, let’s say pre 2020, I really, really thought that the amount of power that stayed had within the American system was kind of dumb. I didn’t think it could be justified. Why is it the case that we don’t let the federal government do X, Y, and Z, and that this has been distributed to the states? And then COVID happened, and it became very obvious to me immediately that if Donald Trump had had the sole power to set healthcare, public health policy at that time, and states didn’t have the capacity to pursue COVID relief in their own ways and respond to it in their own ways, we would’ve been much worse off. And so that’s kind of tension and difficult to have to work through. There’s this great book called Laboratories Against Democracy by Jake Grumbach that deals with the inequities of state politics that I think also has to be taken seriously.
I mean, he finds that for reasons that seem kind of intuitive once you think about it, that state and local governments can actually be less accessible and more egalitarian than the participation in the federal system because, well, who pays the most attention to granular state and local issues? Wealthier people, whiter people. Everybody comes to the table in presidential elections. Everybody’s watching CNN to figure out what’s going on at the national level. Who’s really paying attention to bond issues and the kinds of things you end up on your ballots if you’re a local voter? Well, it tends to be wealthier folks. And so there are these equities that come into state politics as a consequence of that. So I don’t know. I don’t have a sense that what the perfect balance is as a matter of abstract yields or whatever. But I do think that you’re right, there’s a practical reality now.
We have the opportunity to sort of test things out and build things at the state level that we hope become national policy moving forward, whether that’s healthcare policy. I’d like to see more state power in setting labor law actually, especially now that we have an LLRB that seems like it’s about to be gutted at the federal level. States like California and New York already taking steps to see what they can do to enforce labor law and to construct an alternative at their level. I’d like to see more of that. So I do think it’s a kind of viable interim solution. When it comes to experimenting with different kinds of democratic forms, so I talk about direct democracy in certain respects, things that we might be able to try out there. We could try them out at the state and local level. If they work well enough, we could think about implementing those things at the national level.
Once we get to a point we’re able to implement large scale political reforms. But state and local politics, it’s this bind where it is, as it stands, less accessible in certain ways, but also the venues in which I think we can do a lot to try things out and also build enough power to eventually get us to a point where we can implement more radical changes and more dramatic changes at the national level. That’s my kind of long-winded, convoluted answer to a good question.
Goldy:
I guess I have a blinkered view of this living in Seattle where we just elected a socialist as mayor and we pioneered the $15 minimum wage and other labor standards, secure scheduling, paid sick leave, et cetera. This is not a city where the moneyed interests tend to get their way, but I can see that’s not… No, look, I’m old enough. I grew up in an era where states rights was the villain. Obviously it was what was being used to fight civil rights and voting rights and in defense of segregation. I was a kid, but I remember the ’60s and the early ’70s. So it’s difficult for me to now look at state’s rights as possibly the thing that will protect our freedoms, but times change.
Paul Constant:
I did want to ask you the final question we ask everyone, which is why do you do this work?
Osita Nwanevu:
Oh, that is a terrifically hard question because I’m thinking through why I do this work intensely a lot now. I think that I came into writing and journalism because I had a very kind of simple model of how this occupation worked in my head. You find some facts out in the world or you make a particular kind of argument and you present it to people who can read it, a general public, and they read that and they think differently about an issue or a policy or a politician, and then things change as a consequence of their being exposed to your brilliant argumentation or your brilliant reporting. And we have seen conclusively in real life over the last decade, how thin and unrealistic that model of what this job does is like. So I’m now in a position of thinking through what is it that I hopefully hope to achieve through writing?
Is writing the primary vehicle even for reaching the public that you want to be exposed to your ideas? My animating reason remains the same. I do do this because I want to see a better country. I think that there are so many things we could be doing. Better is a matter of policy. There’s so many injustices that I think that we could be rectifying, which is not to say America right now is in the pits and the worst it’s ever been. I actually think it’s important to recognize in our history how much worse things have been. And understanding that actually gives me a tremendous amount of hope, as I maybe suggested earlier. Understanding how dark and bleak and horrible the past has been and how much better things are as a consequence of people writing and arguing and organizing and competing for power.
Understanding that things can change, as dark as things can I seem is tremendously important. I do this work because I’d like to see a better country and I’m not sure I’m doing it in the right way, in the most effective way to bring those things about. I think all journalists and all writers are kind of having to navigate the extent to which this occupation allows them a real way of doing that, but that’s why. And I think that’s going to remain why.
Goldy:
We just had a great conversation with Osita, Paul, about democracy, what’s wrong with it, how to fix it, why it’s important. But of course, this is an economics podcast. It’s Pitchfork Economics, not Pitchfork Politics. So I think it’s important to get into why democracy matters when we’re talking about economics. I think fundamentally, if Nick was here, he would agree with me that it’s because we don’t… Our theory of the economy, of markets doesn’t really see these as two completely separate systems, that democracy and markets are part of the same system, that you can have a market economy without a democracy. I suppose it’s a kind of market economy. There is no example of a democracy without a market economy. And we would say that the more politically inclusive a system, the more economically inclusive that system will be, and it’s economic inclusion that actually drives innovation, prosperity, and broad-based growth.
Paul Constant:
Yeah. I think that it’s impossible to separate the two politics and economics. And I think that woven through all of his answers were economic solutions, especially most overtly talking about the workplace. But I think that we’re talking about a few corporations that have swallowed up power and are able to basically throw elections in their favor. So I think it’s one and the same argument, I think, when you get right down to it.
Goldy:
Right. The fact that we were talking about a lot of it on the political side doesn’t mean this wasn’t an economic argument. And I think it gets back to his observation about how voters, if you actually polled voters on issues, they broadly agreed with Democrats. Voters broadly support democracy and they fear for our democracy. And yet Trump did win a majority of the vote in 2024 because a lot of people were concerned about economic issues. It was that economic insecurity that has been a consequence of the past 50 years of upward redistribution of wealth and income that has led to the point where authoritarianism is capable of taking hold, which is an irony, of course, is that you won’t get economic security in an authoritarian system. I mean, a handful of people at the very top will, obviously it’ll be,
But the kind of economy we want, what people really want, a kind of secure, stable, middle class life, you can only get that from a democracy. And this speaks to one of the earliest guests on this podcast way back in the beginning, Ghanaish Siduraman and his book, The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution. His thesis was that our constitution was written assuming a broadly egalitarian nation. And the US at the time of the founding was unique in that regard compared to the rest of the world. And it was largely unique in that way, because we were stealing land from the natives. And so everybody, it was a country of Yeoman farmers and artisans and small shopkeepers and so forth. So it was, even though you had the slave owning elite and merchant elites, for the most part, broadly, it was a very middle class country.
And of course, that’s not the world we live in today. Most people aren’t yeoman farmers and there’s no more land to steal and redistribute, et cetera. And so this constitution that was written assuming we wouldn’t have a problem with the Senate, even if there were small states, if the economy of South Dakota was largely similar to the economy of California.
Paul Constant:
Sure, sure.
Goldy:
We’d have roughly the same interests, but we don’t anymore. There’s huge geographic and economic disparities between the states. And it’s a vicious circle that feeds on itself where this economic inequality leads to more political inequality, which leads to more economic inequality, and it’s just dragging the entire nation down.
Paul Constant:
We’re back to wallowing again.
Goldy:
We’re back to wallowing in the doom and gloom. The goal here, this is the idea behind Pitchforks. I mean, that very first piece that coined it that Nick wrote that you either get… Eventually you either get an uprising or a police state, we’re rooting for the uprising. Trump is in the process of trying to impose the police state.
Paul Constant:
And he’s got record low approval numbers and he’s also polling very poorly on the economy, which is the only issue that he’s been=
Goldy:
Fake news.
Paul Constant:
… super strong on the whole time. Yeah.
Goldy:
You know what will solve that, Paul? We need to sue all the pollsters to bring them in line.
Paul Constant:
That’ll do it.
Goldy:
Yeah.
Paul Constant:
I really appreciated Osita’s thoughtfulness when he was talking about short-term solutions and then broader long-term solutions that can follow that. And I think that if we’re going to fix the economy, we need to think like that as well. We need to enact short-term fixes by raising the minimum wage, getting as much money into the pockets of working Americans as possible, while we’re also doing these big systemic shifts to address the inequality that’s tearing everything apart. And I think that just really appreciated his view that in the long view, we need to change these things, but we can’t just sort of wait for a big sweeping change to come. You have to work towards it the whole time. And so in that respect, I thought it was a very optimistic conversation about politics and the economy. So I guess my gift was a failure, Goldy.
Goldy:
You know, Paul, this is what I mean when I joke when I say that I’m a cockeyed pessimist. I am deeply pessimistic about the future, yet here I am doing the work because there’s no shame in tilting at windmills. Occasionally you knock one over, right? It’s possible. It’s possible to knock over a windmill. And at a small scale, I’ve knocked over, maybe not a windmill, but a couple standing fans over the course of my career.
Paul Constant:
What do you have against green energy, Goldy?
Goldy:
Right. So I think yes, obviously we have to continue the work. There’s no other choice but to continue the work and hope that we succeed. If you want to read more from Osita, his book, his newsletter, some of his articles, we will provide links in the show notes. You can also purchase his book, The Right of the People, Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. You can download it from the library. You can take it out of the library. You can purchase the book from that giant online monopolist. Or Paul, since you’re the expert on this, where else can people get books?
Paul:
Bookshop.org or at their friendly neighborhood independent bookstore.
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