The Right of the People

A searing argument that American democracy is in crisis because it was never one to begin with, and an urgent call to rebuild it from the ground up--from a formidable new voice in political journalism. Frustrated with both the dysfunction of our political system, and the shortsightedness of contemporary political discourse, journalist Osita Nwanevu delved deep into the meaning of democracy to assess, is our democracy even worth saving? The short answer is "yes." But the longer answer is The Right of the People, a book that makes the case for a new America, beginning with the argument that American democracy is--and has always been--more illusion than reality. Examining our contemporary polarization, the state of American conservatism and the Democratic fetish of consensus, and the depreciation of real politics into culture wars, and the evolution of our notion of democracy, Nwanevu builds the case for wresting ourselves from our own American empire. "This isn't a question about our history," Nwanevu writes. "It's a question about a future that we all seem to feel slipping away from us." To make America a truly democratic society means not only granting equal political standing and rights to all, but to establish a democratic economy--bringing the values we take for granted in our politics into the places where we earn our livelihoods. The Right of The People is, at its root, an ethical and spiritual project, one that makes a broader argument about what human beings are entitled to and who we ought to be as a country.