Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor for the New Republic and a columnist for the Guardian, freely admits that his new book sprang from a deep sense of frustration. He was tired of how U.S. journalism compels writers to circle around important questions—“What does it mean to be an American?…How much inequality can or should a society abide?…What is democracy, anyway?”—in what he argues are “thin, repetitive, ephemeral, and social media–optimized ways.”

With The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (Random House, August 12), Nwanevu injects more complexity into the political discourse on democracy and its uncertain future in our multicultural country. And that starts, he explains, by not assuming that democracy is a simple or straightforward concept.

“It is neither,” Nwanevu warns. “To take democracy for granted as an ideal is to leave it vulnerable.”

In a starred review, Kirkus calls The Right of the People “a resounding, persuasive call for a truly inclusive government of the people.” Nwanevu and I recently spoke over Zoom about his book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write that U.S. journalism has “failed to meet this political moment.” What are some of those failures?

I started writing professionally during the 2016 presidential election. Then, even more than is normal, people were really chasing headlines moment to moment: What’s Donald Trump doing? What’s going to happen in D.C. today? What’s going to happen on the campaign trail tomorrow? And it seemed to me that we were in the middle of some really big changes in U.S. politics and society, and if you were just metabolizing the day in, day out, you weren’t getting a chance to zoom out.

That frustration with the limitations of daily journalism only intensified as the Trump years wore on and as it became increasingly obvious to me that there were fundamental tensions over what democracy means. You were hearing more and more open challenges from Trump and the right, attacking democracy and democratic principles. You were hearing more and more defenses of democracy, broadly speaking, from Democrats.

But it seemed to me that we were not getting to the core of what democracy actually means. People were using that word in all kinds of ways. It was not really well defined. And I wanted to sort of dig into that. I wanted a good response to people who say, “Well, we’re not a democracy. We’re a republic, and that’s better. We shouldn’t believe that majorities can make good decisions.”

You talk about historian Eric Foner’s notion of a “new founding” and write that U.S. democracy is due for another constitutional revolution. What should this revolution look like?

I think that some people are going to read this book as me saying, “Well, tomorrow we should have a constitutional convention and just change everything, and it’ll be great.” That’s very much not what I’m saying. There are ideas in the book—both political and economic reforms—that I think are worth exploring, but the ideas are advanced in order to start a conversation.

I’m taking you through what I think democracy means, thinking through some ways we can improve the system. But, really, change on the scale that I think is required is going to take a lot of convincing, a lot of organizing, a lot of political work over many years to get people on the same page about what democracy is and why it’s important.

I see this constitutional revolution as a gradual process, which I think many of the great changes in U.S. society are—whether it’s the Civil Rights Movement or the LGBTQ rights movement or the women’s rights movement. It was not necessarily a specific amendment or specific court ruling that did everything all at once.

And when I think about making the U.S. a real democracy for the first time, I think that it’s that same kind of iterative, gradual process. But the fact that it’s iterative and gradual does not make it any less revolutionary. In my mind, I think that we’re working toward a new kind of country. And that should be seen as a kind of galvanizing and ambitious vision.

Many would say that the first time the U.S. had a true democracy—a multiracial democracy—was in 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. How do these kinds of milestones figure in your analysis?

Even the gains that we made during the Civil Rights Movement—like providing political rights to Black Americans—are under attack right now, partially as a consequence of inequities in our political system. I think that democracy is always an ongoing project. I don’t know if we’re ever going to reach this utopian state.

Still, that’s an ideal worth striving for, and we are so far afield, even compared with our peers in Europe, of that ideal that I think that we ought to be more self-critical about where we are. You say 1965, but some people say that the project of democracy was finished in 1787—we didn’t need to do much more than that. That’s not a realistic way of thinking about politics.

Even just in terms of reaching voters who are disillusioned and dissatisfied with the political system as it is, when they hear from politicians, “No, no, no. We’ve got a system that works. We just have to tweak this or elect this other person,” and then they see these surface-level changes, but the system doesn’t seem to represent them anymore and we still seem unable to solve our very basic problems—that erodes trust. That erodes faith in the American project.

Being more honest with ourselves about how much we still have to do is a way of connecting with those voters. I think that it’s more exciting to hear that you can have a hand in transforming this country and making it what you think that it ought to be—in collaboration with your fellow citizens. That’s much more exciting than “this is a thing that was finished by guys in powdered wigs a couple hundred years ago, and we just have to dust it off every so often.”

What was the biggest challenge of exploring a topic of this scope?

Far and away, the most difficult thing was taking concepts that had been talked about in academia and trying to whittle them down into a form that anybody who generally follows politics would still be able to pick up and understand without losing the content of the idea, without oversimplifying things.

There’s something ironic in the fact that a lot of people who I think are very deeply committed to democracy in academia and who will write these beautiful papers about why more people should be allowed into the democratic process and why we should have faith in democracy communicate those ideas in such a way that ordinary people wouldn’t be able to access them.

I wanted to take these debates that I think are important and invigorating and can challenge our preconceptions about democracy—I wanted to take them out of the ivory tower and bring them to more people. And that took a lot of work.

Brandon Tensley is the national politics reporter at Capital B.