Can America Become a Democracy?

In a time when it is easy to be pessimistic about the capacities of voters to make reasonable decisions, Nwanevu pushes back. Democracy is a good system, he insists. It is Lincoln’s definition of the concept—“government of the people, by the people, for the people”—that most succinctly captures its aspiration. Democracies are freer, happier, and generally wealthier than other countries. They give their citizens a set of procedures for managing social conflict peacefully. They have the potential to be dynamic and responsive; autocracies have many fewer incentives to behave in ways that serve the public.

Part of the benefits of democracy are derived from its implications, not just its outcomes. Many important rights are necessary for democratic self-rule. There must be a degree of equality shared by all citizens. Democracy’s deliberative functions can’t work without a free press and free speech. Nwanevu is hardly starry-eyed about democratic systems. He knows, of course, that the circle of those who have been included as full participants has expanded over time. He knows that voting is an imperfect measure of majority preferences, and that many voters are ignorant. “Democracy isn’t about the will of the people winning out in a given collective decision,” he writes. “It’s about the right of the people to govern themselves through collective decision-making in the first place.” He acknowledges, as Astra Taylor has argued, that “the ideal of self-rule … occupies a distant and retreating horizon, something we must continue to reach toward yet fail to grasp.” But, Nwanevu maintains, we should not hold people’s dissatisfaction with our system against the idea of democracy, because of his second claim: “America is not, in fact, a democracy.”

This part of Nwanevu’s argument is, in contrast to the first, much easier to accept than it would have been a few years ago. But Nwanevu doesn’t just mean that we are sliding into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism: He means that the United States has never really met the definition. “The American people are not equal as political subjects,” he says. Our political system is not very responsive to majorities, giving too many veto points that can be exploited, compounded by economic inequality. He admits that no democratic societies may meet his high standards. But, Nwanevu notes, U.S. democracy “falls far further from the ideal than the governments of our peers … in calling them democracies, one doesn’t subject the concept to quite as much abuse.”