In 2013, The New Yorker published an essay observing that one of the few remaining points of bipartisan consensus among the nation’s political elite was their shared love for the Constitution—even as an equally bipartisan frustration with it seemed to be spreading throughout the rest of the country. Describing the venerable parchment in terms that few politicians would dare employ, the essay’s title offered a punchy summation: The problem was “Our Broken Constitution.”

As Osita Nwanevu notes in his new book, The Right of the People, Americans have been trying to tell pollsters that something is broken for the last 25 years. In a remarkable shift from the optimism that opened this century, when nearly three-quarters of the country expressed satisfaction with the direction of American life, large majorities have now come to disapprove of the way things are going in the United States. What’s more, they predict that by midcentury their country will be less prosperous, less powerful, more divided, and more unequal.

This protracted national pessimism suggests that something is broken, but is it the Constitution? The question is trickier than it may appear on first glance, for the brokenness of something like a constitution is not a simple thing to determine. The familiar adage holds: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There’s no question that something needs to be done if the sink won’t drain or the car won’t start, but if we’re trying to determine whether a constitution is “broken,” we first need to explain what it is that “we” expect it to do when it’s “working.” In fact, things are even more complicated than that, since it’s far from a straightforward matter to say exactly what a constitution is: Is it the text alone? Its underlying values? The contexts, norms, and precedents that are attached to it? (Finally, whose job is it to interpret these things?)

The U.S. Constitution contains a preamble that announces what the document is supposed to do: to “form a more perfect Union,” “establish Justice,” “promote the general Welfare,” and so on. But in general, this list of constitutional purposes has been seen as offering general interpretive guidance, rather than as establishing specific legal powers. As a result, it can be difficult to ascertain whether broad constitutional purposes are being frustrated: Whether the government is working to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” is a more abstract matter than, say, whether a state passing legislation in defiance of a treaty violates the Supremacy Clause. And that’s before we even consider intractable disagreements about such questions as how to define the general welfare, or whose vision of justice we are establishing. Perhaps, as many thinkers have maintained, we shouldn’t want a constitution to hew to any especially thick understanding of these goals. Instead, realizing that agreement on such matters will always be elusive in a diverse and free society, we should simply aspire to a basic law that peacefully channels political competition and adheres to broadly fair, neutral procedures—a system that rival groups can agree to, since none of them want to face the state-backed interference of the others. And as historians and political scientists will point out, a written constitution like ours—which has been substantially amended over the last two and a half centuries—is a polyvocal document. It inevitably reflects the colliding perspectives and interests of many groups of people from many different eras, all of whom achieved constitutional change by settling for compromises that did not reflect their exact wishes.

For his part, Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, thinks the Constitution expresses a fairly unified perspective, that it hasn’t fundamentally changed since its inception, and that it is working more or less as designed. Nwanevu, whose journalism broadly covers American politics and public policy, canvasses in this book many commonly critiqued features of the American political system: the various factors that frustrate the legislative process and limit its responsiveness (gerrymandering and oversized single-member districts in the House, the filibuster in the Senate, etc.); the every-state-gets-two design of the Senate; the Electoral College; the growing powers of the presidency; the influence of money; and so on. But while he decries these problems, he doesn’t regard them as evidence that Americans have betrayed the Framers’ noble constitutional vision, or as proof that the text has been broken by unwise laws, scheming politicians, imperious judges, or a decadent citizenry. The deeper issue, he contends, is that the Constitution isn’t broken; it works all too well.

“America is not, in fact, a democracy,” Nwanevu writes. “It was not founded as one.” The designers of the American political system, he argues, were elites appalled by the economic and political turbulence that marked the brief lifespan of the Articles of Confederation. For them, “the worst of those crises was an ‘excess of democracy’ in the states,” which had fueled a push for “populist policies”—such as paper money and debt and tax relief—“that most wealthy Americans found dangerous and destructive.” While the system has changed in significant ways since the eighteenth century, Nwanevu contends that “the basic foundation they laid down remains remarkably strong—to our detriment. We find our political system frustrating largely because it was designed to frustrate us. Many Americans have come to suspect our institutions do more to protect the wealthy than they do to represent ordinary people. This is precisely what the Founders wanted and what the Constitution was written to achieve.”

If it is a mistake to describe the American system as a democracy, it not only follows that widespread calls to “protect” or “save” democracy are inapt. It also becomes easier to explain why Americans have responded to these exhortations with less enthusiasm than one might predict in a society whose political style has long been distinguished by constitutional veneration. The argument goes something like this: Americans broadly revere their Constitution because they believe it establishes and protects a democratic way of life, but they don’t experience politics that way. Instead, they feel alienated and disempowered, able to perceive that despite all the rhetoric, the people are not really in charge. Yet because they don’t appreciate that the Constitution generally frustrates (instead of enabling) democratic self-rule, they are more likely to see what they call democracy as “a specious and suspicious platitude,” as Nwanevu writes—reducing it to the emaciated form of self-rule they experience, instead of seeing it as a means of empowerment their system has denied them. For such people, democracy is a consistent disappointment, not worth the effort to rescue or defend.

Nwanevu’s book suggests that this would be a terribly mistaken conclusion, for it is not democracy that has failed Americans, but rather their “undemocratic Constitution” (as the legal scholar Sanford Levinson has labeled it). As Nwanevu writes in the introduction, the book advances three basic arguments: that democracy is good; that the United States is not a democracy; and that it should become one through both political and economic transformations. In other words, we should do what the founders did 250 years ago, with “exactly their sense of purpose and even higher, more righteous ambitions for America than they themselves had.”

This way of putting it might strike some readers—those inclined to revere the founders as an unusually wise and public-spirited group of political leaders—as insufficiently appreciative. But as Nwanevu notes, we take the founders (or at least some of them) seriously when we task ourselves with the job of revising, or even completely remaking, the political institutions they bequeathed to us. Many of the most important figures of the founding era, especially those most immersed in Enlightenment philosophy, believed that political institutions could only be legitimate if they rested on consent—and that this ideal of legitimacy would raise tough questions as time went on, since successive generations would find themselves under the authority of a government crafted by people long since dead.

If the circumstances of the world remained forever the same, and if knowledge and opinions never progressed, living under the laws of the past might be an inconvenient but ultimately tolerable state of affairs. But as Thomas Paine argued in his 1791 work Rights of Man:

The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living or the dead?

In the same text, Paine speculated that a sufficiently dynamic political system furnished a solution to this problem:

It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent.

In other words, the dead hand of the past is not necessarily oppressive, so long as we can cast it off whenever we choose—and if we choose not to, our consent can be inferred from that choice not to act. Thomas Jefferson, reflecting on the same problem as Paine—“[w]hether one generation of men has a right to bind another”—suggested in a 1789 letter to James Madison that every constitution “naturally expires” after 19 years. Notably, during the drafting of the Constitution in the summer of 1787, Jefferson had been in Paris, while Madison had been leading painstaking negotiations in the stuffy, overheated atmosphere of Independence Hall, with the windows shuttered to ensure privacy. Unsurprisingly, Madison’s response to his friend was gracious but unmoved: “My first thoughts though coinciding with many of yours, lead me to view the doctrine as not in all respects compatible with the course of human affairs.”

As things have turned out, we have neither a Constitution that resets every 19 years, nor one so easily changeable as to justify the conclusion that Americans have lent their consent to the totality of the document. Our Constitution, notes Nwanevu, is “the hardest in the world to amend as a practical matter”; moreover, he argues, “as a matter of democratic principle, the amendment process is simply abominable.” (As the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy has observed, the ratification process requires that three-quarters of the states approve an amendment, and since so many states have relatively small populations, it would be possible for just 13 of them—collectively containing less than 10 percent of the country’s people—to quash even a mega-popular amendment.) We should honor the founders, Nwanevu concludes, by doing what they did: relying on our own present-day ingenuity, rather than their wisdom, to replace the system they devised with something better. This is not going to be quick work. Because he worries that a new Article V constitutional convention would be hijacked by anti-democratic interests, Nwanevu predicts that it will take “decades of political persuasion and organization” before a new system is ready to launch: “We are still perhaps generations away from a truly democratic Constitution.”

Much of the way Nwanevu builds his case will be familiar to at least some readers. There is more than a hint, for example, of the (uncited) Progressive Era historian Charles Beard in the way the book traces the Constitution’s provisions to the economic interests of the founders. (Michael Klarman, who has influentially updated Beard’s long-controversial thesis in recent years, is cited extensively.) Similarly, the book’s discussion of the Constitution’s democratic deficit is reminiscent of Robert Dahl’s now-classic How Democratic Is the American Constitution? Its overview of contemporary debates over the desirability and efficacy of democracy (in theory and in practice) canvasses, among other prominent works, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s influential 2016 book Democracy for Realists, the anti-democratic arguments of the philosopher Jason Brennan, and the pro-democracy alternatives defended by theorists such as Hélène Landemore. If you’re broadly familiar with these works, you will notice how capably the book traverses an array of academic literatures, skillfully synthesizing from history, political science, and philosophy in support of its core claims. If you’re not familiar with these works, the book offers an excellent introduction to many important contemporary debates among diverse scholars of democracy, especially American democracy.

It’s worth emphasizing how relatively uncommon it is for books aimed at a general readership to attempt this ambitious synthesis of so many topics and approaches. After a few opening pages that recount the widespread democracy-talk that has come to dominate political discussion in recent years, Nwanevu candidly declares that he wrote his own contribution to this discourse “out of boredom”—because he was “dog-tired” of “the habits of mind that shape American political journalism” and “wearied” by its failure to “meet this political moment.” Liberated from the breakneck pace and merciless, click-based economics of that medium, he takes full advantage of a book’s length: starting with a discussion of democracy’s history and its core values, moving into an overview of its critics, cataloguing its different varieties, guiding the reader through critical ratification-era debates, and concluding with proposals for a range of practical reforms.

While the argument is more reliant on historical narrative and academic scholarship than on revealing anecdotes, it is by no means excessively abstract or lacking in detail. For example, Nwanevu begins his defense of “economic democracy” by reviewing the philosophical arguments for taking the power of (for example) employers and managers as seriously as we take the power of politicians. He then concretizes that idea by spelling out exactly what it means in practice: the revival of organized labor, the implementation of sectoral bargaining, and policies that would promote a role for workers in ownership and corporate governance. Such reforms usually receive only a fraction of the attention given to the more familiar political reforms that the book endorses (such as abolishing the Electoral College, ending the filibuster, strengthening campaign finance law, and making it easier to vote).

But Nwanevu makes the forceful case that economic democracy shouldn’t be seen as a separate or unrelated matter. Not only would such policies materially benefit many Americans, but they would also turn the workplaces where we spend most of our time into training sites for democratic citizenship:

Democracy, as should be plain by now, is a vastly complicated thing; like all complicated things, engaging in it well takes practice. Habits and skills such as learning how to present and debate one’s ideas, when and how to compromise, and how to critically assess and synthesize different sources of information before coming to a decision are critical for democratic life…. Economic democracy—whether through participating in unions, electing work councils, voting as shareholding workers, or working in full-fledged cooperatives—gives us the opportunity to hone those skills at work, where we come together with people often very different from ourselves to achieve things big and small.

Among the many objections this book may provoke is the familiar claim—as old as democracy itself—that ordinary people can’t be trusted with the sort of power Nwanevu wants for them. They simply aren’t responsible. But there are two distinct yet interrelated senses in which it might be said that the people “aren’t responsible.” They might lack responsibility in the sense of being irresponsible—that is, exercising power in ways that are impulsive, ignorant, selfish, reckless, and so on. But the people might also lack responsibility in the sense that they really do not, in the end, determine the course of events in their shared political life; as a practical matter, responsibility lies with some other person or entity entrusted with greater power. Again, these two deficits of responsibility are related, for it may be the people’s gnawing recognition of their impotence that encourages their recklessness: We can be careless with our body politic, the people might quietly suspect, because in the end it doesn’t matter—someone else is calling the shots. They may be as likely to undermine our wise choices as they are to bail us out of our foolish ones.

So those who aim to keep political power away from the dissolute masses might have it backward: Instead of their supposed irresponsibility being a reason to deny them power, it may be that denying them power is a key reason for their irresponsibility. If the people’s fate were genuinely, palpably, terrifyingly in their own hands, they might behave more responsibly. Or at least that’s one way of understanding the wager posed by the ideal of democratic self-rule. Can even the disaffected and alienated among us dismiss that as a mere platitude?