Protests after closure of news channel premises in Tirana
The 24-hour news channel went off air at 7:36 a.m. on Saturday during a police operation, its signal replaced by colored vertical bars on television screens across Albania.
When the police arrived on Saturday morning, they surrounded the premises —the state-owned former Auto Tractor Plant complex — on the outskirts of Tirana and ordered staff to leave the building.
They were acting on a recent court ruling to return the property to the state.
'A blow to freedom of expression'
Anila Jole has been with News 24 since its launch in 2002, starting out as a reporter, rising to the post of editor-in-chief and now acting as the station's director-general.
Jole called the move "arbitrary" and said it had been carried out "without prior written notice."
"Press freedom is the foundation of a democratic society, and when it is undermined, democracy itself is at risk," she said.
Focus Media Group, the owner of News 24 and several other media outlets including BalkanWeb, Panorama and Gazeta Shqiptare that used the premises, employs around 230 people.
It called the eviction "a blow to freedom of expression" in an EU candidate country.
From broadcast news to defense industry hub
Inaugurated in 1976, the Auto Tractor Plant was once the largest mechanical engineering enterprise in communist Albania. It is now set to be transformed into a defense industry hub producing uniforms and equipment for the armed forces.
The project will be managed by KAYO, a state-owned defense company established in 2024 to revive Albania's military industry.
In April, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama hailed the plan as "a positive development for the armed forces, for our national economy and for the local community, bringing back to life an old infrastructure left idle for decades."
'A serious assault on free speech'
The Albanian Journalists' Association called the police intervention "a flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of democracy and freedom of expression, guaranteed by the Constitution and international human rights instruments."
It went on to say that "police actions that directly obstruct the work of journalists are unacceptable and constitute open pressure on the free media."
The SafeJournalists Albania network posted a similar reaction on Facebook, saying that the police operation had blocked reporters' access to their newsroom and restricted their ability to work. "Such actions endanger media freedom and independence," it wrote.
Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha went further, calling the intervention a politically motivated attack and "a serious assault on free speech" aimed at silencing critical journalism.
State Attorney's Office says lease expired in 2022
Albania's State Attorney's Office has defended the police intervention, saying the lease for the former Auto Tractor Plant premises used by Focus Media News expired in 2022.
The Ministry of Finance and Economy had set July 25, 2022 as the deadline to vacate the building, but the company did not hand over the property voluntarily, the statement said.
The dispute went through all levels of the judiciary. In its latest ruling on July 14, 2025, the Administrative Court of Appeal upheld an order for the immediate release of the premises. The court said the broadcaster's media activity was not at risk, describing the case as a matter of office space that could be secured elsewhere.
Focus Media News rejected the statement, accusing the State Attorney's Office of misinformation, and claims that the premises are its property and that it has the documentation to prove it.
News 24's director-general, Anila Jole, said she hoped the court would "take a fair decision and suspend this intervention, giving the station time to relocate to other premises."
Albania seeks to boost its military industry
In April, state-owned defense company KAYO signed a cooperation agreement with Italian shipbuilder "Fincantieri" to develop naval capabilities.
Also in April, it signed an agreement with the Israeli defense technology company Elbit Systems, with the aim of restoring the Aviation School in Vlora so that both military and civilian pilots can be trained there.
KAYO is also seeking private partners for joint ventures in weapons and ammunition production, which require €60 million (approx. $70 million) in investment and significant job creation.
On July 16, the Council of Ministers approved a state-level strategic framework agreement between the Ministries of Defense of Albania and Israel to strengthen Albania's defense capabilities and increase bilateral cooperation in this field.
It is expected that joint projects involving companies from both countries will result in the production of drones, light weapons and artillery in Albania.
The government says the initiative will strengthen national defense, attract foreign capital and position the country as a regional defense hub.
Edited by: Aingeal Flanagan
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Is Trump a Test or Triumph for Democracy?
transcript Is Trump a Test or Triumph for Democracy? I mean, a particular kind of conservative will look at something like the British monarchy and say: There's a kind of mystique to this system and the traditions involved. Democracy is way cooler than that. Democracy is way weirder and more mysterious and more mystical. It's the idea of people coming together. We all do this ritual of elections and so on. That's way cooler on an aesthetic level to me. Is the United States a democracy? Was it ever? Can the cause of democracy revive the Democratic Party? And would more democracy make America more progressive? Or more right wing? My guest today is a thinker trying to chart a course for the American left through the age of populism and Donald Trump. He's the author of a provocative new book, 'The Right of the People,' which makes the case for a new American founding. Osita Nwanevu, welcome to Interesting Times. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. Thanks for being here. So we're going to talk in this conversation about how radical ideas and radical critiques from the left might end up being very influential in Democratic Party politics going forward. But before we get there, I want to go back to the last election, which Donald Trump won after a series of campaigns in which the Democrats had basically presented themselves as defenders of our democracy against the threat of authoritarianism, fascism, or at the very least, a dangerous kind of populism. And what you saw in 2024 was the failure of that argument, because in the end, Donald Trump didn't just win the electoral college, he won the popular vote. Our democracy as it exists today voted for him. So I thought to start, could you talk a little bit about that Democratic message and why, from your perspective, it failed. Sure thing. So I think many voters went to the polls in November understanding the election as being a referendum on democracy. And precisely that way, I think the people thought that they were being asked to judge, on the one hand, a set of abstract ideals that their civics teacher might have told them was important in high school or grade school and the price of groceries, the cost of living. And I think a lot of Americans looked at that choice and they said, well, hell, I'm going to go with my own economic well-being. The hope - which I think was a misguided hope - that Donald Trump is going to improve conditions within the economy. And so the abstractions that Democrats ran on, the conception of democracy that they put forward, wasn't compelling for a lot of different reasons. And I think early last year, Gallup, I think, did a poll where they found more than 70 percent of Americans didn't believe that Democratic institutions were functioning properly. So when Democrats came out and said, our democracy needs to be protected and saved, I think a lot of Americans doubted whether they had a functional democracy to begin with. And so they invested their hopes in Donald Trump, partially because they believe that he could be somebody who would unstick the institutions, tear them down, reformulate them in some kind of way. And so I think that this election can be read both as an indictment of the particular way Democrats talked about democracy in their pitch to American voters, and also as a culmination of, I think, basic anti-democratic deficits within the Constitution that have empowered Donald Trump and brought him to the White House yet again. Well, and I think just in your description, I think you can see the two potential takeaways, right that people trying to reformulate ideas for the Democratic Party could draw from the election. And where you started with the idea that voters were asked to choose between abstractions and kitchen table issues. Out of that sense, you get the argument that basically what the Democratic Party needs to do is just focus on those kitchen table issues, have policy debates, argue about specific issues, health, education, the education, the environment and so on, and not get caught up in larger theories of how democracy works. But you do have a larger theory of how democracy, well, how it doesn't work. You think in America right now and how it should work. So give me your definition of democracy. What is a democracy? A democracy is a system in which the governed govern. You can read a lot of political theory. You can read the classics. I don't think you get a definition that is more succinct than that. Another formulation is Lincoln's: government of, by, and for the people. And so in a democracy, the people themselves are the people who govern. It's not entrusted as a responsibility to some alien authority, some external power, some other hierarchy. People take upon the responsibility and burden and promise of governing themselves. That's the core idea. So how do you know that America in 2025 is not by the people, and for the people? That the governed are not actually governing? So I think there are three characteristics of any democratic system. The first is political equality. People are equal in standing when they come to make a collective choice. So when it comes to the Senate, for instance, we have one of the most malapportioned upper houses in the world. I think only Argentina and Brazil among our peers are more malapportioned than ours. The second characteristic is responsiveness. There's real authority amongst the public when they come together to make collective choice, things happen. And the last thing I would say is majority rule. But as I write, I think in very, very basic ways, our system flouts all three of these things. So over the course of talking about this book now, I've done a lot of events in Washington, DC that is a city of about 700,000 people in this country without full representation in Congress. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the one delegate they have, cannot cast a vote in the final passage of legislation in the House. There are four million Americans for whom that is true. Most of them live in Puerto Rico. They are governed by the federal government without a full equal say in governance that I think, by any reasonable definition, is not a Democratic arrangement. It's something that's troubled people for many years in this country. But even beyond that extreme, those of us who do have representation have very unequally apportioned representation. Classic example California's state about 40 million people for its own country, be one of the 40 largest countries in the world, is one of the largest economies in the world has the same number of senators as Wyoming. State of fewer than 600,000 people, fewer, in fact, than Washington, DC. That means, functionally, that people in Wyoming have about 60 or more than 60 times representation of people in California do in the Senate. I don't think that's a merely academic point. You hear in school that this is balanced out by the House. It's not really in a substantive way. The Senate alone shapes the judiciary. It shapes the executive branch. And obviously it's a veto point for the passage of even ordinary legislation. So right away, and I think the Senate is a crux of a lot of this. We have a fundamental piece of our system that flouts basic Democratic principles and basic Democratic intuitions, again, more so by international comparison than some of our peers. No country gets it perfect. There is no ideal democracy out there in the world. But I think it's fair to say that a system is not really Democratic as much as it might purport to be one. And what about what about the economic component. How is a vision of economic equality, in your view, essential to having a functional democracy or having a democracy that is actually Democratic. Yeah well, this is one of the central provocations of the book. And I think the kind of background intuition that people have in mind, even if they don't know it consciously about democracy, is that we are entitled to an amount of say, a basic level of say, over the conditions that shape our lives. We're not mere victims of circumstance helplessly thrown about by the universe. We're not the peons of particular hierarchies, of people who are more powerful, less than us, or more privileged than us. That's a basic Democratic intuition. And I think one of the things that has gone on in progressive circles over the last decade or so is have people like Elizabeth Anderson, for instance, who make the point that we are governed in more spaces than just the political sphere. We spend about 1/3 of our time at work. The decisions that are made at the top of corporations we work for often affect us more directly, intimately, and immediately than decisions made in Washington, DC, or in our state houses or in our City Hall. And yet, we feel that we're not democratically entitled to any kind of voice in those spaces, except for maybe hoping that we can act through government to regulate the economy. When we try to do that, we find that Washington, DC, and our political institutions are often dominated by wealthy people or bosses. And I think that when it comes to solving the concrete problems of inequality, worker power, the absence of worker power, the absence of worker voice is one of the things that's contributed to our current economic situation. That is a Democratic problem. And I think it suggests, suggests Democratic solutions as well. All right. Let's do an excursion then. Back in time. Yeah to the American founding. Because one of your arguments is that America was not actually intended to be a democracy. That, in fact, we should understand our founding almost in terms of a kind of oligarchic coup. So talk a little bit about your view of the founding. So, I mean, when you raise some of the objections that I've raised about the nature of our system, conservatives will often say, well, we're a Republic, not a democracy. I think liberals by habit say, no, no, no, that's not true. The founders actually intended democracy, but they messed up in 50 million different ways. I think the Conservatives have the better side of the argument when you actually look at the historical record. And I think the people people should understand that the Constitution is forged in a particular political and economic context at the end of the American Revolution. We're in a state of Chu economic crisis. A lot of reasons for this land is destroyed and ravaged. Slaves escape. Trade restrictions are imposed by the British. Poor farmers, especially people in the backcountry across the nation, are appealing for debt relief and for tax relief. They're asking if they can pay their taxes and their debts in with goods. They're asking for different measures of economic assistance. And one of the main things they're asking for, actually, is the circulation of paper money. There's a shortage of hard currency in the country. They believe that the circulation of paper money will make it easier for them to pay down their obligations. This deeply, deeply troubles the wealthiest people in America. There's a belief that this undermines the stability of contracts that it frustrates or complicates the creditworthiness of the country. And there's just this belief, too, that people are in economic distress because they hadn't been frugal enough. They were spending on gambling and drinking on luxuries imported from Europe. There's a lot of my understanding is that they were, in fact, spending on drinking. Well, Yes, to a substantial degree, to a substantial degree. Is that the source of economic distress across the country. Probably not. But there's a lot of colorful rhetoric that Woody Holton goes through in unruly Americans. If people want another read on this. And so people are successfully appealing to state governments for this relief, with the exception of a state like Massachusetts, very conservative in its design, with the state Constitution, it resists these appeals. In fact, it increases taxes. And then you have this uprising which people may have heard about in school. Shays rebellion, this armed uprising that is eventually put down and it alarms the founders significantly. There have been abortive attempts to rework the articles and to reform government before then. But they come to understand the state government has gotten under control. They were actually directing the economic situation in the country and something needed to be done. They needed a stronger sovereign federal government that could act directly upon people, that could request taxes and revenue directly from people, and that would actually be less accessible democratically than the prevailing order had been. And they come to Philadelphia in 1787 with that understanding. And this is not a matter of speculation. We have one of the very first speeches made at the convention was made by Edmund Randolph of Virginia, where he says, look, the thing that actually brought us together here is the excess, excess democracy at the state constitutional level. We have pamphlets and obviously the Federalist papers. We have a real body of information that informs us as to what they were thinking when they designed some of these institutions. And it's not history that I think most Americans are familiar with or are encouraged to think about but it matters. It matters in getting us to understand why the institutions we have function the way that they do. But I also think it gives us a kind of permission. This was not some kind of sacred compromise that came down a mountain on tablets like this was a particular contingent agreement. And we should consider ourselves empowered with all we know now about governance, with the values we have now, to make dramatic changes to the political system with just as much right as the founders did. But it is also, in a way, an invitation that Americans have been taking, accepting right, since barely after the ink was dry on the Constitution. Because I think there's another narrative, which says a number of influential founders, for different reasons, envisioned a more aristocratic form of Republican government than what we've ended up with. But some of that just evaporated at the start, right. Founders did not anticipate political parties. Founders imagined a version of the electoral college, or at least some did, where literally the electors would be wise men deliberating. And that collapses very quickly. And then you just have a sequence across the 19th and 20th century where the country, steadily becomes more responsive to Democratic majorities. And this starts with Andrew Jackson, who is currently a figure in great disrepute on the left, but democratizes the system in a way that once led to him being celebrated. You in the old days of the jefferson-jackson dinners that the Democratic that the Democratic Party used to have, and all of the narratives around New Deal liberalism celebrate Jackson as a democratizer. But you have the expansion of the franchise over time to women, to freed slaves, African-Americans. And so on. And so you have by the time you reach the Civil Rights era and the middle of the 20th century, right. You have a landscape where that founding Constitution, you have the direct election of senators. So America becomes would agree. Much more Democratic. Of course I would. I wouldn't dispute that at all. We're living in a much more Democratic society today in all kinds of ways than we were in 1787. I wouldn't dispute that. I think the case I'm making, though, is that the central institutions that the founders set up in 1787, in many ways, survive today. Yes, we have the direct election of senators. That is true. But we have equal apportionment still, which is one of the central compromises they made at the convention for all they might have distrusted, disliked democracy. Madison and Hamilton both thought that the principle of equal apportionment went too far and advantaging the small states. They say this at the convention. They say this in the Federalist papers. The small states could not walk out, in fact. Gunning Bedford of Delaware says. During the convention, keep Rhode Island happy. You got to keep them happy. But Gunning Bedford I think, makes a speech at convention where he says, basically, look, we will succeed. We will join some other foreign power if we don't get a preservation of equal apportionment, which we've had under the Articles of Confederation in The New system. So that feature, which Madison warns about I think quite cogently at the convention, continues to be perverse and continues to generate perverse outcomes for us to this day. People have talked about the Senate in this respect, especially with population trends continue. You smaller and smaller proportion of the country will win greater and greater proportion of the seats. This is going to continue to distort governance. And actually the distortions are going to worsen a presidency that we've seen in the last six months, especially, I think, validates some of the concerns people had at the founding about whether they were creating some kind of monarchical or quasi monarchical executive. And so I think that for all we've done to expand the right to vote, democratize the system, include the public in more and more places. I think all of that is real. But I think it's time for us to really consider all of these things. I think it's time for us to consider, to the extent that people are angry about Donald Trump again, what are the elements of the system that allowed Donald Trump to rise as a political figure that have sustained them. I think there to an extent, some of the elements that the founders hoped would prevent somebody like Donald Trump from coming into power. So what should we do. Give me in again. In brief, in brief brush brush in brief. Brush strokes. The new Constitution that you think the United States should have. So we could start with the thing that I think most Americans think about when they think about the undemocratic nature of our system, a reform that most Americans have supported for a long time, which is dealing with the electoral college. There's a proposal on the table now, actually, something that's being acted upon in states across the country to move to a national popular vote by Interstate compact without needing a constitutional Amendment. I mean, the Amendment process itself is one of the things that needs amending very, very hard one of the hardest constitutions in the world to make substantive changes to ours. So if you get a number of states totaling up to the 270, you need to a presidential election to say, we're actually going to throw our electoral votes to the popular vote winner. You functionally worked around the electoral college. That's one thing. I've advocated in the past for adding new states to the Senate. I think that there is an ideological imbalance now for all kinds of reasons, in who gets represented the most and most reliably in that body. But that's not a permanent fix to the Senate at all. It's actually taking advantage of the equal distribution would be most likely Puerto Rico and most likely Puerto Rico DC the territories. So, so right. So an ideal Senate or would there be a Senate at all. Well, that's another question. That's another question. I mean, I think that's worth exploring radical idea, but it's an argument that you have to make on the basis of getting people to understand not only that the system is not Democratic, but what is the value of democracy actually, to begin with. So one reason I wanted to have this conversation is that I think that the focus on Donald Trump and the focus on some of the very real radicalism of some of the ideas on the table, on the political right right now has obscured a little bit just how much radical enthusiasm for structural change there is on the left in the Biden administration. There were both a set of concrete legislative pushes for things like a big new voting rights bill, that kind of thing. And then there were just a lot of proposals. These run the gamut from, as you've already mentioned, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico to big changes to the Supreme Court were proposed. And I think now that the Supreme Court and Donald Trump are not in open war with each other, I think the left wing critique of the Supreme Court is going to come back probably in a big way. And the filibuster, right. We haven't even talked about the filibuster is a very concrete way that the Senate itself frustrates merely majoritarian efforts and requires supermajority efforts. So my expectation is that all of these ideas are going to be part of the political conversation on the left and are going to be very influential in the next Democratic administration. What I can't quite figure out, is how they fit into actual practical politics. Yeah right. And I'm just curious how you see that. Like, do you think that a Democratic candidate for president in 2028 or beyond should be running on this kind of narrative and saying, look, we need a kind of, if not a new founding, at least something, something along those lines where if we take power, we really are going to make big changes to how the Senate works. Well, I tell you what I'd like to see happen. I think it would be a mistake to do what we did in the Biden administration again, which is take these reform ideas in isolation and not connect them to again, a kind of real material politics that most people come to politics to try to adjudicate. If we're talking about the Senate filibuster and it's purely a matter of well, this is how majoritarian the system is by design. And we're not talking about no, this is why we can't pass the health reforms that we think we need. This is why we can't meet your material needs, improve the economy to your benefit. If it's merely an abstraction, I think it's a waste of time. If you connect it to economic concerns, material concerns, I think there's real potential there. Most Americans have been told that this system works all their lives from the time they're in school, by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Most up until Donald Trump, who said, no, maybe we should. What was it. Revoke parts of the Constitution and dialed it back. Most Americans, everything. Everything is negotiable. Everything is negotiable. exactly. Most Americans even to the extent that they might be concerned or troubled by Donald Trump and/or talking about our democracy, have a conception of the system. That is, we currently live in a democracy and need to protect and preserve it. You go out to these no Kings protests, and what people say is, I'm really, really upset. And I'm really, really angry that Donald Trump has violated the Constitution. People say that, I think, with all the sincerity one can have. I think they say it for good reasons. I'm not somebody who believes that the Constitution is wholly bad. I like the Bill of Rights quite a bit. I think that we should have stable procedures to adjudicate how governance works, even as I'm advocating for new system eventually. But something about that register has to change in order for us to consider reforms at the level and at the scale that I'm talking about. I think I'd like to see people, whether it's candidates or activists, go out there and say, what really makes me mad is that Donald Trump is violating the principle that we have a right, fundamentally as human beings, to self-governance. Donald Trump is doing things that abrogate our freedom as individuals, but isn't. But isn't that I think see, it's just an outsider to this intra left debates. I feel like you were on the most solid ground a minute ago where you were saying, no, the key is to link debates about self-government to some powerful economic issue. It seems to me if you stand up and say Donald Trump is violating people's right to self-government. No, I mean, there are people who will care about that. But you have to say and the concrete effect is this public policy that you want cannot be passed. I would say beyond that, I think that you say that because when you talk about democracy in that level as a fundamental human entitlement, you say, I oppose Donald Trump's authoritarianism. And I posed that in the matter of principle. And I also oppose our bosses, our executives, our investors in the economy lording it over us at work and in the wider economic system. You say that we have a system that is undemocratic, a society that is undemocratic not just because we have broken political institutions, but we have broken economic institutions, and we should work towards fulfilling the promise of American democracy, not just by instituting these political changes, but by really reforming the economy. So that we get what we do or do from work so that we're more empowered. We have more rights. And so if you were put in charge tomorrow of a new Democratic administration administration's strategy to push something, push some set of proposals that you would think would bring the Senate to a kind of crisis point right, where it's like, you're going to use the filibuster. These things aren't going to pass. And this will create the opening to at the very least, abolish the filibuster, if not also to add new states. What do you think are the most promising, concrete things that Democrats could be promising there. I think the first item of economic legislation I'd put forward on the table is the PRO Act. I think that again, there is a Democratic character to arguments for more worker power. Just for clarity's sake, this is an act that changes rules around unions and unionization. That's right. It obviates state right to work laws. It makes it easier to organize. It fights back against worker rather employer efforts to make unionization more difficult. That is, I think, the central piece of economic legislation and to make a Democratic argument for it, I think. You say that we are now a party in the Democratic Party, aptly named, that is going to fight for democracy in all of its forms, in all the ways that we can. That means resisting authoritarianism from the right. That means reforming our political institutions, and that means granting each and every one of you as workers, what you do in terms of your voice and in terms of what you're entitled to as a matter of pay at work. That, I think, is a cohesive argument rooted in, again, a conception of democracy that is not just about casting a ballot every two to four years. It's a deeper conception of democracy that is rooted in principles about self-governance, that links you up with this whole both political and economic agenda. And I think a novel way, and I think it's a novel way for the left specifically. I mean, we've invested a lot of time, a lot of energy talking about social Democratic programs, whether it's Medicare for all, a Green New Deal, this kind of thing. Labor power, although everyone will tell you it ought to be central to the agenda. And many believe that it's not been as central to the campaigns of someone like Bernie Sanders or Warren Mamdani. But partially that's just because. Because the labor movement has declined substantially. And so few Americans are in labor unions. So it does seem like you are, in a way, you are raising your degree of difficulty as opposed to a debate over Medicare for all. Because with Medicare, all Americans are almost all Americans expect to benefit from it. Everyone has some contact with it. You don't have to explain to people why Medicare might be good for them with labor politics. You do have to explain to the vast majority of Americans who aren't in unions. You have to sell them on unions because they're not invested already in this. But I would actually flip it. I mean, I think that one of the reasons why we don't have Medicare for all, and it's been hard for us to do social policy in general. Social Democratic policy in general is people actually perceive, well, you say this is for me and for everyone, but you're taking money out of my pocket to give it to somebody else who I don't know, some stranger who hasn't worked as hard as me. That's been the fundamental I think, barrier to the success of social Democratic reform in this country. Labor politics. Most people are workers, most adults anyway. People are usually not bosses, usually not managers. And so even if they're not in a union, I think you can make a case that they're entitled to more authority, more voice, more agency than they currently have. And that's the case even if you're making no solid amount of money. Well, even if you're doing well now, what's actually protecting you from having your employer lay you off, tomorrow or next week without your say or without any kind of voice or any kind of ability to resist everybody, I think, who works in this country has things that they would complain about at work and not just for the record, not me. I love my job. It's fantastic. Just in case anyone is listening, you are quite. Zero complaints. So it actually flipped that. I mean, I think there's more of a kind of cynically self-interestedness within labor politics. Then the social Democratic politics that we've tried, where you're relying a lot upon the hope that people are empathetic towards other populations. I think that we can do that, but historically we've enabled it to do that on the basis of having a strong labor infrastructure. Labour is one of the key political factions or political power bases for Democratic Party as they build the New Deal society, as they build the Great Society. So maybe through labor, you can socialize people into having a more capacious understanding of the people they should care for. But then I want to with this using this example. Then I want to ask a question that takes us slightly back towards theories of democracy. Because suppose, having followed American politics through a number of presidential cycles. I can imagine a world where a democracy, a Democratic presidential candidate wins an election, wins 51 percent or 52 percent of the vote. Has a set of ideas. Maybe the PRO Act is one of them that poll reasonably well during the election. Then they come into power and they start trying to pass legislation. The legislation gets critiqued in various ways. There are arguments about it. Voters pay more attention to it. And suddenly if you look at the polls, the legislation is suddenly becomes unpopular. And this is one particular example of what gets called the thermostatic trend in public opinion, where ideas are popular and then they're implemented, and then the public swings in the opposite direction. And I want to know how that fits into your theory of how democracy should work, because we've just lived through six months where Donald Trump, Stephen Miller as his aide. You have repeatedly come out and said, look, we just want an election with a majority of the vote. We represent the will of the people, not the Supreme Court, not the Senate, and so on. And there's a way in which that's wrong, because if you look at public opinion polls, lots of Trump's ideas are unpopular. But there is a reasonable point there, right. It just seems to me that, when we talk about the will of the people, we're talking about something that is very fickle and changeable, that is different six months after an election than six months before an election. And part of the case for a convoluted countermajoritarian system like the US is that it's hard to really get at the will of the people just through elections alone. So, I mean, I addressed this in the book by saying, I don't think the will of the people is a real thing. It should be intuitive that when you read polls and you say majority of the American people believe this on taxes, and another majority believes this on environmental policy, majority believes this on the woman's right to choose, and so on. These are not all the same group of people. There's not one the majority that's being represented across all of those issue spaces. So the concept of the will of the people is very, very troubled. Theoretically yeah. And one of the reasons why I call my book the right of the people is because I think that phrase better encompasses what I think is actually going on in democracy and a democracy, you have a stable set of procedures where people have an equal chance to contest power. And majorities are the way that we adjudicate who wins a particular contest, right. If you're a minority now, you might be majority in the majority next time. That's a dynamic process. There's no one point at which we say we have fully transcendently spiritually. Whatever you want to say have represented the will of the people in this electoral process. We should understand democracy, something more contingent and fluid than that. And so I think that the concept of the will of the people, though, is it's misled people, I think, who well-meaning, but I think it's also been proven useful school for authoritarians, frankly speaking. So Donald Trump or Elon Musk saying, well, whatever we say kind of goes because we are embodying the true, unquestionable sense of the American people. But what are they embodying then. You're leaning very hard on the idea that, they're embodying the right of a contingent, provisional majority to choose its leaders. I think that's exactly what happens in a democracy. And that's all. Yeah and I think that it sounds deflationary, right. But I think this is one of the things that makes democracy work and makes it, again, a useful means of governing ourselves with certain advantages overrule the few, the fact that it's dynamic, things change. You make an argument today and it doesn't work. You try a different set of arguments tomorrow and that might work. And that might pull in more people. You have formed different coalitions. I think democracy has a character to it to produce, generate, change, process, change that makes it one of these is one of the reasons why I think we should value it. So I agree that we should value it. I think the deflationary argument, though, does make me personally more comfortable with the kind of tangled, complex system that we have right now, which I completely agree is not one that I think a sensible person would design from scratch. I think some elements of it are more defensible than others. I would probably mount a stronger defense of some elements of the Senate than I would of the electoral college, though I might have a different view tomorrow because the public, I can change my views. But I guess if you're not getting if you're not getting the will of the people, then it seems like the case for revising our entire system becomes a little weaker. No, I don't think so, because I don't think what we're deflating is necessarily democracy itself, or deflating the concept of the will of the people. But democracy remains important because, again, I think that through these fair contests, you allow people the chance to have a voice and have a say in their society and shaping the conditions of their lives. I think that's still transcendently important idea. I think it's still a practically useful idea. And I think that we should be troubled when that isn't the case, when somebody, on the basis of a pure accident of where they happen to live has much, much more say over the conditions that shape their lives than somebody else who happens to live somewhere else in the country. But I think that we should be open to the idea that, Yes, we should have a complex political system. Yes we shouldn't say, well, because x number of people believe this in the poll and we didn't get it. That means that we have a broken system. I think the thing that more fundamentally matters to me is do each and every one of us really have a meaningful and equal say in shaping this country. The extent that we can as voters, right, apart from whatever policy outcomes that you might desire in substance. But those things are linked. In part because one of the ways that how do you tell if public opinion is uncertain and changeable. And so on right. One of the ways that you tell whether a certain set of people have a say in the government has to be whether at least some of their ideas are represented. And so here, let's here I want to make a less abstract and more concrete question or challenge to your argument. I think the story of the entire Western world over the last 50 or 60 years has been that we have a upper class, an elite class, a managerial class, whatever you want to call it, that is, broadly speaking, to the left of the general public on social issues, not always in every case. And there's obviously been a lot of change, but nonetheless, the drama of a lot of debates, whether it's about abortion when Roe v Wade was handed down, or whether it's about immigration debates, especially in Western Europe, maybe more so than here has been a case where you have social and cultural conservatives trying to claim more power through the political process and feeling themselves defeated, whether by judges or bureaucrats or anti-democratic systems. And I think Trump himself is a representative of that discontent erupting into the process, into the system and changing it. And so it seems to me that on those issues, a more Democratic America would have still moved left on a bunch of these questions would not have stayed stuck in 1955 or anything like that, but would not look at all like the kind of society that I think most people on the left envision. Well, look, I mean, you can go back to Donald Trump again having won the popular vote in November, right. I'm not supporting democracy because I think it is the means through which I get everything I want as a progressive tomorrow. And I think that if we had a Democratic system, everybody would agree with me. All the woke issues I believe in. I believe in democracy as a fundamental core value for governing society. Like a first order value. And that means that I'm willing to accept the possibility of losing an election or losing many elections in the course of making the arguments that I believe in, for the kinds of policies and the kind of social attitudes that I want. So I think that just means we have to do the work of trying to convince people to agree with us on those issues. And as you say, over the course of the last 10 years, people have actually moved left on some of these issues themselves within the general electorate, I think, especially after Ferguson in 2014. So I fully accept that we lose sometimes as progressives and sometimes we win. And that's O.K. I didn't maybe you're conceding more ground than I expected. So let me go let me go a little further here. And say O.K. But then just in the case of Trump, of Trump himself. To me, watching the Trump experience has given me slightly more faith, for better or worse, in the potency of democracy as a force in American life. Because from my perspective, one of the ways you can tell if a society is fundamentally Democratic is do ideas and issues that have a lot of support, but are considered disreputable among the great and good. The wise and mighty have political power and political representation. So in that way, a lot of forms of right wing populism seem like tests for democracy. Clearly, Donald Trump was considered disreputable not just by left wingers or anything like that, but by a large number of the people who ran the Republican Party when he started running for president. And it just seems to me that it's kind of proof that America is actually a fairly Democratic society, that he could win anyway and govern anyway. It's been a lesson for me about the perils and dangers of what the public wants, because Trumpism comes with all kinds of perils and dangers. But isn't that a isn't that in some way a triumph of democracy, the entire Trump experience. There was something very odd reading after 2016, these narratives about populism in academia. This was all the rage for about five or six years there where there were like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are both sides of the same coin, really. We have this kind of burgeoning anti-institutional attitude within the public, and that means that democracy is kind of unstable and something we should distrust. They ignored the fact, and I think it remains worth pointing out, that most people did not want Donald Trump to be president in 2016. He spent most of his time as a political figure. Unpopular right. So on that basic kind of level, I don't know that you can see him as a triumph. Now, I do think you pointed out something important, though, which is, look, if we believe in democracy, if we believe in political equality, that means that we accept that there are going to be people within the political sphere, within our system who have very, very extreme views, who have views that we might not like. That's something you have to accept if you believe you can't be a fair weather friend of the Democratic principle if you want it to work, if you want to defend it from authoritarianism, you have to have a real principled commitment to it within certain bounds. I talk about in the book how we need liberalism. We need Republican values. But I'm not I'm not troubled by the reality that there are people in this country who I'm going to disagree with. The country is going to remain substantially conservative no matter how well I argue and how well people on the left argue. I think that's just the reality of life in a large and diverse country, and that's just something you have to accept. Let's talk. Let's talk about Sanders for a moment then, because I think that I do think that Sanders and Trump both represented versions of what I'm describing here, where Sanders represented a set of economic ideas that elites, the great and good whoever else had had disdained and regarded as antiquated and anachronistic. Ideas that were also quite popular. And I think clearly lots and lots of people were very into what Sanders was selling in ways that elites did not expect, and that had a destabilizing effect. And that changed Democratic, Democratic politics. And I do I think even in defeat, Sanders is in a similar way to Trump, a kind of triumph for a certain kind of spirit of democracy on the left. Yeah I'm curious where you think that tendency is going, because again, in thinking about the concrete side of this, I look at that Sanders eruption and I feel like it was perfectly calibrated to the mid 2010s. This is a period of low inflation. It's a period of slow economic growth coming out of the Great Recession. A sense that we didn't spend it. We weren't Keynesian enough. We didn't spend enough money. And it's just a zone where there seemed to be a lot of room to spend a bunch of money without raising a lot of taxes. And I feel like the left right now is, just in a much more difficult position because of inflation, because of shifts in the economy since then. Can you get that magic back the case for economic democracy. Is it weaker now in 2025 than it was in 2016. I think it's stronger because if you identify economic democracy with empowering workers, I think one of the nifty fiscal things about something like the PROACT or something like codetermination is they cost $0. You can do these things by statute. It's not a huge new social program yet. You are, I think, materially improving the lives of ordinary Americans in all kinds of ways. And you're building a political base so that eventually, when it's more fiscally sustainable, more popular, whatever happens to be then are in a better position to argue for the Social Democratic policies that Sanders ran on in 2016. That's the kind of order of things that I think we ought to take up. And I think one of the benefits, too, is that it's novel sounding to people talking about worker rights. Labor rights in Democratic terms, is not something I think people are mostly used to hearing from us. Again, they hear about social programs. They hear about Medicare for All, but empowering you democratically at work because you're entitled to certain things as a matter of basic principle. Different register, I think. And again, I think it's register that has a lot of promise, partially because you can take, liberals, for instance, who are closer to the center, angry about Donald Trump's authoritarianism, angry what they see going on in Washington, fired up about democracy. You could get them and say, look, there's another piece to democracy, too. And we can join these two things together. And so that the people that Sanders had trouble with, which I think were largely this constituency within the Democratic Party, closer to the center, more kind of MSNBC liberals and to use one of the pejoratives that we on the left, I guess, habitually fall into using. If we can find a way of connecting our agendas, I think that's really, really powerful and something that we haven't really tried very much on the left. And it has a lot of potential when it comes to what happens in 2028. But a lot of that is probably then, though, tied up with the question of how Americans feel about corporate America, right. And this is we had Lina Khan on the show to talk about antitrust and Democratic politics and so on. But I think one of the clear impediments, again, in the last 25 years to this kind of pivot is that Americans have not necessarily felt incredibly hostile to big corporations, big companies, and so on. And that, they end up in a position where the left is saying, we need more labor power, we need more worker power. And the big companies are saying, oh, but if you do this, we won't be able to hire as many people. You'll people, people will lose their jobs and so on. And those arguments have, I think, been more effective than some people on the left want to think. I'm curious, do think we're in a more anti-corporate moment in 2025 than we were recently. I think we've been in an anti-corporate moment for quite some time now. That doesn't mean that everybody, was going to the polls last November because they wanted Lincoln to stay on. I think it was strange for a very narrow, a very narrow segment as a concerned public. Yeah, I love what Lincoln did, but I was like that was a different level of politics. It was something behind the scenes. But general animus towards the wealthy, general animus towards corporations. I think we see that in polls. I think we see people supporting in large numbers taxing the rich more. One of the appeals that Donald Trump made at least the first time he ran was he was going to take a step away from corporate control of the Republican Party. He wins the primary, I think, partially on his basis to build a constituency like that. So I think there's a real potency to that politics. If we try it again, Bernie Sanders remains, I think, among the or if not the most popular politicians in America. So I think there's potential there. But I think you're also right that people don't have a natural hostility to Amazon in the way that people on the left, once or natural hostility to any of these big tech firms that we use every single day. But I think that just means we need to make the argument that there is something unjust about the way this corporation is structured. So I think that there's a lot of restive understanding that inequality has gotten out of control. The corporations do all kinds of things. They can't in our politics and in society in general. But I don't think it's been directed in the way that I'm advocating for by the left. And I think there's still a lot of promise promise there myself anyway. O.K well, let's then let's end by talking about that message and messengers, because you mentioned. Yeah, that Bernie Sanders is still very popular fills arenas but no one has come along on the left with that. The same kind of popularity, the same kind of bond with large numbers of voters. You obviously have figures like Alexandria ocasio-cortez who are seen as potential heirs to Sanders. But even she I think, speaks to a somewhat narrower demographic. And this is where one element of democracy that we haven't talked about is the kind of mystical. Yes right. There's a religious historian, Molly Worthen, who has a new book out about charisma in American life that I've been reading in recently. And charisma is I mean, this is the element I think that in a way, it's hard to defend as a Democratic theorist because it is so weird and hard to pin down. Like, why does why did Donald Trump cruise through the Republican primary in 2016? You can run down 17 different issues, but in the end, charisma has something to do with it. Why is Bernie Sanders so much more popular than any other prominent socialist politician. And the answer has something to do with his weird, Grumpy mayor of Burlington. Charisma So what I mean, the concrete question I want to ask is about who you like as a future leader of the Democratic Party. But before you answer that question, could you say something about the mystical side of democracy and where it fits into your vision. I mean, this is just speaking personally. This is one of the things I actually like about democracy a lot. I mean, in particular kind of conservative. We'll look at something like the British monarchy and say there's a kind of mystique to this system and the traditions involved. And when Queen Elizabeth died, there was a lot of this. I remember writing at the time, democracy is way cooler than that. Democracy is way weirder and more mysterious and more mystical. It's the idea of people coming together, from wherever they happen to be in society, to make a collective choice. We all do this ritual of elections and so on. That's way cooler on an aesthetic level to me. Democracy in the American system. Yeah, it generates charismatic leaders. And a constitutional monarchy tries to separate charisma from power. And democracy. You accept that there's going to be some relationship. But it's not just the charisma of a politician's charisma of you going out in the streets as an activist, you convincing your family and friends to do a particular thing in an election, you having debates with your friends, your loved ones and your community. I mean, that's charisma exists everywhere in the system. And I think that's one of the things that makes it, I think, spiritually powerful to me. But your concrete question, which I cannot answer, who has charisma, who has left well and who has. Who's going to save the left, not just in terms of policy proposals. But we've talked we've mentioned just in passing, right. Andrew Jackson, FDR, Abraham Lincoln. But like, who do you feel like is there who attracts you. I can't say. I can't say that I know of anybody who is, as of yet, making the kinds of arguments about democracy on the left that I wish people were making in the public sphere, and waiting on that. All kinds of talent. I like Zoran quite a bit, cannot be president for very stupid reasons. This is. Sorry just again, Zora, this is Zoran Mamdani. The probable future mayor of New York City, and I agree. I mean, again, I think if you I think if you go down his list of policy prescriptions, right, even in a left wing city, you would have never imagined him getting elected. But if you watch a two minute video of him, you're like, oh, I can see why this guy might get elected. right. So there's real talent there. But here's how I tend to think about the trajectory of the left in general. There is not some kind of natural majority of leftists in the country waiting to be awakened by the right policy proposal, or even the right charismatic candidate. I think that we are a movement that needs to build ourselves up by bringing more people over to our side. People on the left. In the last decade or so, I don't think we fully appreciate or say out loud were shaped by the Obama experience. There's this comet from nowhere who comes in, wins the Democratic primary, and then things change. Or at least he's able to capture the attention of Democratic Party, capture this amount of power. That was what was going on when I was growing up and getting into American politics and so on. But I think it's clear now that all of that was a transient moment to a large extent. I do think there have been durable shifts since 2014 on social issues. I think the polls bear that out very, very quickly, very, very clearly. But obviously we haven't won. Obviously Bernie didn't win in 2020 or 2016. And so there's a What do we do moment before Mamdani prevailed in the primary. From my own personal experience and talking to people. There is a lot of cynicism. There was a lot of hopelessness and a lack of direction people had. And I think he's reinvigorated the left in a really, really big way and demonstrated there is still a kind of window here for us, even within the Democratic Party and evidently, even within the Democratic Party in New York City, the seat of financial capital in the world, if that is possible, if he is the likely the next mayor of New York. And we'll see what happens if he gets in and how governance actually works. But if that is electorally possible, I think people have been given a new lease on life here as a movement. And I think where we go next is going to be determined by the extent to which we take seriously the task of conversion. How do we actually rope in more people who don't already agree with us, who aren't already reading, Jacobin or even the New Republic, who are just even the New Republic, even the New Republic. If you can win in New York, you can win in New York. But what you need is a Bernie Sanders type politician who wins a purple state governorship. And when that happens, I will. I will fully believe that. The left wing moment has arrived. We'll see, we'll see. But I think my own perspective, selfishly self interestingly, is democracy has to be part of the secret sauce here. If you've never read Capital but you believe that people have a right to govern themselves, which you've just described, most American voters, we should describe most American voters. Exactly Yes. What is the thing that's going to actually get you to accept the left's premises on the lack of power people have in the economy and the extent to which workers should direct the economy. I think that there is a Democratic argument that is easier for people to understand, to perceive, to swallow, and to put in line with their existing politics. And a place to start that experiment for me is within the Democratic Party. And utilizing this animus and in this anger people have about the state of democracy to push people in our direction. On economics, I think there's a real, again, real opportunity there that's worth exploring. If I'm wrong, then I don't know. I don't know I'm humble enough to say that I don't know. What we try beyond that. But I do think you've outlined the challenge, right. It's you win in New York, you win in New York. How do you reach out to the great middle of the country. Most Americans, most voters. I think that's something we still have to demonstrate that we can do. And it's something we have to be creative about and that the mystery of democracy may yet reveal. Exactly Osita Nwanevu, Thank you so much for joining me. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. After the great rebuke of 2024, many Democrats seem to think their party needs to become more moderate. But there's another theory potent on the American left that believes Donald Trump's election shows not just that American democracy is in danger, but that it doesn't really work at all. What the country needs isn't just a new policy agenda; it might need the kind of constitutional revolution — from adding new states, to packing the Supreme Court — that some Democrats already flirted with under Joe Biden. That's the kind of argument that my guest today makes in his new book, 'The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.' Below is an edited transcript of an episode of 'Interesting Times.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Ross Douthat: Osita Nwanevu, welcome to 'Interesting Times.' Osita Nwanevu: Thanks for having me. Douthat: We're going to talk about how radical ideas and radical critiques from the left might end up being very influential in Democratic Party politics going forward. But before we get there, I want to go back to the last election, which the Democrats had basically presented themselves as defenders of our democracy against the threat of authoritarianism, fascism, or at the very least, a dangerous kind of populism. And what you saw in 2024 was the failure of that argument, because in the end, Donald Trump didn't just win the Electoral college, he won the popular vote. Our democracy as it exists today voted for him. So to start, could you talk a little bit about that Democratic message and why, from your perspective, it failed? Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
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29 minutes ago
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‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow' Review: Strangling Democracy
We're on a street in a cosmopolitan city, cars whizzing by. A woman's voice calmly addresses us. 'The world you are about to see no longer exists,' she says. 'None of us knew what was about to happen.' That is Julia Loktev's voice. It's October 2021, and she has arrived in Moscow to make a film about two young Russian journalists, Sonya Groysman and Olga Churakova, after reading an article in The New York Times about their podcast 'Hello, You Are a Foreign Agent.' They've been put on the a list of 'foreign agents' by the Russian Ministry of Justice, which means they have to register every personal expenditure with the government and append a disclaimer to everything they broadcast or publish — even personal Instagram posts — or face fines, even jail time. Their only infraction, so to speak, is not reporting the news in the manner that the Russian government would prefer. Loktev, who was born in St. Petersburg and immigrated to the United States when she was 9, thought this might make for a good documentary. History tells us that labeling independent journalists as adversaries of their own country tends not to end there. So with the help of her friend Anna Nemzer, a journalist at the then-Moscow-based independent news station TV Rain, she befriended a number of other journalists in the city. Most were in their 20s; most were women; most worked at TV Rain. Loktev went to Moscow and started filming. What none of them knew — what none of them could have possibly known — was that within four months, Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That has had many horrendous consequences, and one is that it provides a useful pretext for the near-total shutdown of Russian independent media; journalists could now be labeled 'internal enemies' for reporting on the war in terms counter to the government's narrative. Almost all of these journalists would flee the country, fearing prison or worse. And Loktev's film would evolve into a shattering portrayal of an authoritarian government using misinformation, isolation and war to control its citizens. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
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3 hours ago
- New York Times
A Year After Revolution, Hope Turns to Frustration in Bangladesh
Just over a year ago, after Sheikh Hasina, the autocratic leader of Bangladesh, had unleashed a brutal crackdown on protesting students, Abu Sayed stood defiantly in front of armed police officers in the city of Rangpur, his arms outstretched. Moments later he was hit by bullets and later died from his injuries, his family said. He was one of almost 1,400 to die in a mass uprising that toppled Ms. Hasina's 15-year rule. Ms. Hasina later fled to India. She left behind a country on the brink of anarchy, but one also suffused with hope. The students wanted to rebuild Bangladesh as a more equitable and less corrupt democracy. They helped install Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist, atop an interim government tasked with leading the nation out of chaos into stability. But many Bangladeshis are frustrated with the slow pace of change, wondering whether protesters like Mr. Sayed sacrificed their lives in vain. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
