Minority rule : the right-wing attack on the will of the people-and the fight to resist it / Ari Berman.

Title :

Minority rule : the right-wing attack on the will of the people-and the fight to resist it

Author:

Format:

Books

Summary:

"A riveting account of the decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power-and the movement to stop them"--

Language:

English

ISBN - ISSN:

9780374600211

037460021X

Physical Description:

pages cm

Contents:

Prologue : fear of a white minority -- Laboratory for oligarchy -- The fury of democracy -- The new nullification -- The death of the autopsy and the birth of the big lie -- The most dangerous branch -- The new American majority -- The institutional coup -- The electoral coup -- The insurrection through other means -- Democracy on the ballot -- New-school election denial meets old-school voter suppression -- The gerrymandering of history -- Epilogue : a new laboratory for democracy.

Subject:

Conservatism -- United States -- History.

Democracy -- United States -- History -- 21st century.

White people -- Race identity -- United States.

Right and left (Political science) -- United States -- History -- 21st century.

United States -- Politics and government -- 1989-

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Minority rule : the right-wing attack on the will of the people-and the fight to resist it / Ari Berman.

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Summary

A riveting account of the decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power -- and the movement to stop them.

The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. But this crisis didn't begin or end with Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift. Ari Berman charts these efforts with sweeping historical research and incisive on-the-ground reporting, chronicling how a wide range of antidemocratic tactics interact with profound structural inequalities in institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to threaten the survival of representative government in America.

"The will of the people," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801, "is the only legitimate foundation of any government." But that foundation is crumbling. Some counter-majoritarian measures were deliberately built into the Constitution, which was designed in part to benefit a small propertied upper class, but they have metastasized to a degree that the Founding Fathers could never have anticipated, undermining the very notion of "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Chilling and revelatory, Minority Rule exposes the long history of the conflict between white supremacy and multiracial democracy that has reached a fever pitch today--while also telling the inspiring story of resistance to these regressive efforts.

Author Notes

Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an investigative Journalism Fellow at the Nation Institute. He graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a degree in journalism and political science.

He has written extensively about American politics, civil rights and the intersection of money and politics. His stories have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, and he is a frequent political commentator on MSNBC, C-Span and NPR.

Berman has also authored several books, including; Give us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, and Herding Donkeys: the Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and a minoritarian Constitution are keeping unpopular Republicans in power, according to this labyrinthine political exposé. Mother Jones correspondent Berman (Give Us the Ballot) surveys the underhanded tactics Republicans deploy in order to win elections and predominate in Congress, the presidency, and state legislatures despite routinely losing the popular vote. These methods include extreme gerrymandering in Wisconsin (in 2012 Democrats got 51.4% of the votes for state assembly but Republicans won 60% of the seats), voting laws in Georgia that disproportionately reduce registration and turnout among poor and minority voters, and Donald Trump's 2020 stop the steal campaign to pressure state officials and Vice President Mike Pence to throw out election results in states that Joe Biden won. Berman goes on to criticize how the Constitution gives small, rural, white, Republican-dominated states disproportionate weight in the Senate and the Electoral College. He also celebrates counteroffensives to Republican election meddling, including Michigan ballot referenda that established a nonpartisan redistricting commission and made voter registration and absentee ballot-casting easier. Throughout, Berman pairs wide-ranging and historically grounded analysis of America's minoritarian political system with a trenchant critique of its departures from democratic common sense. The result is an eye-opening dissection of partisan manipulation. (Apr.)

Kirkus Review

An exploration of the relentless actions of the right-wing movement seeking to counter the collective voice of the majority. With the 2024 election looming and democracy's fate potentially at stake, Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and author of Give Us the Ballot (2015), traces the deliberate efforts of extreme right-wing conservatives over recent decades to limit control of the country's majority interests to maintain Republican dominance. This trend began with Pat Buchanan's 1992 White House bid. As Berman notes, Buchanan's "nativism, racism, and skepticism toward democracy foreshadowed the ideology that now defines the Republican Party." The author highlights subsequent underhanded policies by polarizing figures like former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who suppressed voting rights, and Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach, who instituted high-profile anti-immigration policies. These actions fall in line with the strategy of Donald Trump and his allies, who actively engage in voter suppression, district manipulation, judicial influence, and historical whitewashing--and all are backed by substantial funding from billionaire donors. In consistently insightful prose, Berman delves into the Constitution's founding intentions, emphasizing its design for a system of checks and balances, and he shows how institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate, with two senators per state regardless of population, can be leveraged to undermine the true will of the people. One of the most telling examples is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin's outsize influence on national politics. Despite these challenges, Berman highlights recent grassroots victories and underscores the potency of state initiatives in countering extremist right-wing threats and preserving a hope for American democracy. "State constitutions empower popular majorities in ways that the federal constitution does not," he writes. "They were specifically designed to be a majoritarian counterweight to the countermajoritarian features of America's political institutions." A richly documented political book with significant current relevance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

The notion that democracy is in peril, its fragility rooted in voter suppression, partisan gerrymandering, judicial overreach, and candidate corruption, has emerged as an underlying political theme in recent years. It has always been thus, posits Berman, a nationally acclaimed voting rights and political investigative journalist. Beginning with the strategies surrounding the creation of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the Constitution, the principles upon which the nation was formed were never as noble as history books would have us believe. In this deeply researched and deftly argued treatise, Berman analyzes the ways in which the concept of majority rule has been purposefully subverted to redound to a powerful minority and reveals the genesis of those entrenched traditions that have resulted in the confluence of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and the destabilization of governmental institutions. With tensions escalating as another national election draws near, Berman rings a clarion call about the current state of political influence to shed light on the steady erosion of democratic norms.