Minority Rule
The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Voting rights journalistAri Berman has been detailing threats to our democracy for years, and his new book Minority Rule is a timely and essential read. He expertly shows how Republicans are trying to rig our political system—and shares how we can fight back.” —Hillary Clinton on X
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
