Americans have long described their government as being democratic. But an honest look at the history and evolution of the government here tells a very different story. The April 29, 2024 episode of the The Majority Report with Sam Seder includes interview with Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones, to discuss his recent book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It..
“Minority Rule” serves as a culmination of his reporting on modern-day efforts at the GOP’s undemocratic takeover and how they play into an ever-shifting battle between democracy and elite rule.
Stepping back, Berman looks to America’s inception and the central role the US Constitution played in bolstering the US’ constraints on popular rule, with institutions like the Senate, Supreme Court, and Electoral College all serving to act as checks to the people’s power of democracy and federalism.
Moving forward, Abe walks Sam and Emma through some of the major periods of democratic progress and (largely racist) backlash in US history, including reconstruction’s shift towards a multi-racial democracy and the following minoritarian overthrow in the South that established Jim Crow rule, and the major progress made under the Civil Rights Movement – which saw a variety of voting-right legislation passed over the 1970s – and the GOP’s reaction that we’re still dealing with today. Parsing deeper into this latter era, Berman looks at the role played by folks like Pat Buchanan in pushing the GOP back toward their project of minoritarian rule, establishing the blueprint of the GOP’s takeover of the undemocratic institutions of US politics and the establishment of a network of think tanks and foundations to shape the generations to come. After an extensive conversation on how the politics (and normalization) of Pat Buchanan paved the way for a Donald Trump presidency, grounded in culture war and white resentment, and how the GOP’s takeover of Wisconsin politics at the outset of the 2010s provided an easy laboratory for anti-democratic policy, Berman wraps up the interview with a plea for the Democratic Party to recognize and strategize against these institutional threats to US democracy, and how refusing to do so paves the way for the likes of Donald Trump.