Minority Rule:The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People--And the Fight to Resist It

by: Ari Berman (Author)

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Publication Date: 23 April 2024

Language: English

Print Length: 384 pages

ISBN-10: 037460021X

ISBN-13: 9780374600211

Book Description

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 overtu 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 govement in America. "The will of the people," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801, "is the only legitimate foundation of any govement." 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 govement 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.