When many on the left were calling for getting rid of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate over the past few years, they argued the rule allowed a minority of senators to stymie the will of the majority. But Ari Berman says that’s just one of the examples of the structure of the government giving disproportionate power to the minority.
Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and author of the book "Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist It."
Berman spoke with The Show more about this — starting with what got Berman thinking about the idea of minority rule, which as he writes, has a very long history in this country.
Full conversation
ARI BERMAN: So I've been covering the issue of voting rights for over a decade now. And as I got deeper into covering voting rights and efforts to restrict voting, I started to think, what's the purpose of this? Is it just to try to achieve some kind of electoral advantage or is there a bigger project at work here?
And I found that the bigger project at work was minority rule, an effort to try to overturn or nullify the will of the majority. And I wanted to trace that not just in the present day, but go all the way back and show how it started.
MARK BRODIE: And when you talk about nullifying the will of the majority, are we talking about the majority of the population, the majority of voters? What, what specific majority are you looking at?
BERMAN: Well, I'm just thinking generally speaking about the will of a majority of voters. So I'm thinking about the fact that popular policies on things like gun control or abortion rights or climate change don't actually become law or the fact that we have institutions that in many ways allow a minority of Americans despite not having majority support to wield a majority of power.
BRODIE: So do you see a direct through line then from even the founding of the country to now in terms of how the minority and the majority sort of interact with each other and, and how that affects the kinds of policies that are enacted?
BERMAN: I do because I think the founding fathers created a rather constricted version of democracy. They wanted a democracy in theory, but in many ways, they didn't want a democracy in practice. And so the public was shut out of a lot of the governing institutions.
At the time, the Constitution was ratified, the House of Representatives was the only part of the federal government that was directly elected by the people, meaning the president wasn't elected by people. Senators weren't elected by the people. And of course, the Supreme Court was a product of these two institutions. And even still, we have a situation where in the Electoral College, you can win a minority of votes but win the Electoral College and become president.
We have a Senate in which frequently the party that only gets a minority of votes statewide still gets a majority in the body. We have a Supreme Court in which a majority of justices were appointed by presidents who initially lost the popular vote and by senators who represented a minority of Americans. All of that is a direct result of institutions that were put in place over 200 years ago.
BRODIE: So who specifically were the founding fathers trying to keep out? I mean, obviously, African Americans weren't allowed to vote at that point. Like were there other groups of people that, that the founding fathers were, were trying to exclude?
BERMAN: Well, they were first off trying to protect themselves. So they were trying to protect the interests of essentially wealthy, white, male, property owners, many of whom were slave holders. So they wanted to protect their own interests, meaning that they didn't want to protect the interests of people that might be opposed to those interests. So in many cases, they were trying to shut out poor white men from the government and also women, African Americans, Native Americans.
I mean, the interesting thing is the, the book is called “Minority Rule,” but I'm not talking about minorities as we tend to think of them. I'm not talking about previously disenfranchised minority groups. I'm actually talking about a, a privileged largely white minority that is actually holding power by trying to dampen the voices of these previously disenfranchised minority groups.
BRODIE: So for some of the efforts that are going on now, do you see them taking the same kind of tack as what the founding fathers did? Are there new approaches to as you, as you write and as you discovered, trying to allow the minority to do what it wants maybe at the, at the expense of the majority?
BERMAN: Well, I think what we have is I think we have the structural inequities in some of our governing institutions, things like the Electoral College or the structure of the U.S. Senate or the composition of the Supreme Court. Then layered on to that we have some of these newer anti-democratic movements that are using policies like voter suppression and gerrymandering and election subversion to try to gain an advantage.
And some of that has gotten a lot worse recently, including in places in like Arizona where there's newer anti-democratic tactics that have been used, things that the founding fathers could have never imagined 230 years ago, like trying to overturn an election or trying to purge people from the one party if they didn't sufficiently support stealing the election, things like that are certainly new, but they're layered on top of an already existing undemocratic foundation.
BRODIE: What is the balance, do you think, between allowing the majority to, for example, enact the policies that it wants while at the same time protecting the rights of the minority and not, you know, not sort of letting the majority run roughshod over them.
BERMAN: That's a really good point. And I think the protection of minority rights is critically important in a democracy. That is one thing that distinguishes democracies from authoritarian regimes is the protection of minority rights. But I think it's a dangerous situation in which a minority can rule despite not having majority support.
You think of previously disenfranchised minority groups in history. Things like for example, African Americans during the civil rights movement, they worked to build majority support. They wanted to persuade the Congress and the president and the American public to support their agenda.
Minority rule today doesn't want to do those things. Under minority rule today, the idea is, don't try to persuade a majority of Americans to support your project, just gain hold of these counter majoritarian institutions and push your agenda through that way no matter how unpopular. And I think that's really opposed to the basic idea of democracy being based on the consent of the governed.
BRODIE: So you alluded to this, but I want to ask you more specifically about the role that Arizona has played and what did you find in your research about how Arizona plays into all this?
BERMAN: Well, Arizona really is at the cutting edge of a lot of it because it's a state that's changing demographically … it's a state that's changing politically. It's a place where white power is declining and multiracial coalitions are forming.
And I think what you're seeing is a backlash against those demographic changes, a backlash against those political changes. And one party, particularly the Republican Party, becoming a lot more radical both in terms of what it believes and in terms of its tactics.
And I think efforts to find common ground in the form of politicians like John McCain, for example, are becoming endangered species in Arizona. And I think that the, the rightwing movement in Arizona has become a lot more ideological and a lot more aggressive in its tactics.
