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. 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.
Some counter-majoritarian measures were 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.
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“An exploration of the relentless actions of the right-wing movement seeking to counter the collective voice of the majority…Despite these challenges, Berman highlights recent grassroots victories and underscores the potency of state initiatives .”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Berman rings a clarion call about the current state of political influence to shed light on the steady erosion of democratic norms.”
— Booklist“[A] holistic, historical approach to current threats.”
— Library Journal“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.”
— Publishers WeeklyBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Ari Berman is the author of several books, including Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, and he is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and NPR. He is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center and has won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize for Magazine Journalism and an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media.