In an age defined by troubling events like the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol; the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade; and the never-ending legal troubles of former President Donald Trump, journalist Ari Berman’s Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It seeks to couch those things in crucial political and historical context. As Berman explains in the book, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “To entrench and hold on to power, a shrinking white conservative minority is relentlessly exploiting the undemocratic features of America’s political institutions while doubling down on a wide variety of antidemocratic tactics, such as voter suppression, election subversion, dark money, legislative power grabs, immigration restrictions, census manipulation, and the whitewashing of history.” It goes a long to way toward explaining some of the horrors of the modern American political system.
Vogue recently spoke to Berman about the concept of minority rule as it applies to legislative and judicial power, what he sees as the biggest threat to American democracy and the rule of law, and the books that helped inspire his.
Vogue: How did your concept for this book first get sparked?
Ari Berman: I’ve been covering voting rights since 2011, and as I got deeper in my reporting I began asking myself why Republicans were making it so difficult to vote. Was it simply about gaining an electoral advantage, or was there a deeper strategy at play? I realized their goal was to enshrine minority rule, so that a shrinking conservative white minority could hold on to power even as the country shifted demographically and politically in the opposite direction. I then wanted to trace that strategy all the way back to the Founding Fathers, who created these anti-democratic political institutions that were intended to curb the power of the masses. In my book, I show how there’s always been a push and pull between democratic and anti-democratic forces since the beginning of the country.
Is there an example of minority rule that you feel is most visible in public life?
The US Senate—because each state gets the same number of senators, something that has been
called “The Great Compromise” but is more accurately described as “The Great Concession”: smaller, whiter, more rural, more conservative states have far more power in the Senate than larger, more diverse, more urban states. And that problem is getting worse over time. In 1790, the country’s most populous state, Virginia, had 12 times as many people as its least populous, Delaware. Today, California has 67 times the population of Wyoming. By 2040, roughly 70% of Americans will live in 15 states with 30 senators, while the other 30 percent—who are whiter, older, and more rural than the country as a whole—will elect 70 senators.