Hey there. I'm Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, with some exciting news to share: My new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, is out today.
The book examines how the crisis facing American democracy is much older and deeper than Donald Trump. I trace the debate between democratic and anti-democratic forces all the way back to the Founding Fathers, who created political institutions such as the Electoral College and the US Senate that weren’t all that democratic.
As I wrote in an exclusive excerpt for Mother Jones, those anti-democratic compromises laid the groundwork for Trump and the reactionary MAGA movement we have today. It's as if our Founding Fathers, in ways they could not have anticipated, placed a ticking time bomb at the heart of American politics—and this could be the year it explodes. Just consider these three stunning stats:
–For the first time in US history, five of six conservative justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators elected by a minority of Americans.
—By 2040, roughly 70 percent 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.
—Before the 2000 election, only three times in US history had the loser of the popular vote won the Electoral College. But that’s happened twice in 16 years since then and almost occurred a third time in 2020.
At this pivotal moment for democracy, when so many of our fundamental rights are at stake, I hope you’ll take a moment to catch my new book, the excerpt in Mother Jones, and the terrific videos produced by my colleague Sam Van Pykeren. Let us know what you think!
—Ari Berman