Ari Berman, “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People,” Simon & Schuster, 2024, 295 pp. 

I strongly recommend this book.

 With the 2024 election looming and democracy's fate potentially at stake, Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and author of Give Us the Ballot (2015), traces the deliberate efforts of extreme right-wing conservatives over recent decades to limit control of the country's majority interests to maintain Republican dominance. This recent trend began with Pat Buchanan's 1992 White House bid. As Berman notes, Buchanan’s “nativism, racism, and skepticism toward democracy foreshadowed the ideology that now defines the Republican Party.” The author highlights subsequent underhanded policies by polarizing figures like former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who suppressed voting rights, and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who instituted high-profile anti-immigration policies. These actions fall in line with the strategy of Donald Trump and his allies, who actively engage in voter suppression, district manipulation, judicial influence, and historical whitewashing—and all are backed by substantial funding from billionaire donors. In consistently insightful prose, Berman delves into the Constitution's founding intentions, emphasizing its design for a system of checks and balances, and he shows how institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate, with two senators per state regardless of population, can be leveraged to undermine the true will of the people. One of the most telling examples is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin's outsize influence on national politics. Despite these challenges, Berman highlights recent grassroots victories and underscores the potency of state initiatives in countering extremist right-wing threats and preserving a hope for American democracy. “State constitutions empower popular majorities in ways that the federal constitution does not,” he writes. “They were specifically designed to be a majoritarian counterweight to the counter-majoritarian features of America’s political institutions.” 

  My Notes:

Pg. 4: The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act overturned a 1924 law, a law that instituted strict quotas on immigration from everywhere but northwest Europe. It was adopted in a nativist fervor after immigration from southern and eastern Europe had skyrocketed in the late 1880s and early 1900s, making the country more urban than rural for the first time and diluting the power of Anglo-Saxon whites. The 1990 census predicted that whites would one day become a minority in the country. 

 Pg. 5: In a remarkable fifteen-month span, (A second Reconstruction) President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act, a sweeping trio of antidiscrimination laws that would transform the politics and demographics of the country. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 desegregated nearly every aspect of American life—from schools to public accommodations to workplaces—and expanded the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment by ending discrimination based on race, sex, and gender. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 struck down the literacy tests and poll taxes and other suppressive devices that had rigidly maintained Jim Crow in the South for nearly a century. The Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) opened the country's doors to the developing world in the first significant way. It specified that no person would be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence. 

 Pg. 9: To entrench and hold on to power, a shrinking conservative white minority is relentlessly exploiting the undemocratic features of America’s political institutions while doubling down on a variety of antidemocratic tactics, such as voter suppression election subversion, dark money, legislative power grabs, immigration restrictions, census manipulation, and the whitewashing of history. This reactionary movement, which is drastically overrepresented in the Electoral College, the Congress, and gerrymandered legislative districts because of the political system that diminishes the voices of urban areas, young Americans, and voters of color, has retreated behind a fortress to stop what it views as the coming siege. 

Pg. 10: It’s certainly true that the founders designed the US Constitution in part to check popular majorities and protect the interests of a propertied white upper class. The Senate was created to represent the country’s elite and restrain the more democratic House of Representatives, while the Electoral College prevented the direct election of the president and enhanced the power of slave states through the three-fifths clause. Voting rights were restricted in most states to white male property owners, so that only 6 percent of Americans were eligible to vote in the first presidential election. However, the antidemocratic features that were built into the Constitution have metastasized to a degree the Founders could have never anticipated, threatening the survival of representative government in America. 

 Pg. 21: In January 2010, SCOTUS (5-4) radically rewrote America’s campaign finance laws to allow megadonors and corporations to contribute unlimited sums, often in secret, to political action committees. Citizens United reversed a century of campaign-finance restrictions that saw money as a corrupting influence on politics, ruling that restricting these donations was a violation of First Amendment’s rights to free speech. By 2012, more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just thirty thousand people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, the country’s most elite minority. Not a single member of the House or Senate would be elected without their support.

 Pg. 24: Wisconsin offered an early preview of the post-Citizens United political landscape. As the cost of federal elections increased by nearly $2 billion from 2008 to 2012, spending by outside groups in Wisconsin quadrupled in 2010 and 2012 compared to the two elections before Citizens United.

Pg. 53: When the founders created the Constitution in 1787, every state but Pennsylvania and Vermont included property requirements for voting, which usually amounted to fifty acres of land or fifty pounds of personal property, a sum that excluded anywhere from a quarter to 40 percent of white men from voting. The free Black population could vote in fewer than a half-dozen states. 

 Pg. 55: When the delegates adjourned in September 1787, the final document thirty-nine of them signed benefited small states over large ones, slave states over free ones, and the country’s wealthy over the common man, collectively protecting elite white power in all three branches of government. 

 Pg. 66: Pat Buchannan watched in horror as the white population grew by 1 percent from 2000 to 2010 while the Black population grew by 15 percent, Hispanic by 43 percent, and Asian by 46 percent. Ninety-percent of the nation’s population growth from 2000 to 2010 had come from nonwhite residents. Gerrymandering became ever more essential to keep white control of government locally and nationally.

Pg. 143f: Trump’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census set off alarms. Many remembered during WWII when Japanese addresses (citizens and non-citizens) were turned over to the Secret Service which then used the information to fill internment camps during the war. The census formed the DNA of America’s democratic system. If it were corrupted, then many of the country’s other democratic institutions, which relied on census data would be too. 

 Pg. 148f: Between 1905 and 1914, nearly 10 million immigrants entered the US, the highest rate in the country’s history. Then the 1924 law was passed and stopped this: immigration fell from 1.2 million in 1914 to just 150,000 by the end of the 1920s, and nearly 90 percent of visas went to northwest Europe instead of southern and eastern Europe, a complete reversal from earlier in the decade. The law established the country’s first numerical limits on immigration and a clear racial and ethnic hierarchy. 

Pg. 157f: In 2019 the Supreme Court decided two cases, within minutes of each other. In the first 5-4 decision, Chief Justice Roberts blocked the administration from adding the citizenship question to the 2020 census. Then in another 5-4 decision Roberts upheld the gerrymandered maps in North Carolina. The conservative majority went much further, ruling that partisan gerrymandering presented ‘political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts’ and could not be reviewed, let alone overturned by the federal judiciary. 

Pg. 170: In the 2020 election Trump, even though trailing Biden by 7 million votes, only needed forty-five thousand votes in the three closest battleground states, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, to win the Electoral College. After losing in 30 court cases contesting the election results, Republicans moved on to lobbying Republican-controlled legislatures to override the popular vote winners and appoint new electors for Trump. 

Pg. 182: In 1917 Georgia added an additional protection to maintain white supremacy. It created an arcane Electoral College-type system where statewide and congressional elections were decided not by the popular vote, but by the number of county units a candidate received. This system gave conservative rural areas far more power over state politics than more diverse and moderate urban areas. (It was finally struck down in 1963). 

 Pg. 221: The filibuster was not part of the Constitution and had emerged as an accident of history when the Senate failed to specify how to end debate on a bill in 1805. The founders called for a supermajority only in specific circumstances, such as approving a constitutional amendment, foreign treaties, and removing impeached officials. 

 Pg 285: In 1968 George Wallace came within fifty-three thousand votes in three states of denying Nixon a majority of Electoral College votes, which would have thrown the election to the House of Representatives for the first tie since 1824. 

Pg. 287: In Congress, thirty-four senators from the seventeen smallest states—representing just 4 percent of the US population—could defeat a constitutional amendment.