Minority Rule Is Threatening American Democracy Like Never Before

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► For more, visit Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/minority-rule-is-threatening-american-democracy-like-never-before/

Everyone seems to be talking about saving democracy this year. “American democracy, that’s what the 2024 election is all about,” Joe Biden has emphasized, painting the threat of Donald Trump’s return to power as the central issue in the 2024 campaign. “We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of history.”

But the crisis facing American democracy is much older and deeper than Trump and it is, indeed, a relic of a very different time in US history.

In a new video companion for Mother Jones, based on my forthcoming book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, digital producer Sam Van Pykeren explores how the US political system was created to restrain democracy, not protect it. The founders essentially placed a ticking time bomb at the heart of our political system—and this could be the year it explodes.

As Ari explains in his book, it all dates back to the birth of American democracy, when the Founding Fathers created political institutions within a system that concentrated power in the hands of an elite, propertied, white male minority. More than 200 years later, the series of compromises the founders made have increasingly vested the majority of political power in the hands of a minority of the population—a reactionary conservative white minority that is seeking to entrench and hold onto power through a wide variety of anti-democratic means.

You can pre-order Minority Rule here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374600211/minorityrule

Find the published excerpt here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/minority-rule-is-threatening-american-democracy-like-never-before/

#MinorityRule #AmericanDemocracy #FoundingFathers #UShistory #AriBerman #JoeBiden #DonaldTrump

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31 COMMENTS

  3. The first chief justice of the supreme court said the people who own the country should be the ones to govern it. Since then every supreme court except one has favored wealth over people. The sole exception was the Warren Court. It gave us Brown versus Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and several more.

  9. Trump is too stuck in his own mud to get back into that House that is so White. Biden sends our money to promote genocide. I think somehow Nikki will take the baton. Not that I particularly like or trust her, but the GOP will have gotten the First Woman President in place. JMHO -gi

  12. These people just cant stand white people, period. Leftists cant stand white people or they have white guilt themselves. They say the stat all the time thay whites wont be a majority because they dont want people to exist. All leftist say it.

  14. Thats bs, our founding fathers started a revolution and were themselves in the minority against Britain. Our fathers wanted to make sure smug, big governments leftists like the dude in the pink hoodie couldn't harm the minority. Its funny because of the constitution and and capitalism you have everything you take for granted. Undemocratic, founded on white supremacy, slavery, misogynistic men, these are just buzz words to rewrite history.

  16. If this is about "minority rule" then why is MAGA just continuing to grow and grow and grow? It isn't just a conservative movement anymore. And it isn't just whites. There have been hundreds of thousands of voters leaving the Democratic Party and re-registering as either a Republican or an Independent. Joe Biden has been a career politician for decades. So has Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. There have been other people attempting to come in from the outside: Howard Dean, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul. Trump is the first outsider to actually get in. So… you CLAIM that you want a better version of democracy, even though the actual will of the people is going MAGA. You CLAIM you want to get rid of the elites controlling the government, yet you keep voting FOR those elites. Your sweetheart, Bernie Sanders, owns multiple houses and has never worked a real job. How can you honestly think HE represents the ordinary people? Do you not see the massive discrepancy between what you say and what you do?
    If the founding fathers were just a bunch of rich elites who wanted to rule, why did they create the Bill of Rights? Why are there TWO Congressional houses? Why does Article 4 state that the Constitution can be amended by a convention of states if the Federal bodies won't do it? If the Senate seems to suggest "minority rule", how then do you explain the House? If this has been all about keeping rich people in power, why then have more and more people become rich? The more rich people you have, the more the power becomes diluted. Can you not see that? How many of you have ACTUALLY READ the Constitution? Anyone?
    What if the majority wasn't on board with progressivism? What if the majority were Muslims? Would you then complain about "minority rule"?
    Have you not seen the polls or the recent political maps? Trump has most of the swing states now and he's gained a lot more support from actual people in the blue states, people who have come to realize that progressive policies are trashing their cities and generating violent crime. Look at all of the most progressive cities. They are full of homeless drug addicts, violent crime, human feces, diseased needles, gangs, and they're all outrageously expensive… AND THEY'VE ALL BEEN RUN BY DEMOCRATS FOR DECADES! How could it possibly be the Republicans fault that these cities are falling apart? The Feds have leveled over 90 charges against Trump… NOW… at election time. Why not way back when? Why have they waited so long? If he's such a horrible, horrible, fascist wannabe dictator, and there's all this evidence of his wrongdoing, why didn't they throw all of this at him while he was president or in 2020? Why hasn't the Federal government actually CHARGED him with insurrection, if that's what he supposedly tried to do on J6? Why have food prices only gone up up up since your progressive president has been in office? Why was the Middle East so uncharacteristically at peace during the Trump administration but now it's all about war again? While are people LEAVING Democratic cities to go live in red states? Why is there no mass migration of people from red states to blue states?
    If you want a democracy that truly reflects the will of the people and you want to stave off authoritarianism, why then do you object to people's right to defend themselves?

  22. Anyone who is so cynical about our imperfect system, as it has been in our lifetime, that they cannot see the difference and the urgency in comparison to the Putin-style dictatorship that Trump has in mind, is sadly naive. We are in danger of mass arrests, death squads and concentration camps. Anyone who thinks that is exaggeration has not been paying enough attention and is unaware of the history of dictatorships that our country has already assisted abroad.

  25. Naïve people are only ones who will believe the nonsense coming out of the mouths of the people in this video. Keep Believing it. Your doing exactly what the establishment you so willing call the controlling minority wants you to do. By all means legal keep going. It’s doing exactly what they want it too.

  26. It's so good to see a young person whose eyes are open!
    This is a great thing you are doing, most important for you and your peers future! I have 3 gen-z grandchildren.
    So keep up the good work, I'm sure you are helping many to see the light💥

  29. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of a document being written in stone and too sacred to ever be questioned. In England, they speak in almost a religious adoration of the Magna Carta ……signed in 1215 and then largely ignored until 1640. It makes some reasonable points but was never about universal suffrage. It was about the aristocracy not accepting interference in what they were doing from the crown. In 1776: the concerns of the American Colonists, who were British subjects, have little relevance to the USA of today but the process required to make even minor amendments to it make it almost impossible to achieve. I like some of the European and Scandinavian democracies where their Constitutions are regularly reviewed and updated. My point is, some traditions and procedures are important, they’re not sacred. Written text and laws are written for the guidance of wise people and the blind obedience of fools.

  30. Focusing on supposed flaws in the Constitution is probably not a good approach. It was a different world when drafted and the US Constitution has done well in comparison to others.
    The culprits are a lack of ethics, and ideals within our institutions. The Founders knew that when the truth no longer mattered, the republic would fall. No Constitution is a cure. This diverse modern nation has lost its cohesive hierarchy of values, dreams and goals. A relentless onslaught of 24 hr news and social media appears to be a pretty good way to divide and ruin a nation.

  31. So what this jackass is saying about 10 minutes in is that popular will doesn't matter, the people don't really matter only the tiny elite matter. We're all just spaced fillers I guess. We're all just paperweights. Well I think one truth is obvious the elites will do anything to maintain their absolute control for as long as possible.

    If somebody says well I don't believe in majority rule then I immediately asked him, so you want minority rule? Okay which minority? The rich? The business elites? Because that's what we have now. Which minority group is qualified to be the soft dictators of the rest of us? Not saying that we should do away with Representatives at this point in time although I have some feelings about that, but just like every other political race is decided by a straight majority vote so should the presidency. And I'm sure there are times when I may not agree with the majority of the voters in a given election, but that doesn't mean I want to turn away a straight majority vote.

    If somebody could give me a qualified explanation as to which minority is qualified to enforce their agenda over everyone else, then I might adjust my view but I haven't heard it yet.

    If the public doesn't matter then why do we even bother having elections? We can just have people chosen by random or through divine revelation or we could go back to an absolute monarchy I mean really anything goes at that point.

    There's no perfect system and there are some better forms of voting such as ranked choice and so forth, but anything that tries to directly subvert popular choice I can't get behind. Hopefully the majority of people will be able to see straight enough to choose better than the alternative. If not then we're just going to have to deal with that, but I know one thing is a fact, the EC is bogus and should have been trashed a long time ago.

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