Ari Berman: Minority Rule and Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Democracy

Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

“The will of the people,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1801, “is the only legitimate foundation of any government.” But that foundation is crumbling.

Join us as journalist Ari Berman describes what he calls a decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power―and the movement to stop them.

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. But this crisis didn’t begin or end with Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, Berman says reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift. He has followed these efforts, 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 deliberately built into the Constitution, but Berman says 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.” Don’t miss his talk on 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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