How Republicans Wield Power Through Minority Rule
Author Ari Berman explains how Republicans control major levers of power through anti-democratic means.
Despite consistently holding minority positions on issues from abortion rights to climate change, Republicans rule as though they represent a majority of Americans. They don’t. Yet thanks to anti-democratic structures in place that date back to our nation’s founding, Republicans wield power at both state and federal levels as though they have a mandate from the people.
Whether it’s the U.S. Senate where Wyoming has as much representation as California, or the Electoral College where Republican presidents are able to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote, or partisan gerrymanders that ensure Republicans hold a majority of congressional seats despite voters being 50-50, Republicans are able, within our system, to essentially win by losing.
Ari Berman explores this phenomenon in his new book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, and we are thrilled to be able to bring you this conversation with him about how Republicans wield minority rule and why they get away with it. — Team Big Picture
Ari, congratulations on the release of your new book! We live with the consequences of the Republican Party’s strategy of wielding power by exploiting the mechanisms of minority rule within our system every day. Even for those of us who live and breathe these issues, it can be difficult to see the impacts clearly since we’ve lived with them for so long. Thank you for shining a light on this travesty.
To start, can you explain to our readers the mechanisms that the Founders originally put in place, and how they are now being utilized by the GOP to maintain power through anti-democratic means? Are there parallels between the Founders then and the modern GOP today?
The Founders, despite the lofty ideals in the Declaration of Independence, designed the 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 boost small states while restraining the more democratic House of Representatives, which was also skewed because of the three-fifths clause, which asserted that an enslaved person would be counted as three-fifths of a free person for the purposes of apportioning House representation, thus artificially boosting the political power of slaveholding states.
The Electoral College prevented the direct election of the president and enhanced the power of small states and slave states. The makeup of the Supreme Court was a product of these two undemocratic institutions. Additionally, in most states only white male property owners could vote. This protected elite white power in all three branches of government.
Today, the modern GOP is taking advantage of this undemocratic system, which gives far more representation to smaller, whiter, more rural, more conservative states at the federal level, while layering on top of it a wide range of newer anti-democratic tactics to entrench their hold on power.
Are demographic shifts necessitating such a strategy by Republicans? Why aren’t they simply trying to win over a majority of voters? Or are they simply interested in maintaining a white majority at all costs?
Yes. The timing of the right’s modern retreat from democracy is no coincidence. According to the Census Bureau, the nation is now roughly 20 years away from a future in which white people will no longer be the majority. New multiracial coalitions are gaining ground in formerly white strongholds like Georgia and Arizona. To entrench and hold onto power, a shrinking conservative white minority is relentlessly exploiting the undemocratic elements of America’s political institutions while doubling down on tactics such as voter suppression, election subversion, and the censoring of history.
Because so much of the Republican Party is unwilling or unable to moderate their policy platform, clinging to unpopular things like Trump’s Big Lie and radical abortion bans, they are instead trying to rig the political system so that an elite white minority controls a majority of political power. This reactionary movement—which is significantly overrepresented because of the structure of the Electoral College, Congress, and gerrymandered legislative districts—has retreated behind a fortress to stop what it views as the coming siege.
Perhaps the most egregious example of “minority rule” you cite in your book is the current Supreme Court. Can you break down all the ways this stacked conservative Court is the poster child for the GOP’s minority rule strategy?
The extreme direction of the court is emblematic of how the counter-majoritarian distortions in American politics have worsened. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, but 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.
The current supermajority on the Supreme Court has selectively deployed originalism to freeze the Constitution in the country’s undemocratic past when a majority of Americans were excluded from political participation, in order to take away core rights and freedoms on issues like abortion and voting. A court constructed through a series of antidemocratic maneuvers by Republican senators like Mitch McConnell—who owe their own power to minority rule—has in turn made the country less democratic through decisions gutting the Voting Rights Act, legalizing partisan gerrymandering, and allowing billionaires to buy elections in secret through dark money.
In this election, the Supreme Court is already playing a critical role in enabling Trump’s authoritarianism. The court reinstated Trump to the ballot in Colorado, Maine, and Illinois after state officials disqualified him for violating the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. The justices also slow-walked the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution, delaying the federal election subversion case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith, possibly until after the 2024 election, and a majority of justices seem ready to give Trump a get out of jail free card. That means Trump could face no legal accountability for his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection before voters go to the polls—or ever! It is the most brazenly political act by the court’s conservative majority since it decided Bush v. Gore, which handed George W. Bush (who also lost the popular vote) the presidency in 2000.
We all know the statistic about Republicans losing 7 of the last 8 presidential popular votes yet still winning the presidency thanks to the Electoral College. But there are examples of this strategy playing out at the state level as well. Can you break that down for us?
For much of the past decade, more than fifty million Americans have lived in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina under minority rule, where Republicans controlled the state legislature despite receiving fewer votes and pioneered new ways to curb political participation.
Republicans, after taking control of so many key swing states after the 2010 election, turned those states into laboratories of oligarchy, designed to protect the interests of an elite conservative white minority through tactics like voter suppression, gerrymandering, election subversion, and union busting. They made the states the epicenter of their strategy for minority rule, then exported that strategy to the national level. This radicalization against democracy by Republicans at the state level laid the groundwork for Trump’s rise.
State-level efforts to undermine democracy have dramatically escalated in recent years. Trump specifically tried to throw out votes in diverse urban areas like Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Philadelphia in 2020. A record number of candidates in key state and local races in the 2022 midterm election sought to override one of the most fundamental principles of a democracy: accepting the outcome of a free and fair election. That election denier movement is regrouping in 2024 and is focused on taking over state and local Republican parties so they can succeed where Trump failed in 2020.
What is our recourse? Democrats don’t seem to be doing much to combat this. Do you have prescriptions our readers should be advocating for?
Three things:
Protect the rights and freedoms we have now before it is too late by electing pro-democracy candidates.
Work to expand democracy at the state and local level. Pro-democracy activists have had tremendous success in un-rigging seemingly rigged state governments in pivotal swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin in recent years through policies like expanding voting rights, banning partisan gerrymandering, and changing the composition of state supreme courts. States can be laboratories of democracy once again and lead the way in protecting democratic rights.
Build a long-term movement for institutional reform at the federal level. Reform the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation in Congress. Add Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico as new states to make the Senate more reflective of the diversity of the country. Pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to abolish the Electoral College and end the incredibly undemocratic way we elect U.S. presidents. Some of this will take time but Democrats and progressives need to have a decades-long strategy for institutional reform just as the right-wing did.
Ari Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. He’s the author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) and Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, and he is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and NPR. He's won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize for Magazine Journalism and an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media. He lives in New Paltz, New York.
Great interview, but I have one point that I'd like to press. Ari stated that "...an elite white minority controls a majority of political power." You left out the word "male". Republicans are an elite, white, male minority that control a majority of political power. Republicans in power are mostly male. This is an important point, especially in the Republican push to control women.
When you vote in November, remember this: "REPUBLICANS HATE WOMEN"!
Republicans are failing the people in every way possible. They only care about controlling women and their bodies. Fascism. The only true freedom anyone has is their freedom of choice. Vote Blue and your freedom to make choices is protected.
Imagine wearing this in front of them 👇
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