This week, we’re sharing a recording of an event hosted at the Center for Brooklyn History where Chris interviewed author Ari Berman. Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and has written numerous books including his latest, “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It,” which is the subject of this conversation. They discuss parallels between founding fathers’ ideologies and contemporary figures, threats to our democracy and the movement to counter regressive efforts.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. We got a fun one today that’s a little different than our normal routine, which is a live event that we did recently with Ari Berman, who’s a really good friend of mine. I’ve known him for years, a fantastic reporter on voting rights, among other things, author of a great book called “Give Us the Ballot.”
And Ari has a new book out, which is called “Minority Rule: The Right Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist It,” which is a book about how much the modern Republican Party in the era of Trump has explicitly embraced a kind of minoritarian vision of politics, that it shouldn’t be the people as represented by a majority rule, but just the right people, and about the different ways they’ve gone about putting that into practice. Many of which precede Donald Trump, who is sort of the ultimate apotheosis of that.
We held the event at the Center for Brooklyn History. It was a book event for his new book, “Minority Rule.” And it was a great conversation. Enjoy.
All right. Well, so first of all, the book is fantastic. And I’ve actually had a chance to really, like, really dig into it the last two or three days and read the whole thing. And to me, the central story and tension that the book explores, I think, is plausibly considered the central tension of American history. And that’s a tension between democratic commitments for self-governance and self-control over the scope of a whole polity on the one hand, and the various permutations of beliefs that reject small D democracy in favor of some form of hierarchy that produces some kind of minority rule.
And that what I think the book is incredibly successful in doing is showing how much this is a theme throughout the nation’s history of sort of moments of advance and retreat, back and forth, back and forth. And I guess my first question is how you found yourself to that topic and that theme.
Ari Berman: Well, I started with a current problem, the problem that we’re in today. And then I worked my way backwards. I started peeling off the layers of the onion. And basically, the problem that I was wondering about today is how did the Republican Party get so radical? How did we have a situation in which a minority of Americans, an elite conservative white minority, not minorities as we normally think of them, get a majority of political power? How did they take control of institutions like the Supreme Court? And where did the urge to resist democracy come from?
Because I had been covering voting rights and voter suppression for more than a decade when I decided to write this book. And I asked myself, is this just about political power? Is this just about gaining an advantage in an election or is there a larger project at work here? And then what I realized is there’s a larger project at work here. And then I decided that I was going to trace it all the way back to the founding period.
So in my last book, “Give Us The Ballot,” I started in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And now I started with 1787 and the Constitutional Convention, because you really have to go all the way back there to understand that the founders were wrestling with this notion. How much democracy should we give the people? How much should the people be trusted? If they are trusted, will they hurt our interests? And those were all things they were concerned about when they went to Philadelphia in 1787.
Chris Hayes: So let’s talk a little bit about that. And before we do, I want to just make one more point about terminology, I guess. There’s democratic and anti-democratic and there’s majoritarian and counter-majoritarian. And they kind of line up, but they’re actually conceptually distinct, and I think in important ways, because there’s all sorts of places where we want counter-majoritarian institutions in a liberal democracy.
Ari Berman: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Because we don’t want a plebiscite or even if a country has, I mean, you’re seeing this in India right now where there’s a government there with massive public support, you know, winning enormous landslide elections, and then using that to do things that really do impinge on the basic rights of certain minorities. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, how you conceive of this, at least conceptually, in thinking about what the difference is between anti-democratic or counter-majoritarian.
Ari Berman: Yeah, and that’s a really good point. And obviously the protection of minority rights is a key part of a democracy. And that’s honestly a lot of what the civil rights movement was trying to do, was protect minority rights while allowing the majority to rule in a way that respected minority rights. Because in American history, minority rights have often been undermined.
But what was interesting is when I went back to the founding, they didn’t actually want to protect minority rights as we think of it. They wanted to protect the rights of a very specific minority, a white male property-owning elite. So they weren’t concerned with African-Americans who were a minority group at the time. They weren’t concerned with women who were excluded from the government. They weren’t concerned with Native Americans who wouldn’t even be considered U.S. citizens until 1924.
And so there’s all of these groups that we tend to think of as minorities who are excluded from the protection. And they’re basically saying, we want to protect this elite white minority that is ourselves basically who’s going to run the country. And the only way we can do that is set up counter-majoritarian institutions, but also in an undemocratic way.
Chris Hayes: Right. So these counter-majoritarian institutions, so let’s go to the convention, because I actually think this context is fascinating. I think a lot of people don’t actually know it. And I was familiar with parts of it and parts of it I wasn’t. But you get the Declaration of Independence, then the Revolutionary War, and there’s an actual interregnum —
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — where before the Constitutional Convention is called, state governments, they all have state constitutions, and the state governments are attempting to rule themselves in some democratic fashion.
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then there’s a crisis that precipitates the calling of the convention. What is the context and crisis that precipitates that?
Ari Berman: And this was fascinating because I am clearly, I’m not a historian of the founding era. And I basically just did a crash course at NYU Library pre-COVID to read as much as I could about this period. And I was fascinated because I had never read the Constitutional Convention before. I never read the debates, never really looked at that closely. So everything I knew, and I think what most Americans knew, was filtered through other stuff, through the David McCullough’s or whatever of the world, or Paul Giamatti playing a very grumpy version of John Adams.
But basically, the Declaration of Independence comes out in 1776, and there’s this remarkable language about all men are created equal, leave aside the fact that women are excluded from that, but all men are created equal. Democracy is based, what they say, on the consent of the governed, which I think is still the best definition of democracy we have today. They create all of these state constitutions that are very democratic for the time.
A lot of white men who don’t own property enter government for the first time. There was reduced entry to become an officeholder. There’s lots of town meetings, things like that. So the idea is, legislators should be as close to the people as possible. But the problem is, the federal government doesn’t have a lot of power in the Articles of Confederation. Then there’s an economic crisis.
And basically, states start passing very populist policies. They start doing things like tax and debt relief. And people like John Adams, played by Paul Giamatti, get very angry. And there’s this incredible John Adams quote, where he says that if a majority were to rule, all deaths would be abolished, the poor would be favored over the rich, and there would be a downright equal version of everything.
So the founders come to Philadelphia, and in 1787 they basically say, we need to do something about what they call an excess of democracy. We need to create institutions that will be democratic, but not too democratic, in that they allow the masses to rule anymore. We, the white men who led and fought the revolution, we want to reclaim the government for ourselves. We’re still going to call it a democracy, but the institutions we create won’t actually be all that democratic.
Chris Hayes: There’s a fascinating monetary policy angle to this, which is that there’s this enormous inflation that’s happening because everyone’s trying to pay off all this war debt. They’re printing money. And one of the things that the state starts doing, which is wildly popular, is letting people pay their debts or taxes in essentially worthless paper money, as opposed to gold and silver, which amounts to this enormous inflationary sort of devaluation. And it crystallizes for a lot of them at the time, like, whoa, wait a second.
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We are giving the people, the volk, the power to essentially control monetary policy, which even today in 2024 is very attenuated on purpose with the Fed’s independence. So you have them coming. Now, Madison is central in your telling here, because it seems to me that and tell me if I’m reading it wrong, that you think Madison is a sort of a good faith actor here in that he’s not just trying to create essentially what I think one Marxist critic once called the U.S. Constitution, a charter for plutocracy.
Like, he’s not trying to just do that. He is concerned about counter-majoritarian balancing. And he really is wrestling with actual problem, which is more than just a problem of the elites don’t like it when you devalue currency, but that there are real things to reckon with about what happens if a group of people mobilize in such a way that they just run roughshod over other people’s interests.
Ari Berman: Exactly. So Madison is basically the intellectual architect of the Constitution. He is the bookworm. He’s the scholar. He’s small. He’s sickly. He dresses all in black. People think he’s a college freshman, sort of like they think I’m a college freshman when I go places. And he’s reading all of these books about democracy from ancient Greece and ancient Rome and in France. And he’s in this long running debate with Thomas Jefferson about what does it mean to be a democracy and what does it mean to protect minority rights while allowing the majority to rule?
And he’s taking these unpopular positions when he’s in the Virginia House of Delegates. They want to pass a law that basically guarantees that Virginia will be a Christian state. And he says, no, I don’t support this. Because what about people that belong to a different sect of Christianity or don’t belong to Christianity at all? And that’s kind of like a heretic thing to say at the time. So Madison’s wrestling with all these things.
And basically, Madison believes in majority rule. But then he starts to wonder, well, what if the majority starts doing unjust things? What if they threaten what he’s referring to as the rights of property? And there’s some self-interest, too, because Madison’s a slaveholder. He owns a lot of land. His father’s the largest landowner of the country. So he has his own biases. But I think he’s trying to look at this from a higher perspective.
And they get into all these debates. And what’s fascinating is the Constitution, and I know we’re going to talk about this is very much a product of compromise, right? So even though Madison is the intellectual architect of the Constitution, a lot of what the Constitution adopts, he ends up being not so crazy about.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, one of the interesting themes in your chapter on this is that Madison has a very sophisticated and balanced view of all this, and ends up in a situation where constitutional design is considerably less democratic than he himself, who already was not a radical.
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: He was not on the kind of like leftmost radical democratic edge of that convention.
Ari Berman: No.
Chris Hayes: He’s sort of near the center of it and still ends up to, again, if you’re sort of thinking of this in left-right turns. And the two big ones are, well, there’s three, right? There’s Three-Fifths Compromise —
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: The U.S. Senate —
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and the Electoral College.
Ari Berman: We need to go through them one by one.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. That’s why I teed them up.
Ari Berman: This isn’t MSNBC.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. We got time. So —
Ari Berman: Where do you want to start with?
Chris Hayes: Well, let’s start with the Senate because I think in chronological order —
Ari Berman: It comes first. No, it’s also —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, the Senate is the first big one.
Ari Berman: It’s the key part of the —
Chris Hayes: Yes, yes, right.
Ari Berman: The Senate —
Chris Hayes: Things flow from that because —
Ari Berman: The Senate is the key part of their design for the federal constitution because what they want to do in the federal constitution is they want to restrain majority rule. And the lead way they want to restrain majority rule is through the U.S. Senate, because they want the Senate to represent what Madison calls, very honestly, the opulent minority. They want it to be the elite body that checks the more Democratic House of Representatives in their design.
Because basically what happens is Edmund Randolph, who’s the governor of Virginia and a former aide to George Washington, he’s kind of like the figurehead. You know, he’s tall, he’s good looking, he’s a war hero, and Madison’s like the chief of staff behind the scenes, basically telling him what to say. And Randolph introduces what’s called the Virginia Plan.
And the Virginia Plan basically says that senators are going to be nominated by state legislatures and chosen by the lower house. So they’re not going to be directly elected by the people. But Madison wants the Senate, while being an elite body, to operate on a majority rule basis. So he wants it to be based on proportional representation, meaning his state, Virginia, is the largest state, it has the most representatives. That’s not what happens.
So this is a fascinating debate, because they start debating how the Senate should look. And the smaller states start rebelling. And there’s this incredible scene that I talk about in the book, where the attorney general of Delaware, Gunning Bedford Jr., who’s a classmate of George Madison’s at Princeton, stands up, looks at Madison and the delegates from the largest states, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and says, if you don’t give us the same amount of power that you have in the Senate, equal representation, we will leave the union and find a foreign ally.
Which at the time, think about it, this is 11 years after 1776. That’s the worst thing you could say, that you’re going to leave, you’re going to dissolve, that Delaware is going to join France. That’s pretty much the worst thing you could say at the time. And so Madison —
Chris Hayes: Madison was like, oh, that’s so cute.
Ari Berman: Madison is forced to agree to this, and basically is very, very angry about it, and says that it’s going to allow a more trifling minority than ever to control the body. He saw what was coming. He knew that more sparsely populated Western states were going to be admitted to the union. What you’re going to have is basically minority rule in the body, where the small states would command all the power in the Senate.
Now it’s interesting, in 1790, the largest state, Virginia, had 12 times as many people as the smallest state, Delaware. Today, California has 67 times the amount of people as Wyoming. So the problem that Madison was worried about has gotten dramatically worse.
Chris Hayes: And he recognized it at the time, as did many people at the time.
Ari Berman: And that’s what’s so fascinating, is we call it a compromise, but it’s more like a concession. And not only that, because this is the whole problem with originalism. If you want to go back and interpret the Constitution at the time, you also have to note that James Madison and many of the most prominent framers were very unhappy with possibly the key concession of the Constitution itself.
Chris Hayes: And just again, to stay with this distinction for a moment, Madison wants the Senate to be an elite body whose relationship to the people is attenuated, but not a minoritarian body.
Ari Berman: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: There’s a distinction there, and it ends up being minoritarian numerically. Every state gets two senators. That continues to this day, and we have the Wyoming-California problem. So that’s the Senate.
Ari Berman: So it’s the worst possible compromise.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: Because it’s minoritarian and undemocratic, to your earlier point.
Chris Hayes: Eventually, they’ll pass an amendment to the Constitution that has direct election of senators.
Ari Berman: Some people would like to get rid of that.
Chris Hayes: There are some people who want to get rid of it. So then it comes to the House and the question of how House seats should be apportioned. And now there’s another rift and another debate. This one, not between big and small states, but between slave states and non-slave states.
Ari Berman: Yes. And it’s very similar to the Senate debate. In the Senate debate, the smaller minority, the small states, wins. And in the House of Representatives, which is the most democratic part of the government, it’s the only branch of government that’s going to be elected by the people. So it’s critically important to the new government in maintaining the legitimacy of the government between the people.
Another privileged minority, the slave states win. And they basically say, if you don’t count our slaves for purposes of representation, we’re going to leave the union too. And so, interestingly enough, one of the most democratic founders is James Wilson, who is a prominent lawyer in Pennsylvania and a close friend of George Washington. He’s kind of a sort of foul-mouthed, sort of moody Scottish, which I like that personality personally.
So Wilson is the most democratic founder. He says the president should be elected by the people. He says the Senate should be elected by the people. Well, guess what? He proposes the Three-Fifths Clause and the Electoral College to try to create some kind of compromise. So the most democratic founder creates two of the worst compromises, because basically he says, okay, the North says we’re not counting enslaved people for purposes of representation because they have no rights.
And the Southern states say, if you don’t count them, we’re leaving the union. So James Wilson says, what if we just count them as three-fifths of people, which is how Southern states were taxed in the 1780s? Well, what that does is basically that gives the South a huge incentive to keep importing slaves but give them no rights. And in the new federal government, the Southern states, the slave states, have a third more members because of the Three-Fifths Clause than if they didn’t otherwise.
Also, because the Electoral College is a product of the Senate and the House and overall representation, that means the slave states get more representation in the Electoral College and the small states get more representation in the Electoral College. And the slave state is really magnified because if you look at American history, 10 of the first 12 U.S. presidents are slaveholders. Eighteen of the first 31 Supreme Court justices are slaveholders. And pretty much every speaker of the House for the first four decades.
So this is one of the odious. It’s the most morally unjustifiable part of the government. And even though it has since been changed, it had a huge impact on how the nation was structured originally.
Chris Hayes: Even though, and I think I learned this from your book, slaveholders were a minority of the convention attendees, which I don’t think I would have guessed. I think because we think so much now about Madison and Washington and Jefferson, and we think we so associate the stain of slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise with the founders. I don’t think if you’d asked me to guess that I would have said a majority of the convention delegates are not slaveholders.
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Even in this small sense, there’s a minority coup that happens, which is that the slave interests, even of the founding fathers in the room in Philadelphia, and of the white men who are deemed citizens at the time, are still a minority of that set of people. And yet they still, through this compromise, and then through the massive importation of slaves and the enslaved people, the growth of that population, they managed to pull off this sort of sectional control of the government through the first 40 years.
Ari Berman: Exactly. And the North has double the free population of the South. But what happens is the South gets more members of Congress, it gets more electoral college votes, and basically it has the power to control the federal government. And that’s why the crisis over slavery doesn’t come to a head until the Civil War, which takes a very long time for the federal government to ever actually deal with this problem.
Chris Hayes: And then the last one is the electoral college, and one of the things I think that’s interesting about electoral college is no one really likes it. No, really. Like, whenever you hear this nonsense about the founder’s design, it’s just not true.
Ari Berman: No.
Chris Hayes: As a historical matter, as a textual matter, it’s late in the convention. They’ve already made these two compromises. And the key thing to understand about electoral college is that it integrates the other two compromises.
Ari Berman: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So they’ve already had these two enormous fights that already almost ripped the convention apart. Now they’ve got to figure out how are we going to elect the president, and all the same fights resurface. Well, but what are the slave states will say, what about us? What about all the enslaved people in our control? And the small states say, we’re going to be drowned out by Virginians in a national election.
Ari Berman: Yeah, exactly. And so these two privileged minorities, the small states and the slave states, basically lead the opposition to the direct election of the president. And actually, Madison’s very honest. He says, in his opinion, there should be a direct election of the president.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ari Berman: The problem is Virginia will be at a disadvantage because its enslaved population can’t vote. So basically he comes out and says it’s going to be bad for the slave states. There’s other arguments that are being made. The small states say the large states will benefit. A lot of people believe the country is too uninformed to make a rational choice. So they have this complicated system of electors where basically and people think, oh, the voters elected the electors. No, that’s not how it worked.
In most states, the electors were just appointed by the state legislatures. And then that small number of electors, I think there were 67 in the first election. They choose the president. And because in most states only white male property owners could vote, basically no one is voting for the electors.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: So in the first presidential election where George Washington is elected, only six percent of Americans are actually eligible to vote. And then a much, much smaller number actually do vote for the electors that choose him as president.
Chris Hayes: And crucially, as you point out here, and this is a really important point, that low voter turnout is very different than what was happening in the states prior to the Constitution, where there was actually a lot of popular enfranchisement and high levels of voter turnout and direct democracy.
Ari Berman: That’s why I think the Constitution can best be understood as the country’s first counter revolution against democracy. And one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book in my own small way is so we could have a more nuanced discussion of this document to understand that, yes, it’s a remarkable document for the time. There was no guideposts for what they were doing. It’s incredible what they created, but it’s a very flawed document. And if we’re going to be at a moment in time when so many people are saying we have to understand the Constitution as it was intended, we have to understand that it was intended to check democracy, not to expand it.
And we can’t have such a view of the Constitution that says that all of these institutions are so amazing when it’s so obvious that they made a lot of mistakes and that a lot of it needs to be corrected. And, you know, Chris, you have kids the same age as me. I tried to explain the Electoral College to my nine-year-old daughter, and she looked at me like she was crazy. You know? She’s a big Knicks fan, thank God. And you know, when Jalen Brunson scored 47 last night, thank God, she understood that the Knicks got more points than the Sixers, thank God, and won the game.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: It would be crazy for me to say, well, you know what?
Chris Hayes: At the guard position, you’re captain.
Ari Berman: Yeah. Actually, the Sixers lost the game, but they won it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: That’s what we’re doing. And that’s why I say it’s a ticking time bomb. Every four years, we have a ticking time bomb where the most undemocratic outcome possible could elect the most powerful person in the land.
Chris Hayes: Well, and I think when you say that the seeds of the Civil War are sown in this document, right, because of all these compromises which then come apart, that’s the other kind of loaded gun in the document, you know, is that the Electoral College constantly threatens this problem, right, that a majority of people choose a president and the other person wins. The loser wins.
One last thing, and then I want to move ahead to a different period in time. One last thing that I think is interesting and important always when talking about the founding era is, and you quote, any critique you could come up with for the Senate, the Electoral College, the Three-Fifths Compromise, they were 100 percent saying it at the time. No, I mean, Gouverneur Morris has a great quote, he’s like, what is this Three-Fifths Compromise? He’s like, are they men? If they’re men, then their men, then they can vote, they can do whatever.
Are they property? Well, if they’re property, how about you count our property for the purpose of a port? Like this is obvious farcical nonsense. And people recognize at the time, the same thing about the Electoral College, like contemporaneously with each of these three major sort of anti-democratic, counter-majoritarian aspects of the Constitution, there are people screaming their head off saying, this sucks.
Ari Berman: Yeah. And then basically the problem is, is there’s always these dissenters. But for the most part, the most democratic forces at the Constitution lose over and over and over again. They lose with how we choose our presidents. They lose with how the House is constructed. They lose with how the Senate is constructed. There is people that want there to be a fundamental guarantee of voting rights. That never happens. There’s people that want slavery to be banned. That doesn’t happen.
Over and over, the more anti-democratic forces win. And what I say is that in very tangible ways starts to shape the direction of the country, but also in more philosophical ways. The idea that privileged minorities need to be protected and the idea that the masses are something to be feared and the idea that democratic participation should be restricted rather than encouraged. Those are ideas that 230 years later are still extremely influential and I would argue have captured one of the major political parties in our country.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So let’s skip ahead. Let’s do Calhoun next. So tell us who John C. Calhoun is and why he is important as one of the most preeminent theorists of anti-democratic theory in American history.
Ari Berman: It’s going to be so good for the book when this conversation is banned in Florida.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ari Berman: If you’re listening, Governor DeSantis. So John Calhoun, who’s a pivotal figure in pretty much the early 1800s until the Civil War and after. He’s a senator from South Carolina, but he literally holds every single position in the government except for president. I mean, he’s vice president, he’s secretary of war, he’s secretary of state. He’s a senator and he develops this ideology of nullification and he develops this ideology that basically says the Southern minority, because in his lifetime, the South starts becoming a minority to the North.
And he develops this ideology of nullification that the South should have rights, the power to reject laws from the North. And what he does is he comes up with an ideology of minority rule that’s explicitly premised on white supremacy. So the founders want to restrict poor white people from making decisions in the government. And John Calhoun says, I’m fine with poor white people making decisions. I just don’t want black people making decisions. And he said, slavery, in his words, is not a necessary evil, but a positive good. He says that.
And he basically says that the most important thing you can do in a democracy is protect white supremacy. And starts thinking about how can we reshape the Constitution so that that will happen.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So he’s the sort of conceptual. I mean, he really does, even though obviously the slave power is enormously consequential to the founding, the specific form of violent white supremacy as theory, really Calhoun really kind of cements it in a way that becomes essentially the official theory of the Confederacy that then leaves the union because they basically decide that they won’t accept majority rule in the form of Abraham Lincoln’s election to president, which is what prompts Fort Sumter.
Ari Berman: Exactly. And Calhoun sees the writing on the wall and he starts warning against it. He says, the South is now a minority and our institution, our most cherished institution in slavery is going to be banned by the Northern majority. And not only that, but he foresees a day and he talks about this. He talks about this with Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders.
He sees a day in which rights are going to be extended to formerly disenfranchised communities. He understands what’s coming, the 13th, the 14th and 15th amendments. He understands that the U.S. is going to become a multiracial democracy for the first time. And he believes that explicit protections for white supremacy should be in the Constitution. Now he loses that fight, right? The ideology of nullification is rejected. The South loses the Civil War.
But he basically provides not just the roadmap for the Confederacy, he then provides the roadmap for how segregationist whites are going to overthrow multiracial democracy when it happens.
Chris Hayes: I mean, one of the things that’s interesting here, just to stop and ponder this for a second, is that I think you say the case you make in the chapter on the convention is persuasive. That what wins the day are sheer interests, force and power over persuasion. Like it’s not that the small states convince everyone that it’s better to have a Senate using arguments and reason. They just have the leverage and they say, well, we’ll walk and you’ll be screwed and the same things at the slave states.
It’s notable that in the end, it’s not arguments or reason that wins the great question about how the country will be slave or free. It’s the, you know, 600,000 dead in the bloodiest war in the nation’s history. So it’s notable that in both these cases, like they’re not resolved through argument, like they’re resolved in the first case for sort of nonviolent, but application of brute sort of will to power and force in the second through the nation’s bloodiest battle.
So then after that, this sort of Calhounism versus the vision of radical reconstruction, which is universal suffrage and what we would call today multiracial democracy, you sort of argue in the book through these sort of different flashbacks throughout that that argument continues advancing and retreating in different times, in different places through the second reconstruction of the 1960s and basically up to Barack Obama.
Ari Berman: Exactly. What I argue is that there is this long push and pull between Democratic and anti-Democratic forces. And periodically in our nation’s history, we have these fights over race representation and political power. And often the side that’s advocating for justice ends up winning them. They win the fight during reconstruction. They win the fight during the civil rights movement. But then there’s these backlashes and these backlashes are predicated on minority rule, right?
I mean, just to talk about reconstruction, there were black majorities in Mississippi and in South Carolina, and it was a white minority that overthrew them. And even in states where there was a white majority, there were whites and blacks who joined together in places like Georgia and in Florida so that there would be multiracial democracy. And what I argue is that basically what the Southern states did is they use the ideology of minority rule to fight back against multiracial democracy.
Chris Hayes: And it’s not just we should say that Calhoun’s vision that really does become, I think, the template for so much of this focuses exclusively on, to his mind, there’s a color line, which is white and black.
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, that’s how he views the world and that’s how he thinks of it and he thinks of it as white supremacy. But there are other forces at play, particularly around immigration, like when a whole bunch of, you know, 10 million immigrants arrive in a very short period of time through Ellis Island, there’s huge backlash there. And at this time, these folks are, you know, Mediterranean and viewed as sort of not really white, you know, a threat to the Anglo-Saxon nature of the country.
And all sorts of anti-democratic provisions now get put in place in those lines, where including, and I love this, in New York, in the New York House allocation, the members of Congress. So the cities are getting all the immigrants, New York City, right, where we are right now. There’s 750,000 people and one congressional representative for that 750,000. And there’s a northern rural New York congressional district with 90,000 people.
Ari Berman: Sounds like Wisconsin today.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. But you’ve got these wildly —
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This is before Baker v. Carr, which is the Supreme Court landmark case that creates one person, one vote. But at the level of congressional representation, you have states doing crazy stuff that’s wildly anti-democratic in a whole bunch of different directions.
Ari Berman: Yeah. And this is another way that white power starts to manifest itself and kind of more conservative white power decides to strike back again. Because as you say, there’s a lot of immigration in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And what happens is the census shows in 1920 that the country is becoming more urban than rural for the first time.
And it’s fueled by immigration. It’s fueled by immigration basically from southern Europe. And so this is kind of like the Italians and people that we would not think of as, you know, persecuted immigrant groups, but they are at the time. And basically, there’s —
Chris Hayes: If you ever talk to an Italian, they will tell you. It’s just for the most (inaudible).
Ari Berman: So, I mean, so in 1924, Congress passes the Johnson-Reed Act to dramatically restrict immigration from northwest Europe. And there is remarkable rhetoric around it. I mean, basically —
Chris Hayes: From southeastern Europe and refine it to northwestern.
Ari Berman: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ari Berman: And what they say is that basically the people that support this immigration restriction act say that they are doing it to preserve basically Anglo-Saxon Protestant power and they’re very open. And there’s an op-ed in “The New York Times” by a Pennsylvania senator, and it says America of the melting pot comes to an end. So they were very open about what they wanted to do here. And you’re talking about, once again, preserving white power.
And it just goes to show you that these forces of nativism at different times when the country is becoming more diverse, start to have a backlash against it. And then I trace it all the way up to the present day, where I argue that the fear of a majority minority country is what’s driving a lot of the backlash right now to democracy more broadly within the Republican Party.
Chris Hayes: Right. Because you see it at the founding. You see it, Calhoun’s worry. You see it in Reconstruction and the Redeemers who fight back to sort of wrest power, sometimes violently from majority rule in the South. You see it in ‘24 in the Johnson-Reed Act. You see it in the 1960s in the fight over, obviously, the civil rights movement and the backlash there, too.
So, what makes this moment, which is I think these anti-democratic impulses, I think you would argue, have been present since being in the country and have always been associated with what we would call the ideological right. I mean, I think Calhoun is a reactionary. The people arguing for, you know, the slave power and the Senate are reactionary. What prompts this latest era in which, to your point, that this ideology has so fully seized one of the two major parties?
Ari Berman: Well, I think the warnings have finally come true. We elected a black president.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: You know, I mean, the very thing John Calhoun was most afraid of happened.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: And it wasn’t just the election of the black president. It was the incredible multiracial coalition that was behind him. We are 20 years away from becoming a majority minority country in which white people will no longer be the majority in the United States. That’s going to happen for the first time in U.S. history, according to the Census Bureau, in 2045. So a lot of the concerns that have been present for a long time are starting to manifest themselves. And we’re getting closer and closer and closer to that period.
And in the book, I talk about the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan, which are so incredibly important in the 1990s, because what Buchanan does is he starts mixing antipathy towards the civil rights movement of the 1960s with warnings about the impact of non-white immigration. And he basically makes demographic change the center of his argument and starts having a new cultural war because Republicans have been pushing the Southern strategy for a while, and they’ve been trying to court conservative white voters who they think will leave the Democratic Party and join the Republican Party because they’re angry about civil rights.
But this is a new front. This is a new front where you’re basically saying it’s not just one minority group you’re worried about. You’re worried about this rainbow coalition emerging. You’re worried about there being common cause between black people and Latinos and Asian-Americans. And Buchanan’s worried about that. And he’s saying that America has what he calls an emerging white minority that needs to be protected.
And then, of course, 2008 happens. And that’s, of course, what occurs, right? Obama’s election is called the Coalition of the Ascendant. It’s young people, moderate whites, people of color. That’s the future of America in terms of where it’s growing. And that leads to a vicious backlash than the Republican Party that first manifests itself at the state level when all of these states start doing undemocratic things, when Republicans take over after the 2010 election and that’s a huge part of the story, tracing that in states like Wisconsin.
Then it happens on the national level with people like Donald Trump, who basically make the preservation of white power central and talk about building a wall and banning Muslims from the U.S. and all of that kind of thing and get much more explicit in terms of the tactics they’re using and the strategy they’re using.
And basically what I argue today is that we have this undemocratic political system, but layered on top of it are all these new or newer versions of anti-democratic tactics to try to stop this changing demographics from taking power to try to stop this majority minority future. And that’s what the voter suppression, the gerrymandering, the election subversion, the rewriting of history. That’s what it’s all about.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You’ve got the Electoral College and obviously we all know that Donald Trump won fewer votes than his opponent, which, again, if you cover any race as a political correspondent in America, every single race, it’s who gets more votes except for one. Like literally every race. There is not a race. Actually, as a matter of Supreme Court jurisprudence, this has to be the case.
In every single race, it used to be there were all sorts of weird electoral college systems at the state level. You talk about one that was created in Georgia in every race, in every election in America, whoever gets more votes gets the office in question, except one, right, president. So Donald Trump is elected to be president, even though he got fewer votes. He appoints three Supreme Court justices.
That 6-3 majority has wreaked the havoc that it has wreaked. Those are, I think you argue convincingly, you know, they’re sort of coming back to bite us, right. These massive anti-democratic institutions. But talk more about the specific tactical deployment of both the anti-democratic rhetoric and anti-democratic tactics at the state level around things like voter suppression and gerrymandering, particularly the gerrymandering that’s happened in places like Wisconsin, North Carolina, which is at a level that is truly shocking.
Ari Berman: Yeah. And what I argue in the book is that the country has historically been a laboratory for democracy and oligarchy, that it’s not one or the other. We’ve been both. And that duality really defines the country today. And what happened is after this incredible surge of democracy in 2008, Republicans look to the states as their laboratory of oligarchy. And they look particularly influential was Wisconsin when they took over because Wisconsin had been a laboratory of democracy that had been very influential, not just on a state level, but on a national level.
Wisconsin was a place that gave birth to Social Security, to unemployment insurance, to collective bargaining rights for unions. It had been a very important state in terms of being a laboratory for all of these progressive advances. And Republicans took over with Scott Walker and the Republican government, and they wanted to change all of that.
They wanted to go after labor rights to defang the most important supporter of the Democratic Party. They gerrymandered to such an extent that in one election, the Republicans got 46 percent of the vote for the state House, but got 64 percent of the seats. So, they could dramatically loot much worse than what’s ever happened in the Electoral College.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ari Berman: They could do much worse at a state level and still contain power. They passed all of these laws to make it harder to vote. Even when Democrats managed to get elected, they elected Democratic governor in 2008. The first thing the Republican government does, the state government does, is they strip power from the Democratic governor in a lame duck session. So they’re pioneering all of these.
Chris Hayes: You’re saying in 2018 when —
Ari Berman: 2018.
Chris Hayes: — when Tony Evers (inaudible) that.
Ari Berman: They’re pioneering all these anti-democratic tactics. And what I’m making a point in the book that you make often in your show, which said the radicalization of the Republican Party predates Donald Trump. And the fact that the Republican Party radicalized against democracy before Donald Trump laid the groundwork for Donald Trump. That if the Republican Party hadn’t already become an authoritarian leaning party, particularly at the state level, someone like Trump would not have been appealing to them in the future.
So that’s why I’m arguing, fine, Scott Walker is very different than Donald Trump. He is the governor of Wisconsin. He’s a much more country club Republican. He’s a Reagan Republican. He disagrees with Trump on lots of issues. But if you want to understand the rise of Donald Trump, you have to go back and look at the tactics and the policies that people like Scott Walker used at the state level to transform these states, push the Republican Party in a much more undemocratic direction, where instead of worrying about winning over a majority of voters, because this was the key decision they made after the election of Barack Obama.
We’re going to change our policies to go after this changing demographics, or we’re going to try to build a fortress to stop what they view as the coming siege. And they decided instead of trying to moderate or change their tactics on issues like immigration, they were just going to try to build this fortress instead.
Chris Hayes: One of the things I wrestle with is as I watch this happen, it just seems to me that a slightly better version of the Republican Party could win national majorities. It’s a closely divided country. You could find someone. You don’t have to run this guy. And I think, you know, again, it’s a closely divided country. Thermostatic public opinion is a very real thing. It really does happen. Democrat is in office. People’s views in polling tends to move to the right.
Republican is in office. People’s views as, you know, caption polling tends to move to the left. People move in, you know, sort of opposition to whoever they think is holding power. It’s perfectly possible to build together a national majority. And to build together a national majority that doesn’t look that different ideologically than the current Republican Party.
It does seem to me there’s almost an affirmative choice. Like how much of this, to go back to that first question you said animated, I wonder sometimes how much of this is, well, we feel outnumbered, ergo, we don’t like democracy, right. So a kind of retreat position you’ve been painted into a corner in.
And so as a sheer matter of practical calculation of your interests, you’re like, we’re the Delaware in this situation. We’re outnumbered. We want to retain what we have. And an actual ideological commitment to the idea that we don’t like a lot of people making decisions for themselves. We want to be the ones that rule.
Ari Berman: Well, I don’t think they’re necessarily mutually exclusive.
Chris Hayes: No.
Ari Berman: Yeah. I mean, they’re worried about people ruling and they’re worried about people using democracy to influence the democratic process. And that’s one of the things that Buchanan does. He basically says that all of these new demographic groups are going to change democracy. They’re going to have an impact in democracy. And therefore, maybe democracy itself isn’t so great because what’s more important in democracy is the preservation of white power. And that’s something that first Buchanan is arguing. I’m sure Trump would argue that, too. And I think that’s taken over a lot of the Republican Party today.
And what I’m arguing in the book is not that the Democratic Party is always right or that Democratic the Democratic Party should always win. What I’m arguing is that’s a very dangerous situation for democracy when only one of the two parties is committed to democracy itself, that that’s what gets us in trouble and that the choice facing the country right now is not Biden versus Trump. It’s one party that’s committed to the democratic norms by and large, another party that’s committed to authoritarianism.
And I think I mean, just to talk as to people in the media, I think it would be much healthier if people in the media describe the choice as that way, as opposed to making it so candidate focused, because I mean, there’s so much attention on the two candidates and rightly so. But I mean, say what you will about Biden. But I think generally speaking, the Democratic Party, with some exceptions, tries to pursue what it believes in as popular policies and believes that it can win on those policies.
What Republicans do is they capture all these counter-majoritarian institutions like the Supreme Court and they try to do all those radical things like overturning Roe v. Wade through the Supreme Court. Can we just talk about the Supreme Court for a minute —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ari Berman: — because I know you have thoughts on this, too. Because I mean, I want people to understand that for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of conservative justices have been appointed by presidents who initially lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans. That’s never happened in American history. We have the most undemocratic Supreme Court in the country’s history.
Then they’ve further rigged democracy, I would argue, in three different ways, very quick. This is my version of a three part question that’s more of a comment. First, they’ve made the country less democratic through things like gutting the Voting Rights Act, Citizens United, upholding partisan gerrymandering. Two, they’ve done so many things that are directly at odds with public opinion on abortion rights, on gun control and environmental rights. That’s also a signature project of the court.
Third, as we’re seeing right now, they are fully committed to endorsing Donald Trump’s authoritarianism and making it sure that he has no legal accountability from the voters. Every one of those things would be disturbing. The fact that all three of them are happening at the same time is just incredible.
And I mean, Chris, I’d be curious about your thoughts on this. But I think Democrats and the president himself made a huge moral miscalculation and a huge strategic miscalculation by not talking more about the illegitimacy of the Supreme Court and what we should do about it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, the problem of what you do with the court is an unsolved one. I mean, you’ve got sort of legendarily discredited courts in American history, the Dred Scott court and I was recently for the book that I’m working on now, I recently went back and was reading the Lincoln Douglas debates. And it is amazing how much of the Lincoln Douglas debates are about the Supreme Court.
They’re largely about the court in some senses because of Dred Scott and because basically Lincoln saying things that would sound completely familiar today, which is like these people are off their rocker. Like, why are we listening to them? And ultimately, the court is responsible for the breakup of the union because of that, right. I mean, it is part and parcel of the story that leads to the eruption of the Civil War.
And then you’ve got the Lochner era court and the New Deal and FDR’s court expansion or court packing plan, which also is another sort of point of where the kind of counter-majoritarian or anti-democratic nature of the court and democratic legitimacy kind of come head to head. And in some ways, I think the story, which is a complicated one that historians tell the court kind of blinks and sort of doesn’t. They put it in a footnote and they climb down from their position.
I feel like I don’t know other than, yes, the point of making arguments to citizens about why the court is bad. But ultimately, I’m not sure what past, you know, I mean, I feel this is an unanswered question for myself as just a player in American civic life, like what to do about the court.
Ari Berman: I mean, there’s a lot of ideas out there —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: — from, you know, changing it so that justices are no longer appointed for life.
Chris Hayes: Oh, I endorse that.
Ari Berman: I mean, I’m just saying there’s lots of state courts that have a lot of power, which there’s mandatory retirement ages for justices where —
Chris Hayes: Or a term or a fixed term.
Ari Berman: — fixed terms or justices are elected. So they’re responsive to the people.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: Or there’s strict ethics codes over what they can and can’t do. I’m saying the Supreme Court has none of that.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ari Berman: So, I mean, the Supreme Court so far gone in terms of even how most states are structured. And then there’s the question of I believe all three of the Donald Trump’s appointments are illegitimate in terms of how they may have got on the court. I think that —
Chris Hayes: But cash out. What does that word mean? That’s known as the question. Like —
Ari Berman: Okay. What it means is that —
Chris Hayes: I agree with you in some sort of like, you know, some sort of spiritual sense. But I don’t I don’t know what that (inaudible) like, what does that mean?
Ari Berman: It means you maybe you expand the court, maybe you change how the court looks. The funny thing is, the president created an entire commission to do this with lots of smart people and they just completely buried it.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ari Berman: And so this could have been a front and center issue that we debate. We could have debated this.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ari Berman: But made it a much more public issue. It’s clear that the justices who are appointed by life and who owe their power to these kind of majoritarian institutions with a few exceptions are going to uphold and deepen these kind of majoritarian institutions. And they’ll moderate just enough that the pressure goes off.
They’ll do things like the Alabama gerrymandering case for every once in a while, but generally speaking, they are committed to both making the political system less small D democratic, more Republican and more suitable to the interests of a conservative white minority than the majority of Americans. And this crisis is only getting worse. And the thing that worries me is that Donald Trump can’t do this alone. I think you would agree.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ari Berman: He needs enablers in the Republican Party to implement the authoritarian agenda to the extent that he wants to do it. He has purged the Republican Party in Congress of basically all of his critics. And he has justices on the Supreme Court that are far more sympathetic to his agenda than I think we realize. A lot of us thought, oh, they just wanted to review immunity. No, they believe he’s actually immune. They are going to grant him immunity on some level.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ari Berman: We’re not talking about delaying the trial. There’s never going to be a trial. So this crisis is so much deeper than we ever had. And listen, I wrote this book before the insurrection. I wrote this, started writing this book before Roe v. Wade was overturned. I started writing this book before Trump’s immunity is overturned. And I don’t want to say I told you so. But all of the things that I’m writing have gotten so much crazier.
Like I tried to explain to my agent what minority rule was. And she looked at me like I was a little crazy. Then the insurrection happened, okay. So it’s like the Republican Party keeps radicalizing more and more and more against democracy. And I think we’re at a point where we have to realize the rights that we all cherish and taken for granted, not only have they already been taken away, but we’re at a point where they could be taken away permanently in terms of the structure of our government if this institutional capture occurs in all three branches of government after 2024.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I think that’s correct. And I think the immunity arguments were a really scary moment for that because it was really shocking to hear the words coming out of their mouths and in some ways to go back to the original place we started with the Constitutional Convention.
And this is something that Lincoln talks about in the Lincoln debates and something FDR talks about. The idea of checks and balances is that it goes both directions. And one of the things that’s happened a little bit with the court because of polarization, because it’s harder to amend the Constitution because of the filibuster, there’s a bunch of different reasons. The court is increasingly unchecked.
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean —
Ari Berman: Yeah, you’re totally right.
Chris Hayes: — it’s just like, so what’s the check, right? So the check is they’re nominated by one branch, the Article II branch, the president of the United States. They’re confirmed by the first branch, by the Senate, okay. The money they get to be a court comes from, you know, from Congress’s signed by the president. Now, okay, you could zero out their funding. And like, that’s sort of fun to think about for a second, like, would they do it in Zoom? Would they hang out?
I mean, really, like or like someone floated this, like just take away their clerks. Like, okay. You want to stay on the court forever? Guys, you got to write it all. They better start making it work, okay? You don’t get some bright 25-year-old to do all your writing for you. You’re going to have to do it.
So there are things you could do, but those feel trollish more than they feel like real checks. But the point being that conceptualizing checks is it’s like, let’s say you passed a law that strict jurisdiction from this court for some set of things, right? And there’s ample precedent for this. Well, who would review that law?
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It would get challenged and then the court would get to decide whether it’s okay to strip them of jurors. I mean, so there’s a finality and there’s a sort of towering nature and imbalance, I think, right now in the power of the court that is also out of whack with the country’s institutional history.
Ari Berman: Yeah. And I think you make a really good point about the Congress, because historically at different points in our history, for example, in the 1980s, when the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, Congress stepped in and strengthened the Voting Rights Act and overruled the court. That’s happened on other issues as well. But as you say, the counter-majoritarian distortions of Congress are getting worse, particularly the U.S. Senate is becoming much more undemocratic and that therefore you can’t count on them to be a check on the court anymore.
The Congress came very close, very close to passing voting rights legislation that I think would have been the most pro-democracy and most important democracy legislation since the civil rights movement. And it failed because of the filibuster, which is another remnant of the Jim Crow era.
Chris Hayes: You saw this. There’s an amazing tell in this, in the argument that Donald Trump’s lawyers have been making before federal courts and now the Supreme Court. An argument that was kind of almost like a like a yes and improv troop got kind of like improvised along the way a little bit because it wasn’t in the first iteration of the brief.
But the current position they have is that there’s a distinction they’ve invented between official and not in private acts. It exists nowhere in the in the text of the Constitution, the history of the country’s understanding of executive power. And then if you commit a crime via official acts, the staging a coup, the whatever, you can only be prosecuted if you are impeached and then subsequently convicted.
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what’s great about that, to go back to the sort of Senate, right? Impeachment is a really important aspect, actually, of the Constitution and it’s much more present in the Constitutional Convention than it has been in the use thereof subsequently as a historical matter. It’s a rarely invoked thing.
But in the Constitutional Convention, and you write about this in the book, they’re really worried about the lifetime tenure of the executive being the king. They really think it’s important that you be able to kick them out. And what’s happened is the nature of the minoritarian, counter-majoritarian, anti-democratic structure of the U.S. Senate and the two-thirds bar for conviction means it’s functionally impossible.
Ari Berman: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And Trump’s lawyer knows that. So when he gets up there, he goes, guys, it’s easy. You just got to impeach and convict. And it’s like, well, no one’s ever been convicted in American history. And I don’t think we’re going to start now. He knows that and that is, again, whether he realizes it or not, or Trump realizes it or not, a fallback to using minority rule as the ultimate sort of check.
Ari Berman: Yeah. And just to give you one example, I think the last impeachment vote after the insurrection was I think it was 57 to 43 —
Chris Hayes: Which is the highest number ever.
Ari Berman: Yeah. And the 57 senators that voted to impeach Donald Trump represented 76.7 million more Americans than the 43 that voted against him. Imagine that. Basically, representing 80 million more Americans.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Ari Berman: And you don’t have any power in the body. Can I just quickly talk about solutions for a few minutes?
Chris Hayes: Please, yes.
Ari Berman: Let’s use the Cubs game to come here. Okay, thank you. I’ll probably come up with a Q&A, but just so, you know, I want to thank everyone. I want everyone to come out of here. Like I said, my talks are like a roller coaster. We’ve got to bring you way down. But hopefully by the end, we’re going to bring you way up.
Chris Hayes: I don’t think a roller coaster works that way.
Ari Berman: Well, it’s a reverse roller coaster.
Chris Hayes: I think you do end back down. The ones I’ve been on, but.
Ari Berman: This book has a happy ending. So, Chris, I think sort of three things I would say for what people can do now. The first, obviously, is protect the rights and freedoms we have currently before it’s too late. The second thing is build a long term movement for institutional reform. This is what the right wing had in the 1960s and 1970s when they lost in the civil rights movement. They said, we have to take over academia. We have to take over the courts. We have to take over the Congress. And we’re not going to do it. A year later, we’re going to build a movement to do it.
So, there needs to be a longer term movement for changing the filibuster, for potentially putting new states in the Senate to change how that body works.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ari Berman: Passing the national vote compact to abolish the electoral college through other means. All of these things I think Democrats need to think more structurally about. The third thing I think is that the state level and local level is such an important place for activism right now. And there’s so much important democracy is happening at the state level. I have an op-ed about this looking at Michigan because Michigan —
Chris Hayes: And it’s the last chapter of the book as well.
Ari Berman: Yeah, and it’s the last chapter of the book. I mean, Michigan was one of the most rigged states in the country. It was as bad as Wisconsin was. And activists decided to take power into their own hands. They passed ballot initiatives, banning partisan gerrymandering, adding automatic registration, election day registration, no excuse absentee voting, combating election subversion, enshrining abortion rights. That state has dramatically changed.
Now for the first time, Democrats flipped control of the state legislature in 40 years because the popular vote winner actually led to the most seats in the legislature, a radical concept. You get the most votes, you get the most seats. The state had the highest voter turnout in their history in 2022. It had the highest turnout of young voters in the country in 2022.
And I’m not to say that Michigan is some kind of post-partisan utopia, but it goes to show you places can change from minority to majority rule. And actually in many ways, the states have much more majoritarian figures and features than the national constitution is. So it’s really important to change the federal government, but I think it’s much more likely we’re going to change state and local governments a lot quicker, a lot more effectively. And if people are looking for something to do, I would urge them to get involved on that as one really tangible thing that actually can be changed.
Chris Hayes: Ari Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for “Mother Jones,” a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. His latest book, which is his third, is called “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist it.” Please join me in thanking Ari.
Once again, great thanks to Ari Berman and also the folks at the Center for Brooklyn History for helping us put that episode together. You can email us at withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod across multiple social media platforms, including Threads, Blue Sky, X. I’m @chrislhayes on all of those. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Katie Lau and Bob Mallory, featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?