‘Minority Rule’ author Ari Berman says the founders created a flawed system : NPR

A voter leaves a voting booth in Concord, NH, during the January 23, 2024 primary election.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

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Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

A voter leaves a voting booth in Concord, NH, during the January 23, 2024 primary election.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

This is a fundamental tension in a democracy: how do we achieve majority government in a way that also protects the rights of minorities? Journalist Ari Berman says the Founding Fathers wrestled with this question in 1787 — except that, for them, white male landowners were the minority in need of protection.

“Most of the founders were skeptical that the public could directly elect the president,” Berman says. “So they created this very complicated situation where the voters would elect the president instead of the people electing the president directly.”

In his new book, Minority rule, Berman connects the debates and compromises of the country’s founders to contemporary politics. He argues that the Founding Fathers created a system that concentrated power in the hands of the elite and that today, institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate – designed to thwart the power of the majority – have little almost the same effect.

Berman notes that in the nation’s first presidential election, in 1789, only a small fraction of the population was eligible to vote — and that in some states, electors were only allowed to vote for electors, not for candidates themselves.

Although voting rights have since been expanded, Berman says the democratic process remains deeply flawed. He points out that in 2000 and again in 2016, the presidential candidate who won the popular vote did not win the electoral vote. Plus, he says, because the Constitution says every state has two senators, regardless of its population, “smaller, whiter, more conservative states have much more power and representation in the Senate than larger states , more diverse and more urban.

“What we’re seeing now is the same kind of thing, in which a privileged, conservative, white minority is trying to suppress the power of a much more diverse, multiracial governing majority,” Berman says. “And this is a very dangerous situation for American democracy.”

Interview Highlights

Minority rule, by Ari Berman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Minority rule, by Ari Berman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

On the Constitution as an imperfect document

We revere the Constitution as a civic religion. I think it would be much more helpful to look at the Constitution as a whole and say that there are some remarkable parts of this document, but there are also some really flawed parts of this document that we still don’t have. not corrected. Because what is truly remarkable is that even as America has become more democratic in the intervening centuries – and no one would dispute that America is no more democratic today than it was t was then – some aspects of the Constitution became less democratic.

On the creation of the Electoral College to maintain minority rule

Most of the founders were skeptical of the public’s ability to directly elect the president. They felt that the public would be misinformed, or that it would be chosen by the larger states, or by the free states in a way that would harm the South. So it’s interesting, one of the themes that runs throughout the book and the foundation is that these small minorities wanted to be protected. And when I talk about small minorities, I’m not talking about minority groups. I mean the small states wanted protection, the slave states wanted protection, and they thought they would get that protection in the Electoral College. So they created this very complicated situation where the voters would elect the president instead of the people electing the president directly.

On how Delaware representatives upended the original plan to have Senate representation based on population

James Madison and other prominent framers wanted the Senate to be based on proportional representation, so they wanted it to be based on population. So larger states like Virginia would have greater representation than smaller states like Delaware. But the small states rebelled. And there’s this incredible moment at the Constitutional Convention where the attorney general of Delaware stands up and says to people like James Madison, if you don’t give us equal representation, we’re going to find a foreign ally of ours instead , we are going to join, and we are going to leave the United States of America. And it was an astonishing request. The idea that they would join England or that they would join France, if they did not have the same level of representation, meant that the large states had no choice but to give in to the demand small states to ratify the Constitution. .

But what worries Madison is that it would allow what he calls a more objectionable minority than ever to control the U.S. Senate, because if small states had the same level of representation as large states, it would inevitably lead to a minority regime. . And Madison feared the situation would get worse as more states joined the union. And of course that is what is happening today, where the gap between large and small states is considerably greater than it was in 1787.

On how having two senators per state affects minority rule

Just to give you a really amazing statistic: by 2040, 70% of the population will live in 15 states with 30 senators. That means 30 percent of the country, which will be whiter, more rural, and more conservative, will elect 70 percent of the U.S. Senate. The trend in the US Senate is therefore increasingly unbalanced and undemocratic. And what’s really interesting to me is that a lot of conservatives want to go back and want to cite the framers, but they don’t know that many of the framers, including James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, had serious concerns about some of the institutions they were creating, particularly the structure of the U.S. Senate.

Lauren Krenzel and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.