Minority Rule: GOP’s Undemocratic Takeover | Ari Berman | TMR
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- Опубліковано 3 тра 2024
- Live-streamed on April 29, 2024
Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones, to discuss his recent book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People-and the Fight to Resist It.
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Ari Berman then joins, as he, Sam, and Emma touch on his history reporting on voting rights with MR, and how “Minority Rule” serves as a culmination of his reporting on modern-day efforts at the GOP’s undemocratic takeover and how they play into an ever-shifting battle between democracy and elite rule. Stepping back, Berman looks to America’s inception and the central role the US Constitution played in bolstering the US’ constraints on popular rule, with institutions like the Senate, Supreme Court, and Electoral College all serving to act as checks to the people’s power of democracy and federalism. Moving forward, Abe walks Sam and Emma through some of the major periods of democratic progress and (largely racist) backlash in US history, including reconstruction’s shift towards a multi-racial democracy and the following minoritarian overthrow in the South that established Jim Crow rule, and the major progress made under the Civil Rights Movement - which saw a variety of voting-right legislation passed over the 1970s - and the GOP’s reaction that we’re still dealing with today. Parsing deeper into this latter era, Berman looks at the role played by folks like Pat Buchanan in pushing the GOP back toward their project of minoritarian rule, establishing the blueprint of the GOP’s takeover of the undemocratic institutions of US politics and the establishment of a network of think tanks and foundations to shape the generations to come. After an extensive conversation on how the politics (and normalization) of Pat Buchanan paved the way for a Donald Trump presidency, grounded in culture war and white resentment, and how the GOP’s takeover of Wisconsin politics at the outset of the 2010s provided an easy laboratory for anti-democratic policy, Berman wraps up the interview with a plea for the Democratic Party to recognize and strategize against these institutional threats to US democracy, and how refusing to do so paves the way for the likes of Donald Trump.
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Again, a guest saying the things I have been screaming at people for decades.
Thank you for inviting someone who can explain it much more clearly than I have been able to.
Brilliant interview. And Sam's metaphor for the spine being afflicted causing the whole body to be afflicted is pretty apt. It's like a building that was built with bad measurement numbers, the whole thing is askew now because of decisions that were made at step 0
These are very important historical views and concepts that inevitably deserve further reflections.
This is quite an interesting interview. I just recently did a deep dive into the Reconstruction Era in one of my college courses. Thanks for sharing this.
Great interview
Very interesting & informative! Thanks!
Truly we didn't fall out of a coconut tree.
MR, I love you guys but all this talk is stuff everyone with 2 brain cells already knows.
The question is, what's being done about it and who's going to fix it?
They don’t tho.
Good catch. I wish Sam had people like law professor Samuel Moyn on again to talk about practical ways to emasculate far right judges, ala Article 3 Section 2 jurisdiction stripping, practical reforms to the Senate, ala a "14th amendment restoration act" as proposed in a Atlantic article a few years ago. Etc. But I get a sense that Sam has never quite gotten over his normie law school hangover.
Thank you
amazing interview
There's a lot of awareness in the democratic party. Awareness and complicity
3:45 I mean...yeah, and? Republics are a baby half-step away from feudalism. They're aesthetically democratic but realistically anti-democratic, and always have been. By design. Doesn't matter which republic you point to, the power dynamic is entirely top-heavy and top-down. When you stop to look at the systems, republicanism, capitalism and feudalism are almost identical regarding their power structures. You can actually describe one, and then swap out key words to effectively describe any of the other two.
What people need to understand is that the status quo is a right wing status quo. That means that "normal" is hierarchical, not democratic/equal. It's one of the many reasons why "both sides" is a bunk argument; it's always been "both sides between this far right group and this less far right group," never really between the actual left (not the aesthetic left that use leftist phrasing and terms to push hierarchy, like Maoists and others like them, but the people who want full democracy rather than top-down control, and who want equality for all people rather than only "the right people") and the actual right (the types that push hierarchy, whether through their rhetoric or through their actions. Authoritarianism/totalitarianism are right wing METHODS, and it doesn't matter who does it or what "good place" their "heart" is in), because if you look at the extremes you see that they are the most fully democratic/equal (left) and the most hierarchical/stratified (right), not "whatever Democrats (or the local party considered on the left) says vs whatever Republicans (or the local party considered on the right) says."
Because the status quo is right wing, the "moderates" and "centrists" are right wing. They work to protect the status quo of the right wing, and because that's where our "center" is, they are seen as the "reasonable" people rather than the ones, just like the rest of the right, that are trying to keep society stratified and hierarchical, and therefore ensure that a large part of the society (or others through foreign/capitalist policy. Social democracies are guilty of it, too) remain mostly powerless and at the mercy of those "above" them. THAT is the reality of what it means to be a right winger, no matter what you ultimately label yourself as, and part of why "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" and "liberals are one moral panic away from supporting fascism" are apt sayings (liberals are, after all, right wingers with different aesthetics).
The fact that our "democracy" is laughably not is just more evidence that we live in a right wing society governed by a right wing system that was always intended to ensure power remained in the hands of the elite. Social/cultural/political power AND economic power. It's just feudalism with the aesthetics of democracy, or put another way "feudalism with the denibility of elections." Or put another way, "elective authoritarianism."
Sadly, FAR too many people outright refuse to entertain the thought that "our democracy" is anything but, and double down on the brainwashing. They don't understand republics, so they just repeat talking points about "constitutions" and other nonsense. But guess what: consittutions and laws ONLY MATTER IF THERE IS PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY FOR BREAKING THEM. Want to know something wild? We have laws that say that we can't give aid to entities engaged in human rights violations, but the whole of our government does it anyway; there are no consequences, because the only people who CAN hold them accountable ARE THEMSELVES. Every time one of the branches steps out of line and doesn't get push-back or legal accountability is because the constitution and laws are only tools to use when convenient, not literal rules that they must abide by. It's the same way in every republic. Those at the top control the game and its rules, and everyone else is just spectating while sending the equivalent of "thoughts and prayers" in the hopes that something might change.
Republics are trash as far as systems go. They give deniability to the ruling class by saying "you should have voted harder." They mask the reality of authoritarianism by letting people believe they have any say at all. They're better than feudalism, but so is the turd I just flushed down the toilet; the bar is in Hell, so almost everything is better than feudalism, including feudalism but with elections instead of bloodlines, where the cost for seeking office is so high that most people will only ever be able to dream about it, thus keeping power in the hands of the old ruling class: the owners of capital, the owners of land, and the old-money aristocracy which is often tied to the old-blood aristocracy.
21:30 Yeah, the protection of "white power" goes back 230 years in terms of framing the arguments...but that itself only became the framing after 200 years of anti-miscegenation laws and the like making race mixing illegal, all to do the thing that elitists since Aristotle have been doing: creating a permanent underclass so that those at the top can r@pe those at the bottom economically (including cheapening labor) while protecting themselves from uprisings to a pretty large degree. Keep people fighting each other and you keep them from unifying against the group that convinced them to do it while screwing them both.
Here is my senate fix. Reallot the number of senators this way. The 10 least populace states get a single senator. The 10 most populace states get 3 senators. The rest of the states get 2. Every new state added to the union in the future simply adds 2 more senators to the pool.
Humans will never advance to a new sphere of existence without ridding ourselves of racism, without ending war, without working in tandem with each other. With the USA the primary superpower, our inequities will pave the species with it's evil nature 😢
I hereby shed one(1) tear dedicated to the our lost expectations
It goes back to the Normans...
So is this a new discovery?
😮
Trump is nothing more than a shiny empty suit that others fill with what they need him for and the words that come out of his mouth.
Our reflective history keeps fucking up, we keep not paying attention to how Internationalism effected the United States; on a Democracy Level. The year 1917, the establishment of the Soviet Union, saw an increase in Democratic, Civil, and Labor Rights, right up until 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and now we are seeing massive threats to all gained Democratic, Civil, and Labor Rights.
* The United States was established as a Liberal Democracy (Bourgeoise Democracy), that was meant to represent the interests of the Capitalist Class; not to represent the people, this has been the contradiction of Liberalism since its founding.
we must add new states by breaking up big states. it only requires a state legislature majority and a congress majority. no role for governor, president, or courts.
Berman doesn't understand the real cause of minority rule. Few people understand it, because Social Choice Theory is taught only at a few top universities (Caltech, Harvard, MIT, etc) to political science majors. The real cause of minority rule is the use of primitive voting methods that count only one majority (or one plurality). When only one majority (or plurality) is counted, it can often be a coalition of minorities on different issues, which undermines majority rule on those issues and on many other issues too.
Counting only one majority (or plurality) is also highly prone to spoiling... even when there are only two candidates, because when those two run it deters "better compromise" candidates from running, who would win head-to-head contests over both of those two. For instance, Larry Hogan (the moderate conservative popular former two-term governor of solid blue Maryland) would presumably defeat Biden head-to-head, and Hogan would presumably crush Trump head-to-head by a landslide. But in a 3-way race, it would falsely appear that Hogan is least popular, because he would be sandwiched between "left" and "right."
A recent example is the August 2022 special election in Alaska. Nick Begich finished in 3rd place using Ranked Choice Voting, which counted only one majority -- the 52% who ranked Mary Peltola over Sarah Palin. It failed to count the majority who ranked Begich over Peltola and the majority who ranked Begich over Palin. Extremist Palin lost by only a narrow margin, but she would have been crushed by a landslide if the large majority who ranked Begich over Palin had been counted.
The importance of counting multiple head-to-head majorities is understood by the world's most widely used voting method: the Robert's Rules procedure for voting on motions. To eliminate N-1 of N alternatives, Robert's Rules counts N-1 head-to-head majorities. Counting multiple head-to-head majorities is what makes Robert's Rules reasonably effective at defeating minority-preferred policies.
Robert's Rules says the use of Plurality Rule is usually not in an organization's best interests. But Plurality Rule is the voting method that Ari Berman would have us use to elect the President and Senators (and everyone else), as long as the "one person, one vote" principle he talks about is satisfied. Getting states to switch to a voting method that counts all the head-to-head majorities is MUCH more important than correcting minor violations of the "one person, one vote" principle.
The ancient history of U.S. voting methods, and the Founding Fathers' compromises, is irrelevant to consideration of what's best now and in the future.
Plato argued each citizen is valued as 9/8, the Major 2nd music interval that must be "compromised" for the good of the state as the Tritone or 9/8 cubed (logarithms). Exponential wealth growth is the inverse function of logarithms and that's the true purpose of democracy - to cover up the elite exponential wealth growth. It's a great scam. The Tritone is also the Tyrant inherent to democracy.
>taranullius9221 : No, what Berman said has nothing to do with the fundamental problem I described: the use of voting methods that count only one majority or plurality. Berman also never mentioned the straightforward solution: using citizens' initiatives to compel some states to switch to a voting method that counts all the head-to-head majorities. Instead Berman said there is no roadmap to achieve the reforms he talks about.
There's no record that any of the Founders understood voting methods. It's possible that Thomas Jefferson had some understanding since he occasionally corresponded with Condorcet, but none of that correspondence has survived.
Berman couldn't even describe the Republicans' goal consistently. Sometimes he said it's to maintain the wealth of the rich elite; other times he said it's to maintain "white rule" (even though a huge number of whites don't share that goal). If I wanted to satirize Berman, I might say their goal is to maintain the patriarchy by taking away women's rights, or I might say their goal is to maintain the right to own automatic weapons and large-capacity bullet magazines. No, the real story is that all of those factions of the Republican Party are minorities who together often comprise a majority (or plurality) coalition that wins, which undermines majority rule on all those issues. But it would NOT be a winning coalition given a voting method that counts all the head-to-head majorities.
Your claims about a "label" and a "generated paragraph" are ridiculous, and strongly suggest you didn't understand my comment. Perhaps an example would help to make my point clearer:
Suppose 52% of the voters prefer party R over party D. Does that mean party R is most popular? No, because an alternative X may be preferred over both R & D by majorities. Suppose the voters' orders of preference are:
35% D X R
13% X D R
12% X R D
40% R X D
There are 3 head-to-head majorities:
52% prefer R over D: 40%+12%
60% prefer X over R: 13%+12%+35%
65% prefer X over D: 13%+12%+40%
With primitive voting methods, X falsely appears to be least popular because X is the top choice of only 25% (13%+12%). R wins with either a 52% majority (if the voting method is Top Two Runoff or Instant Runoff or if X chooses not to run & lose) or with a 40% plurality (if the voting method is Plurality Rule and X chooses to run despite expecting to lose).
But with a voting method that counts all the head-to-head majorities, X wins. The minority factions that comprise the R coalition lose to X by a 60% landslide.
To construct the order of finish, first the largest majority (65% who rank X over D) causes X to be placed ahead of D in the order of finish:
X D
Next, the second-largest majority (60% who rank X over R) cause X to be placed ahead of R
X D
X R
Next, the third-largest majority (52% who rank R over D) cause R to be placed ahead of D:
X R D
X leads the completed order of finish. The 52% majority coalition that's decisive for R given primitive voting methods would be ineffective if all the head-to-head majority coalitions are counted.
The classics , I make better choices than you because I have no choice
My cousin Laura was adopted
These posts are drowning in chatGPT babble.
Your useless non specific post sure sounds like one of them
Not the same shirt... not even close.
Grifting wifters