by JANINE JACKSON
Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman, about right-wing plans for minority rule, for the July 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: With so much attention on individual politicians’ temperaments, and on the country’s political temperature generally, it’s easy to forget that US governance is based around structures. These structures are being undermined, but they also have design flaws, if you will, that have been present from the start, as explored in a new book by our guest.
Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and author of a number of books, most recently Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ari Berman.
Ari Berman: Hey, Janine. Great to talk to you again. Thank you.
JJ: My ninth grade government teacher said that he didn’t think we’d remember much from his class, but there was one thing we needed to know, and periodically, he would just holler, “What’s the law of the land?” And we would shout out, “The Constitution!”
There’s a belief that we have these bedrocks of democracy—and they might be ignored, or even breached—but in themselves, they have some kind of purity. Where do you start in explaining why we would be helped by disabusing ourselves of that kind of understanding?
AB: That’s right. Our understanding of the Constitution is basically these godlike figures in their powdered wigs decreeing the law of the land in 1787, and having the people’s best interests at heart. And in many ways, the Constitution was a remarkable document for its time, but the founders had their own self-interests at heart in many cases. And remember, these were white male property holders, many of them slave holders, and they designed the Constitution, in many ways, not to expand democracy, but to check democracy, and make sure that their own interests were protected.
And they realized that they were a distinct minority in the country, because they, as I said, were a white property-holding elite, and the country was not. There were a lot of white men without property, and then you think about women, and African Americans and Native Americans, and other people who weren’t part at all of the drafting of the Constitution.
And so the Constitution, in many ways, favors these elite minorities over the majority of people. It favors small states over large states in the construction of the US Senate. It favors slave states over free states in the construction of the US House. It prevents the direct election of the president. It creates a Supreme Court that’s a product of an undemocratic Senate and an undemocratic presidency.
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