Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist It

Ari Berman’s Minority Rule is a riveting account of the decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power—and the movement to stop them.

The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. But this crisis didn’t begin or end with Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift. Berman charts these efforts with sweeping historical research and incisive on-the-ground reporting, chronicling how a wide range of antidemocratic tactics interact with profound structural inequalities in institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to threaten the survival of representative government in America.

Chilling and revelatory, Minority Rule exposes the long history of the conflict between white supremacy and multiracial democracy that has reached a fever pitch today—while also telling the inspiring story of resistance to these regressive efforts.

Ari Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. He’s the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) and Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, and he is a frequent commentator on MSNBC and NPR. He won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize for Magazine Journalism and an Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media. Kevin Kruse is a Professor of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the political, social, and urban/suburban history of twentieth-century America, with a particular interest in conflicts over race, rights and religion and the making of modern conservatism. He is the author of Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, and Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement.

 This event is cosponsored by Labyrinth Books, Princeton University’s Humanities Council, The School of International & Public Affairs in NJ, and Princeton University’s Department of History, Department of African American Studies, and Electoral Innovation Lab.