A former president is standing trial for a criminal offense for the first time in U.S. history. On Monday, the prosecutor’s opening statement in The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump steered away from the crime itself — a hush money payment — and reminded the jury that these allegations are about corrupting an election and deceiving voters.
“This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures,” the prosecutor said. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”
Trump’s defense attorney countered. “Trying to influence an election” is allowed within the rules, he said. “It’s called democracy.”
But who gets to decide what democracy is? Especially in an America with a maimed Voting Rights Act that’s rife with Republican efforts to suppress the votes of those ethnic groups least likely to support them.
Ari Berman, a national correspondent for “Mother Jones,” has been covering voting rights and ballot access in the U.S. for more than a decade now, which means he has borne closer witness than most to some of the most seismic changes in civil rights since the mid-1960s. That’s only one reason why his new book “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It” is an essential read. I spoke with Berman recently about his new book and the urgency of addressing voter suppression, intimidation, and deception as another pivotal election approaches.
Jamil Smith: You’ve written a comprehensive history of voting rights. What brought you to this topic?
Ari Berman: Because I’ve covered voting rights for a decade and a half, I wondered: Why would people put so much energy into making it harder to vote? Is it just about an electoral advantage, or is there a larger project at work here?
Through my reporting, I realized that there’s a larger project to prevent a diverse New American majority from taking power. The people on the other end of the demographic changes in our country’s power shifts are fighting a rearguard effort to maintain their dominance. It’s the story of White supremacy versus multiracial democracy, which is also the story of American history for the last 250 years. If I’m going to tell the story of voting, I might as well trace it back to the beginning.
You start with Pat Buchanan’s 1995 campaign speech at the National Press Club and the idea that America should close its doors to immigrants. How do you trace the line from that to where we are today? I would argue there would be no Donald Trump without Pat Buchanan.
Buchanan laid the groundwork for Trump, and he’s one of these forgotten political figures who was extremely influential but has been pushed to the side of history.
I was curious about when the Republican Party became alarmed by the country’s changing demographics. A lot has been written about the party’s backlash to civil rights and the Southern strategy to shift White voters away from the Democratic into the Republican Party in the 1960s. That’s one part of the story, but what about the modern-day demographics?
It’s not just Black Americans they’re worried about, but the combined power of Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, all the different Americans that we have right now — voters of color, more broadly. It starts with Pat Buchanan because the 1990 census was the first to predict that White people would one day be a minority in the country. That’s where fear becomes a reality for the Republicans. It’s not just an abstract thing; it’s going to happen. And, of course, in their minds, the primary culprit is immigration. Immigration is what’s making the country more diverse.
What Buchanan argues in his campaign speech is that the more diverse the country becomes, the more democratic it becomes — and the less powerful White Christian America becomes. He starts talking about the emerging White minority.
I would argue that this is the centerpiece of Trump’s popularity. White people saw their dominant status slipping away, particularly after the election of the first Black president, and they said, “Who’s going to do something to stop this?” And that person was Donald Trump.
At the end of the book, you discuss what you call the “gerrymandering of history.” To what degree has the fight against this been successful, and what do we need to do better to combat this surge of voter suppression?
I called it the “gerrymandering of history” because I view the efforts to censor history as having a political purpose. I view it as not just erasing history but trying to create an outcome where White power is protected.
It’s been alarming to watch so much of the progress made in the last few years be wiped away. Things that you’d think we would never be fighting about, things that would be obvious — that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, for instance — are now becoming a debate.
People must understand that teaching about America’s history is not woke. It’s just teaching the history of America.
People who want to censor history are trying to pit us against each other. They’re not just trying to pit Whites against Blacks; they’re trying to pit other minority groups against other minority groups. For example, they pit Hispanic and Asian Americans against Black Americans. That’s something that the right has been trying to do — and has been somewhat successful —if you look at the polling.
I write a lot about Reconstruction because the effort to censor and rewrite the history of Reconstruction led to a very specific outcome: the establishment of Jim Crow. There had to be support for putting up monuments to Robert E. Lee and saying, “Yes, African Americans got rights, but now we’re taking them away.” There had to be public support for all of that, which was to say, “Well, we tried multiracial democracy, and it didn’t work, so therefore, our only other alternative is White supremacy.”.
We had this backlash to White supremacy in 2020 after the death of George Floyd and others, but they conflated it as if it was a bunch of woke liberals trying to make you share a restroom with someone of the other gender and play sports with other people. So they made it about all of these other issues, as opposed to America’s original sin of slavery that we’ve never addressed.
To what degree is this about White people not wanting to see themselves as the bad guy?
It’s more about White people not wanting to see their power slip away. That’s why I think you have to locate the efforts to try to gerrymander history — and all of the other things that are being done — in the context of the White majority becoming the White minority.
I talk about the backlash to Barack Obama’s election as a pivotal turning point for the right because it crystallized the fact that Black people didn’t just elect the Black president. A lot of White people elected Obama, but more importantly, so did Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and other voters of color. This was the core of Obama’s coalition.
Conservatives are thinking that if voters of color, younger people and more moderate Whites get together, that’s a majority in America right now. They’re screwed. They need to figure out a way to counteract this. They either need to take control of institutions so a minority of the population can win a majority of power, or they need to start picking off some of these groups by dividing these communities so there isn’t multiracial democracy anymore.
The project of the Republican Party since Barack Obama’s election has been to nullify multiracial democracy so it benefits conservatives. That has been their broader project for the last 15 years or more.
To what degree do you feel the efforts to protect democracy are successful? And how are people seeking to better protect the gains made?
The country has democratized dramatically in the past 50 years, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is the turning point in this process. You could argue that the Voting Rights Act made America a multiracial democracy for the first time in its history because so many people were disenfranchised before that. People thought you’d never lose the Voting Rights Act or Roe v. Wade — that because these were enshrined in law, they were forever — and that’s not true. There’s been a 50-year effort to overturn those gains.
Throughout American history, we’ve learned that rights can be granted, but rights can also be taken away. So, I think people are now wondering what is the best way to protect rights going forward.
At the end of the book, I write about Michigan, where democratic rights have recently been expanded. People are starting to think about what it takes to expand rights. Can you do it at the state level, or does it require broader, systemic and institutional reform? I would argue both. We need to protect our rights and liberties in the short term, but in the longer term, we must build institutions where our rights and liberties will be protected and enshrined. Right now, that’s not the system we have.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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