It’s a fundamental tension in a democracy: How do you have majority rule in a way that also protects minority rights? Journalist Ari Berman says the Founding Fathers struggled with that question back in 1787 — except, for them, white male landowners were the minority in need of protection.
“Most of the founders were skeptical of the public’s ability to elect the president directly,” Berman says. “So they created this very complicated situation in which electors 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 says 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 as a check against the power of the majority — are having much the same effect.
Berman notes that in the country’s first presidential election, in 1789, only a small fraction of the population was eligible to vote — and in certain states, voters were only allowed to vote for electors, not the candidates themselves.
Though the right to vote has 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. Additionally, he says, because the Constitution stipulates that each state gets two senators, regardless of its population, “smaller, whiter, more conservative states have far more power and representation in the Senate then larger, more diverse, more…
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