Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me your host Chris Hayes.

Oh we got a fun one today that's a little different than our normal routine, which is a live event that we did recently with Ari Berman, who's a really good friend of mine, I've known for years, a fantastic reporter on voting rights among other

things, author of a great book called Give Us a Ballot and Ari has a new book out which

is called Minority Rule the Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the people and the fight to resist it,

which is a book about how much the modern Republican Party in the era of Trump has

explicitly embraced a kind of minoritarian vision of politics that it shouldn't be the people as represented. of about putting that into practice, some of which, many of which precede Donald Trump, who is sort of the ultimate apotheosis of that.

We held the event at the Center for Brooklyn History.

It was a book event for his new book, Minority Rule, and it was a great conversation.

Enjoy.

All right, well, so first of all, the book is fantastic, and I've actually had a chance to really like really dig into it the last two or three days and read the whole thing.

And to me, the central story and tension that the book explores I think is plausibly

considered the central tension of American history and that's a tension between Democratic commitments for self-governance

and self-control over the scope of a whole polity on the one hand and the various permutations of beliefs

that reject small de democracy in favor of some form of hierarchy that produces some kind of minority rule.

And that what I think the book is incredibly successful in doing is showing how much this is

a theme throughout the nation's history of sort of moments of advance and retreat back and

forth back and forth and I guess my first question is how you found yourself to that topic and that theme.

Yeah well I started with a current problem the problem that we're in today and then I worked my way

backwards. I started peeling off the layers of the onion and basically the problem that I was

wondering about today is how did the Republican Party get so radical? How did we have a situation in which a minority of Americans

in the elite conservative white minority, not minorities as we normally think of them,

get a majority of political power? How did they take control of institutions like the Supreme Court,

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