This destruction of democracy has been intertwined with the effort to maintain white supremacy as nonwhites became a growing share of the population. Subscribe here.Īs Republicans have increasingly become a permanent minority in America, they have resorted to ever cruder schemes to cling to power. This article appears in the May/June 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Calhoun is lifted out of Charleston in June 2020.
A columnist for GQ and frequent political commentator on MSNBC, he lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.A statue of pro-slavery South Carolina Sen. In a work for readers of How Democracies Die and even Master of the Senate, Jentleson makes clear that, without a reevaluation of Senate practices-starting with ending the filibuster-we face the prospect of permanent minority rule in America.Ībout the Author: Adam Jentleson is the public affairs director at Democracy Forward and a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid.
The current GOP has merely used the methods pioneered by its predecessors, though to newly extreme ends. As Jentleson shows, since the 1950s, a free-flowing body of relative equals has devolved into a rigidly hierarchical, polarized institution, with both Democrats and Republicans to blame. In Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson argues that shifting demographics alone cannot explain how Mitch McConnell harnessed the Senate and turned it into a powerful weapon of minority rule. An insider’s account of how politicians representing a radical minority of Americans are using “the greatest deliberative body in the world” to hijack our democracy.Įvery major decision governing our diverse, majority-female, and increasingly liberal country bears the stamp of the US Senate, yet the Senate allows an almost exclusively white, predominantly male, and radically conservative minority of the American electorate to impose its will on the rest of us.
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