In an interview with The New Yorker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated, “I believe there is a very real possibility that we will not.”
“What we have here is a clever takeover of our democratic system that is continuing,” she explained.
In a new interview with The New Yorker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated that “there is a very real risk” that the United States will return to Jim Crow rules and would cease to be a democracy within the next 10 years.
“What we risk is having a government that may pose as a democracy, and may attempt to pretend that it is, but it is not,” Ocasio-Cortez told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview published on Tuesday.
In her statement, the congresswoman from New York stated that while the situation is “not beyond hope,” she asserted that the United States is witnessing “the opening salvos” at the end of democracy with a “targeted,
specific attack on the right to vote throughout the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics,” combined with “white-nationalist, reactionary politics.”
We are witnessing the ongoing sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to transform them into undemocratic systems, all in order to overturn results that the ruling party may not like,” she stated.
Ocasio-Cortez particularly prophesied that the United States will revert to the Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement and mistreatment of African-Americans and other minority groups, which she called “the Jim Crow South.”
The “Jim Crow-style” voting restrictions that have been proposed and passed in states such as Texas, the state legislature of Florida watering down a ballot initiative that would have repealed the state’s previously draconian felon disenfranchisement law, and efforts “to replace teaching history with institutionalized propaganda from white-nationalist perspectives in our schools” are examples of what she is referring to.
“This was what Jim Crow’s scaffolding looked like,” she explained.
“There are a lot of temptation to compare something to something else,” she explained. “Of course, there are several similarities that can be made… Nonetheless, you really don’t have to look much further than our own history, because I believe that we have walked down an unusually complicated route.”
According to Ocasio-Cortez, the most pressing question facing the United States now is “was the last fifty to sixty years after the Civil Rights Act just a brief flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy that we will later determine was inconvenient for those in power?”
Adding that she is not interested in “navel-gazing” or attempting to figure out which Republicans are similarly concerned about the future of democracy, Ocasio-Cortez stated that she believes “at the end of the day, they all make the same judgments.”
“Finally, who cares if they’re sincere believers or whether they’re merely complicit in the scheme of things in the end? Our election results are still being challenged, and they are still voting to do so ” she explained.