Fall From Democracy
By: Kiah Duggins, CRC Attorney
One year after the insurrection on January 6th 2021, military generals, political scientists, and other experts are predicting that organized militias on the far right will continue to use deadly violence to expand their political power and oppose the policies, election results, and demographic groups that they dislike. These experts refer to this predicted behavior as “the fall of democracy” or “civil war.” As a Black American descendant of enslaved people and a civil rights attorney, I can’t help but ask: The fall of democracy for whom?
“The fall of democracy” conjures up images of armed agents censoring, exploiting, caging, stealing from, or even killing people for political gain. It implies the violent suppression of voting and the erosion of self-determination. Although those images may seem shocking and un-American, the truth is that our current criminal legal system already promotes all of those undemocratic realities for low-income Black and Brown people. The government cages and economically exploits presumptively innocent low-income people through money bail systems. Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people aren’t allowed to vote in several states. When Black people are disproportionately murdered or injured by government agents like the police, qualified immunity often prevents them from getting legal relief. Oppressive policies like driver’s license suspension prevent economically exploited communities from voting or obtaining employment.
The United States is not experiencing a “fall” from democracy; its fundamentally undemocratic nature is being exposed. If we frame this country’s problem as a “fall” instead of an exposition, the logical solution will be to climb back up to the anti-Black and white supremacist status quo. If we pretend that the United States was ever a democracy, we will continue to ignore the centuries-old experiences that economically exploited Black and Brown communities have had in our criminal legal system. Our current criminal legal system evolved out of economically exploitative practices like convict leasing and strike-breaking, and it legally perpetuates slavery to this day. The last Civil War was a reckoning with white supremacist ideologies, and the potential for another civil war stems from a reckoning with white supremacist ideologies too.
In order to mitigate harm in the coming months and years, Black and Brown communities have consistently demanded that tax dollars be transferred away from our criminal legal system and redirected to marginalized people through reparations and funding for housing, healthcare, and education. We have consistently made demands to end pretrial detention, support non-carceral diversion programs, and end qualified immunity. There is no viable democracy for us to return to, but we can build a new democracy by meeting the demands of economically exploited communities of color.
