Our Future Selves 10 Years Out: We Will Be Different And Look Like Ourselves
New Yorker Q & A with U.S. House of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
You’ve used a phrase “if we have a democracy ten years from now.” Do you think we won’t?
I think there’s a very real risk that we will not. What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn’t.
What’s going to bring us to that point? You hear talk now about our being on the brink of civil war—that’s the latest phrase in a series of books that have come out. What will happen to bring us to that degraded point?
Well, I think it has started, but it’s not beyond hope. We’re never beyond hope. But we’ve already seen the opening salvos of this, where you have a very targeted, specific attack on the right to vote across the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics. You have white-nationalist, reactionary politics starting to grow into a critical mass. What we have is the continued sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems, all in order to overturn results that a party in power may not like.
The concern is that we will look like what other nation?
I think we will look like ourselves. I think we will return to Jim Crow. I think that’s what we risk.
