My Devotion to Democracy, Questioned
I've been eagerly waiting for 2042—have you? That's the year we were told, back in 2008, that the U.S. would become a "majority minority" country—meaning people racialized as white would be less than 50% of the population for the first time since the country's founding.
The main reason for my excitement: folks of color have historically voted democratic, so it only follows that the Dems would easily reign after 2042...and forever after. I've learned this is known as demographic destiny. I was all there for it.
But destinies are problematic, and this one particularly so. Here I was smug in my knowing that the voting populace would shift in my preferred direction—without me doing anything, relying completely on Brown and Black folks to do everything. Then the destiny date itself shifted, due to Obama and Trump's curtailing of immigrants and asylum seekers, and a change in how the census counts whites. America will become a majority minority country sometime: that's an inevitability.
The destiny part, however, is not inevitable. Just now a greater proportion of people of color voted for Trump than in 2016, way more than Dems expected. I'm seeing some of my assumptions about how democracy works wiped clean like a dirty window, then promptly shattered. This is a good thing. Here are a few reasons why:
My hopefulness that Brown and Black folks would ultimately save the country's shaky Democratic platform is a perfect example of coloring a whole array of people, with their vast differences in experience, background, identity, circumstance, etc. as one color: blue. I made them into a monolith. I don't do this with whites. A recent Code Switch episode helped me see this.
Those Democrats I've long been dedicated to don't actually seem anymore to be the champions of working families, the multiply marginalized, and our social welfare as a whole. This became tangibly evident in the 2024 election, with the DNC dropping its endorsement of abolishing the death penalty while holding steadfast to its commitment to fund the genocide in Palestine.
Way bigger than democratic politics is my devotion to the system of democracy itself. I lived in a democratically-run community, worked at and co-founded democratically-run schools, and base my current work as a coach and facilitator solidly on democratic principles. Yet when I witness how democracy is being weaponized as the be-all end-all (e.g. how Israel is touted as the only democracy in the region, thus justifying U.S. presence and imperialism), I want to divorce myself from my own devotion.
It's a scale problem, I can see: direct democracies, like the schools and communities I've been part of and the circles and workshops I host, work well in part because the populations involved are relatively small. Representative democracies, like this country's, are troublesome. I believed ours would save us from oppression. It occurs to me now that this is something only those who don't experience debilitating oppression every day and who are blind to the oppression we do experience could think. The structures that divide us into those who matter and those who don't are alive and well in our current democracy.
So I'm moving ahead more wary of Democrats and more curious about who's championing social well-being, and how. I'm also feeling keenly sensitized to the difference between the liberatory aspects of democratic philosophy that I still love—equitable access, participation, accountability, support—and the manipulative leveraging of Democracy that I don't.
January 2025 Back to Notebook Home
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