Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said that she thinks there is a possibility that the U.S. will no longer “have a democracy” in a decade.
“The infrastructure plan, if it does what it’s intended to do, politicians will take credit for it ten years from now, if we even have a democracy ten years from now,” the Democratic lawmaker said during an interview earlier this month, according to the New Yorker.
“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,” she said.
The outlet noted that the interview, which occurred on Feb. 1, had “been edited for length and clarity.”
Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive lawmaker who is currently serving her second term in Congress, indicated that the country has a problem with an increase in “white-nationalist, reactionary politics.”
“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,” she said, according to the New Yorker.
The legislator said that there is a danger of the nation reverting to the racism of the Jim Crow era.
“I think we will return to Jim Crow. I think that’s what we risk,” she said.
“And the question that we’re really facing is: Was the last fifty to sixty years after the Civil Rights Act just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy that we will then decide was inconvenient for those in power? And we will revert to what we had before, which, by the way, wasn’t just Jim Crow but also the extraordinary economic oppression as well?” Ocasio-Cortez said, according to the outlet.