Abolitionist Democracy: Dispelling Fear and Loathing in the 2016 Campaignby Joy JamesThe rivalries o
Abolitionist Democracy: Dispelling Fear and Loathing in the 2016 Campaign
by Joy James
The rivalries of candidates or parties define the political universe of US democracy. However, electoral democracy has always been in a heated contest to subdue or defeat its opponent— abolitionist democracy. Electoral democracy does not seek equity, i.e., the destruction of the master/mistress-slave relation; rather, it demarcates “winners” as free citizens from “losers” — those locked up or locked out of society and political power. Abolitionist democracy seeks and in its most fierce expressions recognizes that structures of confinement serve as roadmaps on a fabled quest to transform the “nonhuman” or “anti-human” into the “human” citizen. That transformation of course is not what is referenced in calls to “Make America Great Again” or “Stronger Together” or assurances by the FLOTUS and POTUS that the United States still is “the greatest nation on earth.” Democracies are populated by humans (including those not fully recognized as such), hence compassion and ethics remain during election cycles. However, electoral democracy presupposes the “human” and agency to be fixed in the voter-as-citizen. Unlike electoral democracy, abolition democracy focuses upon the struggle for personhood to signify the limits of captivity and indignity, that is, it probes the boundaries of legal violence, or illegal violence enacted with general impunity. Electoral democracy maintains that the political will of the people is expressed in its elections. Abolitionist democracy can argue that the political will of (some) of the people is also expressed in police violence. Both are election campaigns and our policing campaigns are windows into national or factional political will and intent.
