Violence and the Vote

“Modern democracies like to believe that they can get to a future of equality (or at the very least, mobility)—in principle—without visible bloodshed, through collective (or majority) decisions, using the power of the vote,” says Dr. Aishwary Kumar. “Even in the most boring of times, however, the lure of solving something by violence never disappears.”

“No wonder,” says Dr. Kumar, “democratic antiviolence—especially when one speaks of it from a liberal standpoint—sounds like a ruse, a false promise that uses public hope in a better future as a trap to lure the young into a cruel, unequal, and racial electoral consensus whose overarching bipartisan military priorities have barely moved for three quarters of the American century.”

From this emerges the neodemocratic paradox of autocrats loving elections. “But the converse does not hold. It is possible to love elections without being democratic but one simply cannot claim to love democracy without committing…