Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Very real risk’ US democracy won’t exist in 10 years

The progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the Republican-led pressure on political systems is so great that there is "a very real risk" democracy will cease to exist in the US within a decade.

The leftist Democratic politician derided efforts by Republican legislatures around the country to restrict voting rights as the "opening salvos" in a war on democracy, which she said could result in a return to the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of racial minorities.

In the interview with the New Yorker, she warned that the clock was ticking for Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders to do anything about it, with huge chunks of the president's agenda, including legislation to protect voting rights, stalled in Congress by more conservative or moderate members of her own party.

"Honestly, it is a shitshow," Ocasio-Cortez said of working in the same Democratic-controlled Congress in which centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have blocked both electoral reforms and Biden's ambitious Build Back Better social spending initiative.

"We don't have much time," she said. "The president has not been using his executive power to the extent that some would say is necessary."

The issue of voting rights was a dominant theme of the interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who asked her about her previous use of the phrase "if we have a democracy 10 years from now".

"There's a very real risk that we will not," she said. "What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn't.