Survey Takeaway: What does this sample tell us about our Democracy?

     Though I am looking through a relatively small number of Survey responses from an admittedly small population of people, it is obvious that a few recurring themes arise throughout each of the responses. 

    The first reoccurring theme seems to be the presence of what Alexander Dent would refer to as customary law; the presence of court systems, lawyers, police officers, and the government as authorities as a part of the central understanding of the law and the upholding of democracy. The second theme is that there is also some cultural understanding of the law, which is really heavily dependent on the events that are currently facing the institutions involved in the backslide of democracy and how the language used to describe these institutions has an impact on this. 

    Currently, the conception of customary law seems to be butting heads with many of the current cultural understandings of the law. The increased polarization of day-to-day language has shaped the cultural understanding of the law to be apprehensive of the institutions and authorities who are upholding life as we know it whereas the customary understanding encourages a predisposition to trust these same institutions; often, in the past, the United States has seen a lot more alignment between cultural and customary understandings of law in day to day life, and it has ultimately come down to the increase in access to media that brings people to question their country. It is, however, important to note that this alignment and upholding of more traditional understandings was perpetrated by an elite class that exploited and excluded all but a certain population of the United States who are historically generally white and affluent. 

    What I found is that this has been largely upheld by the intentionally vague and pretentious nature that has always followed as a key part of US law. In John B. Haviland's piece, Ideologies of Language: Some Reflections on Language and U.S. law, Haviland argues this same point but has focus more centralized on the conflict between the narrowness of Northern American language and the disconnect it has with language utilized by Spanish and Indigenous individuals. Haviland utilizes Clackamas Co. v Morale to display just how deep this phenomenon is. The specifics of the case are not relevant so much as the identities of the involved individuals are. The involved individuals were Mixtec Indians from Oaxaca being persecuted by a white court in Oregon. What is striking about this case and Havilland's analysis, is what the court refers to as "referential transparency" which essentially means that only the value behind the immediate sentences and phrases in an interaction are relevant to determine meaning which means that the context of a situation is left out. This has grave potential for misrepresentation of language when there can be many interpretations of said language. The court utilized this take on language to make a case in their favor which ultimately ended up in some level of injustice as the trial was nowhere close to fair. 

    Though Havilland uses more specific examples, what he takes away from his analysis is incredibly relevant to what I am looking at with this blog. U.S. law and the language that surrounds it are notoriously white, notoriously affluent, and are designed for the purpose of serving these limited identities and, in turn, gravely misunderstand and do a grave disservice to the majority of the population it is meant to bring justice to. 

    The backslide of democracy has largely been perpetuated by these very shortcomings; when the system of law ultimately serves to protect those who are members of an elite class, it can never uphold democracy in its truest form. The law is in charge of accountability and what we are seeing across the board in the united states is a lack of that; This large lack of accountability has been seen in the lack of persecution of white-collar crimes, voting rights restrictions in favor of more privileged groups, and gerrymandering in favor of parties who have an interest in power rather than people, just to name a few. When the law works to uphold standards that have long been detested by the public, are upheld by people who haven't been in school for 50+ years and are unaccountable to the public, it becomes almost disrespectful to everything that democracy is to call our current system a true democracy.    

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