Policing the Democratic System: Black Lives Matter and the Politics of Empowered Inclusion

In recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement has called public attention to systemic character of police brutality in the United States. Taking a cue from Michael Dawson’s (2016) assertion that BLM signifies a "legitimation crisis" in the racial order, we use the issue of police brutality to highlight critical lacunae in deliberative-democratic theory—especially in light of the recent "systemic turn" in the literature on democratic innovations. Prevailing models of democratic systems tend to overlook features of society, such as the police, which may not involve overtly democratic practices, but which are nonetheless fateful for maintaining the premises of democratic life. This is especially true for those "Hobbesian" functions that deal with matters such as order and security: as problems that need to be resolved in order for democratic politics to happen, it is tacitly assumed that their resolution somehow precedes democracy in a politically neutral way. Of course, institutions such as the police are anything but politically neutral. Examining the role of police as a mechanism of subjectivation that both directly and indirectly shapes the terms of democratic inclusion, we show why democratic systems theory needs to become more "systemic" in its perspective. At the same time, we will argue that the deliberative systems approach is uniquely qualified among approaches to democratic theory to address these kinds of issues, precisely because it is built on the realization that democratic legitimacy is a multi-step process that integrates variegated institutions and practices. An expanded view of the deliberative system that incorporates institutions like the police affords us a more complete view of the complex politics of "empowered inclusion" (Warren 2017), which stand simultaneously as preconditions and topics of democratic deliberation, contestation, and legitimacy (Afsahi 2021; Beauvais 2020; Bohman 2000; Dryzek 2005; Milstein 2021; O’Flynn 2007).