Calvin Duncan spent twenty-eight years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Freed in 2011 and fully cleared in 2021, he might have understandably shied away from a criminal legal system that had upended his life. But Duncan, politicized by the struggle to access his court records while he was incarcerated, instead ran and was elected clerk of criminal court in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, in 2025. More than 68 percent of the voters in New Orleans chose Duncan for the job, a sweeping majority that should have put an end to any question of who should take the seat.
But not in Louisiana. There, the state legislature quickly passed a bill eliminating the clerk of criminal court position, combining it with the civil court clerk role. Republican Governor Jeff Landry, who as state attorney general had opposed Duncan’s petition for compensation for his wrongful conviction, signed it into law, overriding the will of the majority of the voters of New Orleans. Landry and most of the state legislature are white. Duncan and most of the voters in New Orleans are Black.
“There are a lot of problems for Louisianians, and they spent the precious resources to get rid of Calvin Duncan’s seat because he’s formerly incarcerated, because he was the most far-left candidate,” geographer Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, tells The Progressive. The consolidation, as well as the elimination of several judgeships, Pelot-Hobbs notes, will wind up slowing down the court process. “It’s going to lead to people spending more time behind bars, either waiting for a trial or making the decision to plea-bargain out, which people already do disproportionately because they can’t afford bail and don’t want to sit in a cage at the jail.”
This blatantly undemocratic move comes at the same time as Louisiana is rushing to redraw its Congressional maps, having played a key role in the shredding of what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Louisiana v. Callai, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that redistricting to ensure that Louisiana’s Black voters have some representation in Congress is unconstitutional, which enabled the rapid redrawing of electoral maps not only in Louisiana, but also in several other states, including, as of this writing, Tennessee and Missouri.
“Democracy is under attack”: You’ve undoubtedly read those words many times since the beginning of the era of Donald Trump. Maybe you even remember reading them after the 2000 presidential election and the debacle that was the Florida vote count. But part of the unraveling of democracy is a new willingness by elected officials to blatantly override the will of the voters. And while this process is certainly being led by Southern Republicans, it’s also in many ways bipartisan.
The determination in many Southern states to roll back the clock to a pre-civil rights era should remind us that the United States’ claim to democracy has always been tenuous. As documentary filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor put it in her book of the same name, “democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.” The attacks on the Voting Rights Act have been well covered, but less attention has been paid to the smaller—yet often more insidious—ways that federal, state, and local governments respond to the will of big donors and ideological prejudices rather than the people who ostensibly elect them.
In St. Louis, Missouri, the state’s move to eliminate seats in Congress goes hand in hand with the state takeover of the city’s police department, which was accomplished in the spring of 2025. That means the state sets the police budget, and the city must simply find the money. Kennard Williams, senior organizer at the grassroots organization Action St. Louis, explains that, because of this, the state also effectively hindered most city-level budgeting decisions, particularly because the city implements “parity pay”—when police get a raise, firefighters are supposed to also get one, and the state-controlled police board has offered police leadership a big raise.
“They didn’t check with the city budget division, they didn’t check with the budget director,” Williams says. “That puts the city in a dire position. The mayor has said they will have to consider cutting city workers’ jobs and salaries once the parity does hit for the fire department.”
Williams and I first met in 2015, when he was part of the Black Lives Matter movement that spread across the country from Ferguson, Missouri, after a police officer killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. In the intervening decade, St. Louis-area organizers have fought to restrain the police department and invest in different kinds of social programs to keep their neighbors safe.
“Part of the budget fight that we were having was around funding the Office of Violence Prevention, which is the folks who go out in the community and de-escalate,” Williams explains. There’s also Code Blue, the city’s winter housing and sheltering program, and the Right to Counsel Program, which provides lawyers for people facing eviction. In the initial budget fight, Williams notes, there was no money for Right to Counsel or Code Blue, and Violence Prevention was severely underfunded. “Ultimately, they amended the budget to put some more money into each one, but left them all underfunded,” he says. “If this police budget goes through, the city will have no choice but to cut from them in order to stop layoffs and salary cuts for city workers.”
There’s also the fact that the board has approved the police department’s acquisition of fancy new drones, despite having only twenty-four hours to review the proposal and despite the mayor’s opposition. (Community input? Not so much.)
What the mayor does want is a data center. And here is where things get complicated. It’s not simply Republican state officials overriding the votes of presumably left-leaning urban dwellers. Local officials are also happy to push through controversial projects with limited public engagement. Data center zoning rules were still unfinished at the time the city Board of Public Service voted to approve the project for central St. Louis, Williams says.
“We’re seeing all of this stuff happening with very little listening to the will of the people,” Williams adds. “You’re seeing these drone programs come into place; you’re seeing the data centers happening. And so very much we’re seeing a lot of this larger interest-serving and leaning toward tech interests at the expense of democracy, of people in the city of St. Louis, and what they say they want and don’t want.”
New Orleans, too, is fighting a drone program. The organizing network Eye on Surveillance first learned of the drone program at a French Quarter Management District (FQMD) meeting. The FQMD is a state entity, its board stuffed with representatives of the various tourism businesses in the Quarter (which, I should note, is also where I used to live). Drone programs can be connected to federal Homeland Security funding under the “Drone as First Responder” initiative, and additionally the New Orleans program has an anonymous private donor.
“You show up to the FQMD meetings and they tell you that you need to take it up with city council,” explains Alex Jaouiche of Eye on Surveillance. “You show up to the city council meetings and they say that it’s out of their hands because it’s through the FQMD.”
Community organizing notched a small win against the drone program, Edith Romero of Eye on Surveillance says. The policy briefly allowed for the drones to have weapons, but it was changed after outraged residents raised hell. “That’s another example of how there is absolutely no democracy on any level of government, because [the New Orleans Police Department] can just literally change their policy whenever they want. That’s what they did with the drones.”
As I wrote last fall, northern Louisiana will play host to Meta’s largest data center yet, and the project is now more than doubling in size. The city itself has imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction.
We shouldn’t forget Memphis, Tennessee, a city that is struggling against Elon Musk’s “Colossus” supercomputer, which powers Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, and now the AI company Anthropic, too.
Amber Sherman, a local Memphis organizer, told me last winter about the ramped-up private security protecting the data center from protesters. This is after the state government had stepped in to overrule a key provision Sherman and her neighbors had won limiting police pretextual traffic stops, and after Tennessee had sharply redrawn its Congressional districts, eliminating the majority-Black district in which progressive champion Justin Pearson was running. (He’s still running, but the new lines leave him with a Republican-leaning constituency.) The police, the drone programs, and the data centers—it is unclear so far which company is behind the St. Louis data center, Williams says—are not just budget issues or even environmental ones. The technology contributes to surveillance and control of the population: In essence, cities and states are overriding the rule of the people to insert programs that, in turn, make it easier to override the will of the people.
The growth of these institutions is intertwined. In Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains prison expansion as a “fix” for four surpluses: land, finance, state capacity, and labor. After years of organizing, Pelot-Hobbs says, “there’s a downward trend in incarceration of people who aren’t immigrants in the United States. So there’s been a shifting state capacity away from certain kinds of imprisonment [and] more and more toward detention. But the land piece is a big part of the story, which is, there’s all this surplus land that historically used to go to prisons.” That land can be used for detention centers or data centers—capital is sloshing around in both places, although a massive amount of it is pouring into AI.
But the unique factor of AI is that part of the reason capital is flowing toward it is because it promises to replace large amounts of labor—in other words, to render more people surplus. (OpenAI’s Sam Altman and other tech leaders have recently walked back their “jobs apocalypse” predictions, but the fact remains that “productivity gains” from AI are based in part on lowering labor costs.) AI, in other words, is going to magnify one of the crises that prison expansion purported to solve: underemployment. This, Pelot-Hobbs suggests, “is, at its core, showing us the fundamental contradictions of the idea that these kinds of investments are going to solve the actual really complicated political economic social ills rather than, say, paying people living wages, giving people access to health care and education and homes.”
And then there is the federal government. When I spoke to Sherman, she was organizing with her neighbors against Trump’s incursion into Memphis, and like so many other organizers across the country, she was connecting the dots between Musk’s steamrolling her community and the waves of federal agents terrorizing the city. In just four days in July, federal agents killed two local residents. Tech companies, she said, were “trying to get everything that they have wanted to do done right now, because they have this President that’s supporting them.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been trying to expand its facilities as well. “The plan was initially to have 80,000 beds of new detention capacity in the form of warehouse conversions,” Pelot-Hobbs, who has been researching ICE’s infrastructure, explains. Many of those warehouses had been built during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. “Private developers built [them] up and promised to these towns that it would be a source of jobs, revenue, what have you,” she says.
But many of them were built on spec and have been sitting empty since then. The Trump Administration saw the surplus property and moved to turn the warehouses into detention centers. The shift to federal control of those detention centers would be significant, Pelot-Hobbs argues: “Localities like New Orleans or Chicago have successfully organized their elected leadership to say sheriffs can’t contract with ICE.” Under federal control, “that [would no] longer [be] possible.”
Organizers were able, though, to turn outrage over ICE’s incursions into cities, particularly in Minnesota, where federal agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti, to build opposition to ICE warehouses. “We’re seeing these small communities all over the United States, in rural Georgia, in Oklahoma, in Kansas, say, ‘We don’t want this warehouse converted into an ICE detention center.’” In some communities, Pelot-Hobbs notes, residents have blocked warehouses used for what they consider nefarious purposes from accessing the electrical grid or sewer systems. “I think the Trump Administration thought this was a way to get around activism, and it actually spurred more opportunities for folks to express their outrage at ICE,” she adds.
In other words, local democracy isn’t dead yet, despite all of the threats to it. The tactics used to halt data centers can be used to thwart ICE warehouses, and both have benefited from long-running strategies to block prison construction. Abolitionists have learned to use NIMBYism to their advantage, as have opponents of data centers, who have blocked nearly half the proposed projects for 2026. As for Calvin Duncan, New Orleans has called for a special election for the new, consolidated clerk position.
In Louisiana, organizers have mounted a to recall Governor Landry as well as Attorney General Liz Murrill, and a New Orleans grand jury handed down a criminal indictment against Murrill for allegedly threatening city officials. The courts are hashing out the case as I write, but Pelot-Hobbs notes that Black Louisianans have visceral memories of being disenfranchised and have had enough of the state yanking back or preempting anything good they might do for themselves. The organization, she says, has been impressive.
“It’s long lines, and they’re happening every day all over the state. They’re happening at bars. There are lots and lots and lots of people who are outraged,” she says. “It has been profound, feeling that there was both an expansion of democracy and a contraction of democracy in the life of one eighty-year-old Black New Orleanian woman who is calling all of her friends trying to get these people out of office.”
With so many people around the South, and indeed the country, facing the same issues, the challenge will be how to connect their struggles and amplify their power to strengthen local control.