Liberal democracy
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Liberal democracy, also referred to as Western democracy, is a liberal political ideology and a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of classical liberalism.
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- In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions. In the emerging democracies with mixed economic systems Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia, the same two modes of making social choices prevail, though more scope is given to the method of voting and to decisions based directly or indirectly on it and less to the rule of the price mechanism. Elsewhere in the world, and even in smaller social units within the democracies, the social decisions are sometimes made by single individuals or small groups and sometimes (more and more rarely in this modern world) by a widely encompassing set of traditional rules for making the social choice in any given situation, for example, a religious code.
- Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 1
- Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
- Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, p. 330
- Even in the most liberal democracy the artist does not move with perfect freedom and unrestraint; even there he is restricted by innumerable considerations foreign to his art.
- Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999
- The ascension of the Taliban is, in short, the latest and greatest blow to Western liberal democracy’s legitimacy worldwide.
- Henry Hogan, Liberalism’s Sandy Tomb, The American Sun, 31 August 2021
- The Fall of Kabul is, though, perhaps the greatest discrediting of the liberal world order in the 21 st century. Liberalism’s inevitability, shattered by previous failures in the Third World and the populist upswing across the West, is finally buried in its sandy Kabul tomb.
- Henry Hogan, Liberalism’s Sandy Tomb, The American Sun, 31 August 2021
- Liberal democracy was never actually democratic, in the end. Plutocratic elites often found ways to bend or exploit popular will for their benefit. Unelected kritarchies could easily overturn popular referendums, such as California’s Prop 8 and Prop 187. These same courts legalized gay marriage in 2015 and added transgenderism as a protected category to the Civil Rights Act in 2020, all without popular consent. Corporate power often advanced unwanted social agendas using economic blackmail, such as the 2016 boycott of North Carolina following the passage of anti-transgender legislation. Corporate HR departments and social media terms & conditions dictate speech codes, forcing the average man to fear unemployment or deplatforming for non- elite approved opinions. Domestic agencies, such as the FBI, often persecute dissenters with conjured-up falsehoods about “political extremism.” Lastly, and perhaps most damningly, most Western politicians are beholden to certain classes of entrenched elite interests through corporate money and blackmail.
- Henry Hogan, Liberalism’s Sandy Tomb, The American Sun, 31 August 2021
- Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organization of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield economic power; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by "bad" or "good" men and more and more an impersonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep "the system" running.
- Robert Staughton Lynd, Foreword to Business as a System of Power (1943), p. xii
- Self-proclaimed liberal democracies already showed their true colors during the covid-19 pandemic, when they treated their citizens like mere cattle to be poked and prodded by whimsical technocrats.
- José Niño, The Russo-Ukrainian War: A New Opportunity for Demagogues to Destroy Freedoms at Home, Mises Institute, 14/5/22
- Let us confidently declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues – say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favour of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.
- Viktor Orbán, Tusnádfürdő speech, 28 July 2018
- And yet republican America was no more the end of history in the mid nineteenth century than Western democracy was after the Cold War. Liberal democracy as we understand it today in fact only properly took root across the Western world in the early years of the new century. It grew from the same bloodied soil of war, revolution, and economic crisis as its principal competitor ideologies of fascism on the right and communism on the left. The term itself had relatively little traction in America until President Woodrow Wilson roused the nation to war in its name: to “make the world safe for democracy” (he meant safe for America) in 1917. And it took the experience of yet more illiberal regimes and failed democracies—by 1941, there were just eleven democracies left amidst the carnage of the Second World War—before the commitment to combining liberal values and the institutions of democratic equality was reaffirmed amid the “general political fatigue” of the postwar moment.
- Simon Reid-Henry, Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971-2017 (2019), p. 3
- What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.
- Andrew Sullivan, "Of Modern Faith," The Daily Dish (14 December 2008)
- In terms of marginal efforts to improve liberal democracy, perhaps one of the best things we can do to entrench better values in our institutions and in society at large is to promote sentiocracy — working to gradually increase the concern for and representation of non-human beings in the political process, and thus to make sentiocracy the future of democracy.
- Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics (2022), p. 250
- An effective defense of the open society must begin with an empirically-minded account of its complex inner workings and its surpassing value. Liberal political order is humanity's greatest achievement. That may sound like hype, but it’s the cold, hard truth. The liberal state, and the global traffic of goods, people, and ideas that it has enabled has led to the greatest era of peace in history, to new horizons of practical knowledge, health, wealth, longevity, and equality, and massive decline in desperate poverty and needless suffering. It’s clearer than ever that the multicultural, liberal-democratic, capitalist welfare state is far-and-away the best humanity has ever done.
- Will Wilkinson, "Revitalizing Liberalism in the Age of Brexit and Trump" (30 November 2016)
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