The Democracy That Never Was

Liberal democracy is usually treated as an independent variable, as possessing the absolutes of democratic rule. Its variable forms, changing principles and practice, and conscious destruction by its own advocates, in particular the United States, however, suggest that it is not what it appears to be. This book argues that it is a dependent variable, the political form required by the changing configurations of national capital and their countervailing forces. The forms of liberal democracy have always shifted in concert with the mode of production as their premise.

The absolutes of liberal democracy, the author contends, have never been anything but the abstracted principles of the marketplace. Their nature has now become especially visible for what they have been because the premise as national capital development has changed, leaving liberal democracy as a form without its original content, and its present content out of keeping with a national jurisdiction. As a political form, it persists, but its role has been transformed from the regulation of national capital accumulation to the enforcer of the demands of global configurations of capital.

It is a role that its citizens implicitly understand, as revealed in widespread political cynicism, decreasing electoral participation, and declining legitimacy that require ever greater measures of deceit from political leaders and increased means of coercive social control, including militarized police forces and pervasive electronic surveillance. There can be no going back to the stage of national politics because the neoliberal content of liberal democratic policies represents the necessities of global capital. And it is the contradictions of global capital that define the character of early 21st century political conflict.

Gary Teeple is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada. He was also the Director of the Labour Studies Program at SFU from 2010-2016. He received an MA from the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, and a D. Phil. from the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Sussex, UK.