Is liberal democracy the Santa Claus of modernity?

[ionelv]

While reading the conversation between Ernu and Racu about Stăniloae, legionarism and BOR, it dawned on me that liberal democracy more often than not overlaps almost too perfectly with Santa Claus: a nice soothing grandpa that makes it all better by doling out free gifts at periodic intervals …

…except of course that he is not our grandpa, he exists only in our collective imagination, the gifts are not free as we always pay for them one way or another and with interest, and the joy brought by these gifts only lasts a few days as the bill eventually comes for these gifts and the monotony and dreariness of our normal existence resume until the next gifting event. There is also some Sisyphean angle to Santa Claus and liberal democracy, but that is a discussion for another time.

Comments

[ioplokon]

From the theory perspective, the liberal state doesn't give us anything but rather is the means by which we as a society give things to ourselves (which is still not not Santa Claus, I guess?)

I tend to see it more as a continuous battle against the feudal mode of politics reasserting itself.

[ionelv]

Yeah, that’s exactly it: the theory part is always beautiful and clean. The reality, even from the beginning, is that liberal democracy was oversold (e.g. the curtailing of voting rights of whole swaths of society) and even today, liberal democracy has a big credibility gap between what it promises and what it delivers. You and many will say: but liberal democracy is the best choice we have.

My question is: is it really the best choice, or have we lulled ourselves into fatalism and/or overly optimistic forecasts when 30-40% of West’s citizenry does not even bother to vote or when our political class and our system of laws and courts are overwhelmingly captured by neoliberals and billionaire interests? Is this really the best, because if it is, we are doomed.

[ionelv]

I forgot to mention that pork-barrel politics is exactly the “gifting” I was talking about. Similarly, crooked laws that give an advantage to only a subset of the electorate is another way of “gifting” some that are more equal than others (e.g. corporate citizenship going as far as creating opaque PACs that billionaires use to buy influence, or draconian laws for petty crime and loopholes and slaps on the wrist for white-collar crime that often have much larger negative societal impact, or socializing losses and privatizing profits as seen during subprime crisis).