Liberal democracy’s neutral ideals mask racial and gendered domination

Evidence

From its emergence in the late eighteenth century through the present, European liberal democracy has always been saturated with capitalist powers and values. More generally, through its political and legal abstractions, it has secured the power and privileges of the socially dominant, consecrating not only private property and capital rights, but racialism and a subordinating and gender-normative sexual division of labor. Liberal democracy’s imbrication with privileges, inequalities, and exclusions is masked through explicit formulations such as equality before the law and freedom based in rights and through a trove of tacit precepts such as moral autonomy and abstract personhood. Together, these precepts secure unequal and unfree social, cultural, and economic life as they disavow their intersection with entrenched divisions of labor and class stratifications and their mobilization of norms of personhood heavily inflected by race, gender, and culture. Through their formal context and content neutrality, liberal democratic ideals of personhood, freedom, and equality appear universal while being saturated with norms of bourgeois white male heterosexual familialism. This is but one reason why the historically excluded, long after political enfranchisement, have yet to achieve substantive equality and belonging. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 406

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Marx’s critique of bourgeois rights and aligns with critical race theory on formal equality, and the reader’s existing work on sacrificial structures and colonial masking. — connects to: Liberal constitutional democracy historically reserved political reality to economically privileged minorities. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2336; Liberalism is organically embedded in the racialized nature-value hierarchy; Liberal democratic values are ambiguous and can legitimize domination — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice: Society,…, 114 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Liberalism is organically embedded in the racialized nature-value hierarchy #corroborates (0.90)
• Liberal democratic values are ambiguous and can legitimize domination #corroborates (0.90) — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 114
• The neutral liberal subject is defined against the racialized communitarian other #corroborates (0.90)
• Liberal democracies are simultaneously mechanisms of domination and empowerment #complicates (0.85) — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 47
• Male supremacy functions as a political strategy maintaining gendered power relations #corroborates (0.85) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 928
• Racial democracy rendered structural inequality invisible and individualized #expands (0.80)
• Liberal state neutrality presupposes cultural homogeneity among the governed #expands (0.80) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 358
• Racial democracy made inherited racial inequalities appear to be personal choices #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1223
• Democracy depends on recognizing politically unequal differences #qualifies (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2692
• Formal liberal citizenship equality masks an assimilationist strategy #corroborates (0.80)
• Racial compromises have sustained liberalism’s dominance in modern state formation #expands (0.80)
• Liberal citizenship theory excludes communal identity from public recognition because diversity complicates state mediation #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 880