Liberal democracy’s separate discursive register enables it to critique capitalism.

Evidence

The point is simply that as long as it operated in a different lexical and semiotic register from capital, liberal democratic principles and expectations could be mobilized to limit capitalist productions of value and market distributions; they could be a platform for critiques of those values and distributions, and they could gestate more radical democratic aspirations. When this other register is lost, when market values become the only values, when liberal democracy is fully transformed into market democracy, what disappears is this capacity to limit, this platform of critique, and this source of radical democratic inspiration and aspiration. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 410

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Critiques conducted within political discourse reinforce the system they claim to scrutinize — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 446; Advanced capitalism needs two contradictory legitimating discourses at once — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 275

Broader Connections

• Critiques conducted within political discourse reinforce the system they claim to scrutinize #complicates (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 446
• Advanced capitalism needs two contradictory legitimating discourses at once #expands (0.75) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 275