Commentary
Democracy and its lost presuppositions
Democracy is not a proverbial sick man to be cured; rather, it is a body that has lost the conditions that support its life, and requires another body altogether.
More and more often, “democracy” is invoked as something that is constantly at stake – from international conflicts to freedom of expression, from censorship to the separation of state powers. The term thus functions like an automatic reassurance, as if uttering it were enough to make one feel one is on the right side. Except that, at the same time, the concrete reality of this stake is becoming ever more insubstantial. Not because “people no longer believe in democratic values,” but because democracy today no longer has available the material presuppositions that supported it in the past.
Whether we call it post-democracy, decline, regression, authoritarian threat or the erosion of liberal rights, the diagnosis is the same. The 52nd edition of the Freedom House report confirms this, showing that 2024 was the 19th consecutive year of global decline in freedom, with 60 countries seeing their indicators of political rights and civil liberties worsen.
However, the analyses denouncing the erosion and crisis of democracy almost always end with the same recipe, that of the moral and civil appeal: mobilize, defend the principles, remember the virtues of freedom, “do more.” The idea that democracy can be saved through a surplus of values-based and civil commitment is reassuring because it leaves the fundamental premise intact: that there is a route to save democracy. But this is a hypothesis that must not be taken for granted.
Liberal democracy does not arise “in a vacuum,” but rests on three well-defined prerequisites: a minimum level of social integration of its popular base; a relative autonomy of the collective decision-making process; and, above all, a separation between inequality in the private sphere and equality in the political sphere. This last condition – the “third leg” of democracy – has today cracked irreparably, dragging the first two down with it. The process of modernization, if we may call it that, has sawed off the branch upon which democracy rested.
“Modernization,” after all, is a neutral concept. More to the point, over the last 40 years, it has been the economic and institutional order of neoliberal capitalism that has eroded the third leg of democracy, favoring the concentration of wealth and power. In parallel, it has nullified the role of intermediate for social support played by political parties and transformed them into mere parts of the state and of the mass media.
Thus, the much-praised “market” has become completely steeped in non-economic interests. The result has been the rise of political capitalism – a system in which political power and capital support each other and which – crucially – denies by definition the material conditions for liberal democracy.
In this framework, the values-based appeal for “more democracy” is false consciousness. It is unprocessed grief that survives only as an ethical horizon of meaning, not as effective capacity and awareness of the conditions of possibility necessary to bring the lost object back to life. Because, as Andrea Fabozzi wrote in his op-ed in il manifesto on Friday, December 12, we need more democracy, not less. The appeal to democratic values is thus equivalent to phantom limb syndrome – like the leg that is no longer there but which we delude ourselves into thinking we still have.
The reaction that some like to call “populist” – always falling into the trap of value (pre)judgment – taps into this tension, albeit without being able to resolve it. It too ends up crashing against the impossibility of restoring the material and institutional conditions for the functioning of liberal democracy. The international projection of this reaction – from Trump to autocracies, colonial wars, conflicts for resources – must be rejected by any and every means. The rise of forces promising to restore democracy through authoritarian shortcuts does nothing but aggravate the problem.
The question, then, is not how to return to the liberal democracy of the last century, but whether it is still possible to reconstruct the necessary preconditions that supported it (this will be discussed from January 23 to 25, 2026, at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa in the conference “Democrazia alla prova. Tre giorni di analisi e dialoghi” – “Democracy put to the test. Three days of analysis and dialogue”). Until this theme is addressed in all its implications, public discussion will continue to wander back and forth between moral alarm and calls to return to civic virtues, leaving the crucial issue unresolved and the field open for further authoritarian involutions.
Democracy is not a proverbial sick man to be cured; rather, it is a body that has lost the conditions that support its life, and requires another body altogether. Its defense does not involve advocacy for preserving the existing state of affairs. If there is still a meaningful role for political analysis today, it lies in recognizing that the problem to face is the deep fracture that the processes of capitalist modernization have imposed on the conditions enabling the functioning of our – always imperfect and gap-riddled – democracy.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-democrazia-e-i-suoi-presupposti-perduti on 2025-12-16