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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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The Deprogram
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"As revolutionaries, we don't have the right to say that we're tired of explaining. We must never stop explaining. We also know that when the people understand, they cannot but follow us. In any case, we, the people, have no enemies when it comes to peoples. Our only enemies are the imperialist regimes and organizations." Thomas Sankara, 1985
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I hate the "argument", which has been repeated to me verbatim by the way, that "The CCP is only doing these improvements so they can stay in power."
Like what a dystopian ass backwards way of saying "people in power gave a responsibility to the people they hold power over."
Literally every state acts in that way. That's the point of a political party (theoretically) in a liberal democracy. They're supposed to improve the lives of normal people.
Why is it that when a Western political party comes to power in a 4 year election, and do fuck all but rob the public, that's just seen aa normal?! If a party is improving people's lives materially, would they not always be voted in? For what reason would someone have to vote in another party if things were getting better for them under the current administration?
It's literally not. Liberals believe that the point of the state is merely to protect an arbitrary list "God-given rights" and then to remain largely hands-off after the fact. The government under liberal ideology doesn't have an expectation to improve people's lives. Even liberals who are more "leftist," i.e. social liberals, just advocate for expanding the list of "God-given rights" to include things like health care. They don't just say that they support health care because it improves people's lives, they instead debate over whether or not health care is a "human right."
Liberals also do not see democracy as a tool, a means, to an end, where that end is improving people's lives. Liberals see democracy as the end itself. They evaluate a country as "democratic" based on whether or not they follow a certain set of rituals, like elections, multiple parties, etc. Whether or not it produces good or bad results does not matter to them. You can point to outcomes all you want between something like China and the US showing the different in government popularity or other metrics, and nothing will phase them, because they will just point to a difference rituals as a rebuttal, i.e. differences in the process, saying for example that not having multi-party competition is sufficient proof they're not democratic.
An interesting phenomenon that I have noticed is precisely because liberals do not believe the government has any obligation to the people, they assume all governments necessarily must be hated, and so in a "free" society, people will hate their government. It is indeed bizarre but it is a real phenomenon. Liberals see low approval ratings as proof a country is a democracy because "the people can freely criticize the government," but they see very high approval ratings as evidence a country is autocratic, because they genuinely do not believe it is even possible for a government to have very high popularity, and thus will take it as evidence that "people are not free to criticize the government." If you show a liberal the high approval ratings of China's government they actually interpret that as evidence they must not be a democracy.
The liberal worldview is very distant from something like Confucianism or Marxism which believes that the government's obligation is to improve the people's wellbeing. Not only do liberals not believe this, but whenever they see a government actually improving people's lives, they are so convinced such a thing is impossible that there must be some sort of greater evil nefarious plot behind it.
Spot on.
This is also why to liberals term limits are one of the most important of those "rituals". In the US they were specifically instituted because FDR just kept winning elections on account of people believing their lives were improving because of his policies.
That one specifically is a very American point of view as term limits don't even exist in all western liberal democracies. Xi still hasn't been in power as long as Angela Merkel was. Canadian prime ministers tend to serve for a very long time as well.
True, but we all know the general western reaction to amending the law to extend the term limits in any way.
But here we arrive at another unspoken assumption of western democracy, namely that whatever idiosyncratic procedures a particular liberal democracy might have, they are more or less set in stone and any proposed reform will easily be portrayed as anti-democratic.
This is absolutely spot on. 💯
Wonderful overview!