Liberal democracy is usually treated as an independent variable, as possessing the absolutes of democratic rule. Its variable forms, changing principles and practice, and conscious destruction by its own advocates, in particular the United States, however, suggest that it is not what it appears to be. This book argues that it is a dependent variable, the political form required by the development of particular configurations of national capital and their countervailing forces. The forms of liberal democracy have always changed in concert with the mode of production as their premise.

The subject of this treatise is that these absolutes were never anything but the abstracted principles of the marketplace. Their nature has become especially visible now for what it is because the premise in national capital development has changed, leaving liberal democracy as a form without its original content, and its present content no longer conforms to a national jurisdiction. As a political form, it persists, but its role has changed from the regulation of national capital accumulation to the enforcer of the demands of global configurations of capital. It is a role that its citizens implicitly understand, as revealed in widespread political cynicism, decreasing electoral participation, and declining legitimacy that require ever greater measures of deceit from political leaders and increased means of coercive social control, including militarized police forces and pervasive electronic surveillance.