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, loc. 406