Liberal democracy in capitalist states is designed to protect capital accumulation, not to realise popular rule. Liberalism and fascism form a spectrum of crisis management for the same order: one governs through consent and rights, the other through open violence and emergency powers. Liberalism is also a colonial technology, built on conquest, dispossession, and the ongoing denial or containment of sovereignty.
‘Social democratic’ parties are structurally captured because their welfare promises depend on continued growth, private investment, and extractive industry. They cannot seriously confront capital or colonisation without undermining the conditions that keep them in office, so they learn to police the limits of what can be demanded or imagined.