A stable irony of discourse: that liberal democracy tends to be most resented by the people most protected by it. The further removed you are from the daily threat of authoritarian power, the more tempting it becomes to fantasize about its efficiency. The more abstract rights become in a person’s life, the easier they are to dismiss.

Comfort breeds complacency and performance. In societies that enjoy a long stretch of liberal governance, democratic freedoms are background noise: ambient and expected, like electricity or clean water. The routines of representative government, the mechanisms of legal accountability, the open press, the transfer of power - they all fade into the beige wallpaper of daily life. In that state, the great democratic tradition no longer feels heroic or hard-won. It feels boring.

And boredom is fatal to reverence.

What replaces reverence is a cocktail of cynicism, contrarianism, and click-driven aesthetic politics. Somewhere along the line, liberal democracy becomes too obvious to appreciate and too flawed to defend. If you are lucky enough never to have known a journalist to be disappeared, a ballot box to be burned, or a judge to be jailed for ruling against the government, it becomes easy to sneer at the mild, inelegant compromises of liberalism. If you have never seen a university shuttered or a minority purged, the warnings begin to sound like melodrama.

To be born in a liberal democracy is to inherit a paradox: the freedom to denounce the very system that grants you the freedom to denounce it.

No guards will drag you away. No informants will whisper your words into the ears of secret police. You will publish, protest, and perhaps profit.

Many do. Especially now.

Liberal democracy, as an idea, did not drop from the heavens. It was forged - painfully, bloodily, clumsily - in the wake of absolutism and theocratic rule. The 18th century Enlightenment thinkers did not preach liberty because it was trendy. They preached it because they had seen what the absence of liberty produced: inquisitions, tyranny, a kind of suffocating certainty imposed from above.

Voltaire’s skepticism, Montesquieu’s separation of powers, Locke’s inviolable natural rights - all these were defenses against the return of Leviathan. Liberal democracy was not designed to be a utopia. It was designed to be a safeguard.

This is easy to forget when utopia seems tantalizingly within reach. The political left dreams of leveling inequality so thoroughly that no difference can breed contempt. The right dreams of reinstating an organic hierarchy strong enough to eliminate chaos. The liberal democratic state, meanwhile, promises only the messy, fragile balance of competing forces, mediated through process, restrained by law, and upheld (ideally) by civic trust.

It is not a thrilling vision.

But it is the one that has survived.

The problem with historical success is that it breeds ideological amnesia. This is how we end up with TikToks praising Stalin, YouTubers reenacting monarchy as a lifestyle brand, and entire subreddits pining for some aesthetic of fascism as if it were just sharper tailoring and better fonts.

When the liberal democratic system is working well, it is nearly invisible. Roads are paved, however slowly. Schools function. Newspapers criticize the government without fear. It is, frankly, boring. The kinds of people who seek narrative intensity - those who romanticize revolution or order - find little to feed on in a society built for moderation and muddling through.

So they turn against it, imagining that the system’s greatest achievement - its dull normalcy - is evidence of decline.

There is a reason why both fascist and Marxist regimes invest heavily in aesthetics. The images of triumphant workers or marching columns do something that ballots and procedural justice cannot: they offer emotional satisfaction. Liberal democracy, which insists on compromise and accepts ambiguity, offers no such thrill.

Authoritarians offer certainty. They offer the elimination of ambiguity, of dissent, of the tiresome need to persuade one’s fellow citizens. And they often do so in the name of some higher cause: national greatness, historical justice, cultural rebirth.

You can’t easily rally a crowd around fiscal oversight committees. But you can around revolution or restoration. And if you’ve never lived under a regime that made good on its promises of ideological purity through repression, it’s easy to imagine that the costs would be worth it. Or that there would be no costs at all.

History disagrees.

Liberal democracy is not a religion. It requires no profession of belief, only adherence to the process. You do not need to love your opponents, only to tolerate their existence. This makes it more robust than faith-based systems, but also more brittle in the face of ideological fervor.

It is not emotionally satisfying. It offers no redemption arc, no final utopia, no ecstatic oneness with the state. It offers stability, and the conditions for people to build their own meaning, which many find more difficult than accepting a prewritten script.

But this is exactly why it works. Liberalism asks you to accept a society where the worst people you know are allowed to speak. Not because they are right, but because the alternative is a system in which someone - eventually, someone worse - gets to decide who speaks at all.

This bargain is not made by those who crave certainty. It is made by those who understand what it costs to lose the right to choose.

The most strident critics of liberal democracy tend to be those whose security is least threatened by its loss. The Harvard-educated columnist calling for revolution, the suburban influencer mocking proceduralism, the think-tank contrarian flirting with Caesarism - they can afford their contempt. Their passports are strong. Their bank accounts are protected. Their dissent is cushioned by the very thing they deride.

Contrast this with those who flee from illiberal regimes, who cross borders at night, who risk imprisonment for the chance to vote. They do not scorn liberal democracy. They seek it with urgency. Not because it is perfect, but because it is better than what they had.

To have never lived without liberal democracy is to be inoculated against its necessity. Like oxygen, it is taken for granted until it is withdrawn. The cries of those who have never suffocated ring louder than the gasps of those who have just begun to breathe.

It’s tempting to think that progress moves in straight lines, that the trajectory of freedom is ever upward. But history suggests otherwise. Republics collapse. Democracies backslide. The institutions we assume are permanent are, in fact, precarious.

What sustains liberal democracy is not belief so much as maintenance. Courts must be upheld. Elections administered. Norms respected. These are not self-sustaining phenomena. They are human institutions, and they rot when neglected.

And they are neglected most by those who mistake their good fortune for a natural law.

One of the lesser-known lines from Cicero - who lived, inconveniently, through the death of the Roman Republic - is that a state is best judged not by how it treats its heroes but by how it treats its enemies. Liberal democracy, by this measure, is one of the rare systems that allows its enemies to thrive. It gives them platforms, protection, even pensions.

This is not a flaw. It is the price of freedom.

But it also means that the enemies of liberalism have home-field advantage. They can destroy the game while still enjoying its rules. Unless, of course, the rest of us remember that the rules are not arbitrary, that the system is not accidental, and that boredom is sometimes the best possible outcome.

You can only afford to hate liberal democracy if you think it will never disappear.

The people who know otherwise do not.