[jammies]

I'd be interested to hear the alternative systems to liberal democracy we should be embracing instead of it. I find the great lack in the criticisms of it is that, despite how you feel philosophically about its shortcomings, every other political system that has been tried is (at minimum) significantly worse. Since liberalism is the foundation of liberal democracy, if you wish a different foundation, you envision a different political system.

This is a problem with philosophy in general, as is evidenced by the earlier mention of post-modernism, a philosophy which claims there are no objective truths. Whether or not you can convincingly argue such is irrelevant when we live in a world not only shaped by the objective truths of science, but one that demonstrates that objective truth with every jet airplane that successfully flies, every satellite, every heart transplant, every cell phone and even every nuclear weapon. The assumption that there is an objective reality that can be described by science WORKS, and all the theorizing that says reality is a consensus is negated by the complete ineffectiveness of alternatives to science that do *not* work, no matter how many believe in that alternative. When philosophy is disproved by reality, it is not a flaw in reality that is exposed.

The same follows for political philosophy, the problems with, for example, Marxism, come from it predicting the end point of an industrial future that did not come to pass. The working class did not rise up, unless by "rise up" you mean transform itself into a richer and more influential middle class. Similarly, fascism relies on theories of racial differences which are simply untrue and disproved by genetics. Monarchy, too, relies on the mystical exceptionalism of bloodlines which are piffle and nonsense. The first test of political philosophizing is discarding all such mendacious codswallop by simply referring to facts.