The Demon in Democracy, as Marxism and Liberal Democracy Merge.
Posted by Ed Folsom, August 23, 2026.
Why did Eastern Europe’s communist apparatchiks transition so smoothly into the West’s liberal democratic system after the fall of Soviet and Eastern European communism? Why were anti-communists met with continuing suspicion by the same system? Ryszard Legutko, former Polish anti-communist dissident thinks it’s because communism and liberal democracy have so much in common at their roots.
Legutko was the editor of the quarterly samizdat journal, Arka, the philosophy journal of the anti-communist organization, Solidarity, from 1983 to 1989. Solidarity was led by a man named Lech Walesa. For those who don’t remember those times, Walesa and Solidarity, along with Pope John Paul II, figured prominently in the collapse of Eastern European Communism in late 1989. Legutko went on to serve as a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2024 and is now a philosophy professor at the Jagiellonian University, in Krakow, Poland.
What Legutko points to in his 2016 book, “The Demon in Democracy–Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies,” might explain a lot of what is going on in the U.S. today and the sudden willingness of a significant part of the American public to openly embrace socialism. Regarding that open embrace, The Hill recently reported on a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted from August 12 through August 14, 2026:
“In the CBS News/YouGov poll, socialism was seen in a ‘very positive’ or ‘somewhat positive’ light by 58 percent of Democratic respondents, with 18 percent of the same group seeing the ideology in a ‘somewhat negative’ or ‘very negative’ light. Twenty-four percent of Democrats had ‘no opinion’ on the ideology.
Thirty-two percent of Democratic respondents in the poll said they see capitalism in a ‘very positive’ or ‘somewhat positive’ light, while 50 percent said they saw it in a ‘somewhat negative’ or ‘very negative’ light. Eighteen percent of the group had ‘no opinion.’”
Marxism and liberal democracy share Enlightenment-era roots.
Legutko traces the philosophical roots of Eastern European socialism under Communist Party rule and the philosophical roots of liberal democracy to Enlightenment-era philosophy. You might wonder how Enlightenment-era philosophy that gives primacy to the individual and emphasizes the consent of the governed, the social contract, democracy, and the rule of law, could have led to socialist totalitarianism in the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern European peoples’ democracies. But that did happen, and Legutko points to parallels between Marxism and liberal democracy that threaten to lead us there again.
It’s not as if the masses are sitting around reading Enlightenment-era philosophy these days, but it has left its mark on history. Maximilien Robespierre read Jean Jacques Rousseau, which inspired Robespierre to form the Jacobin Club and the Committee for Public Safety, and to orchestrate the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Later, Karl Marx was influenced by the Enlightenment-era theory of historical progression through stages, the idea that society is governed by laws that reason and science can reveal, and the idea that, to flourish, humanity’s potential must be emancipated from religion and the oppression of traditional power structures.
Vladimir Lenin later became a great admirer of both Marx’s philosophy of historical and dialectical materialism and Maximilien Robespierre’s revolutionary methods. Lenin’s admiration for the work of his predecessors begat the Soviet Socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, the building of Soviet socialism, and Soviet socialist totalitarianism.
As Legutko points out, liberal democracy shares Marxism’s idea of history as unidirectional, moving inexorably in the direction of progress. Both Marxists and liberal-democrats view themselves leading humanity inexorably to higher and higher levels of progress through rationality and science. Neither, therefore, has time for anything that opposes their agenda. Opposition can serve no function but to prolong humanity’s suffering under anachronistic systems of oppression. In relatively recent American parlance, such “divisiveness” only hinders the “unity” of thought and action needed for progress to march onward to true equality, democracy, and justice.
Marxism.
Marxism holds that all of human consciousness is formed by the material means of production and people’s relations to those means: society’s economic “base.” Around this “base,” a “superstructure” of customs, laws, and institutions develops to reinforce and maintain it. All of this happens in accordance with the laws of historical development that Marx discovered. At the capitalism stage of historical development, the bourgeoisie own the means of production and exploit the “surplus value” created by the labor of the property-less proletariat. The “superstructure” that exists around the capitalist “base” facilitates the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of the proletariat.
At the next stage of historical development, a new base must form when the proletariat class rises up against its bourgeois exploiters and seizes control of the means of production. A new superstructure will be built to support the new socialist base. Productive property will no longer be owned by individuals. It will be a common good, owned publicly and in common. Because human consciousness–human understanding of what constitutes reality itself–originates entirely from the material relations of the people to the means of production, what people perceive as reality itself will change to align with these new relations.
In the capitalism-to-socialism transition, as socialism is built, the customs, laws, and institutions of the capitalist superstructure must be done away with in favor of a socialist superstructure that supports people’s new socialist relations to the new economic base. Eventually, as these new relations to the means of production develop human consciousness to a higher level, there will no longer be any need for a state. The state will simply wither away and die at this final stage of historical development, and communism will prevail. Amen.
Up to the point when Soviet and Eastern European socialism/communism fell, the race was on between liberal democracy in the West and socialism/communism in the East. From the Western point of view, this race pitted freedom and democracy in the West against anti-democratic tyranny and central planning in the East. When the project to “build socialism” failed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Eastern Europe, many in the West thought that history had rendered its final verdict in favor of Western liberal democracy: freedom had prevailed over tyranny!
But, as Ryszgard Legutko points out (and he was there, throughout), the former communists were often more welcome in the liberal democratic system that replaced socialism than the anti-communists who remained firmly anti-communist. The liberal democratic system was much more comfortable incorporating former communists who had run the communist system of secret police, imprisonment for wrongthink, etc., than it was with anti-communists who remained openly anti-communist, like Legutko.
Totalitarian seeds common to the philosophies of liberal Democracy and Marxism.
Like Marxists, liberal democrats believe their politics represent human progress and justice itself. They also believe that history is destined to march toward progress and justice, placing them on the “right” side of it.
Anything not within the Marxist or the liberal-democratic program, as the case may be, is not progress or justice. For both Marxists and liberal democrats, this leads to the ideological position that anything that does not actively further their program opposes it. As an aside, we saw this mindset demonstrated in the U.S. in 2020-2021, when Black Lives Matter and its supporters insisted that, “silence is violence,” “silence is complicity,” and failing to be actively anti-racist is racist. For both the Marxist and the liberal democrat, you either join them in the fight for progress and justice or you stand in the way of progress and justice. There is no in-between.
Both Marxists and liberal democrats also hold that Western society is built on systems of oppression that protect certain groups as oppressors and exploiters while oppressing and exploiting others. And each group claims to have the answer for eliminating existing systems of oppression and the beliefs, social conventions, and institutions that support them.
While the Marxist model draws its exploiter/exploited (oppressor/oppressed) line mainly at economic class distinctions, liberal democracy’s oppressor/oppressed model focuses on class, race, and gender. For both, progress’s march to equality and justice requires changing people’s consciousness at the individual level, to root out all the ideas that the systems of oppression have formed in the human mind that foster exploitation and oppression.
These philosophical beliefs lead both Marxists and adherents of liberal democracy to politicize nearly every aspect of life, in a constant search to root out all bourgeois, capitalist, ideas and tendencies not consistent with the building of socialism (in Marxism), and all non-liberal-democratic ideas and tendencies that impede the march of progress to equality, democracy, and justice (in liberal democracy).
This quest to eliminate systems of oppression at the level of the human mind is a totalitarian tendency common to both liberal democracy and former Soviet and Eastern European socialism/communism. Legutko explains the phenomenon of political correctness in liberal-democratic societies as the attempt to scrub the mind of disobedient thoughts through speech control:
“[T]he duty of citizens of the liberal-democratic society is to participate in the great collective enterprise, where everyone cooperates with everyone else at all levels and under all circumstances…Because the logic of this system turns on ‘dialogue,’ ‘respect,’ ‘equal rights,’ openness,’ and ‘tolerance,’ everything is by definition political and nothing that relates, however remotely, to these notions is trivial, minor or irrelevant. A slight offensive remark must always be regarded as a manifestation of mortal sin. What seems a barely visible mark on the surface conceals underneath swirling currents of hatred, intolerance, racism, and hegemony. The body responsible for ensuring that these terrible things do not surface is the state, with all the instruments at its disposal. It is the state that should incessantly work to impose and improve cooperation policies by removing all real and potential barriers, creating a favorable legal environment, and reshaping public space and education in such a way that the people’s minds internalize the rules of politically correct thinking…[A]t the beginning at the very top [of the slippery slope], is the thought with which it all began — a thought-crime, a mental sin that constitutes the first act of disobedience to holy political principles. Whoever seeks the remedy must start with the political therapy of people’s minds.”
Liberal democracy creates its own moralist-commissar-informers to enforce its orthodoxy.
For this reason, the personal truly is the political in both Marxism and liberal democracy. The political realm takes over the personal realm out of a belief in necessity. Legutko points out, though, that in liberal democracy the government isn’t the only agent tasked with overseeing the rules of cooperation and fighting against all “noncollaborative” groups:
“Actually, this responsibility rests on everyone’s shoulders and everyone is responsible for tracking what is wrong and implementing what is right. In this respect, liberal democracy has achieved at least as much as communism and perhaps even more. Real socialism used coercion in the most [palpable] sense of the word; the authorities treated acts of disobedience with brutality and the bloody birth of the system was not without effect on the behavior of the next generation. In a liberal democracy, a vast part of this process occurs spontaneously, and the legal and political coercion is to some extent a response to public demand and not an arbitrary act of violence against society. Hence the large crowds of individuals who are willing…to track down dissident words, actions and intentions in their immediate vicinity…
The atmosphere the systems produce is particularly conducive to engendering a certain type of mentality: that of a moralist, a commissar, and an informer rolled into one. In one sense, this person may think that he performs something particularly valuable to humanity; in another, the situation helps him to develop a sense of power otherwise unavailable to him; and in a third, he often cannot resist the temptation to indulge in a low desire to harm others with impunity. For this reason tracking opposition and defending orthodoxy turned out to be so attractive that more and more people fail to resist it.”
Regarding these totalitarian tendencies in general and the moralist-commissar-informers in particular, reflect back on the period from 2020 through 2022 in this country. Did you happen to run afoul of the moralizing commissar-informers who loudly and proudly asserted themselves in all aspects of daily life during the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter/Covid pandemic years?
People who actively and consistently chanted the liberal-democratic catechism and demonstrated obedience to its anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-transphobe, anti-“anti-science” tenets might have avoided it. And there were plenty of lawn signs available to help people tell the world that they believe “Black Lives Matter,” or that “In This House We Believe” a whole list of liberal-democratic platitudes.
But if you questioned or pushed back on liberal-democracy’s catechism, or if you merely remained silent regarding your position on it, you risked falling under suspicion. Silence, we were told, was “complicity.” Silence was “violence.” In fact, it was and still is difficult to engage in any discussion with anyone committed to the liberal-democratic catechism without them veering into a discussion touching on politics.
There’s an old saying that polite discussion should avoid two topics: politics and religion. But a Marxist will tell you that politeness is a bourgeois value, and the committed liberal-democrat will tell you that being polite manifests “whiteness;” a very bad sin. The Marxist and the committed liberal-democrat must constantly probe the minds of those they communicate with, to identify who among them harbors disobedient thoughts.
Coercion to freedom as Marxism and liberal democracy merge.
Legutko published “The Devil in Democracy” in 2016, in Poland. His views of Eastern European communism were formed while living under its oppression. His views of liberal democracy were formed mostly from observing it in practice in the European Union. Communist ideology hasn’t changed much, and liberal democracy is essentially the same ideology here in the U.S. as in the E.U., both subject to the same totalitarian tendencies.
How could an Enlightenment-era focus on the value of the individual, on democracy, and on equality have gotten twisted into Marxist totalitarian socialism? How could it twist into totalitarianism under liberal democracy?
Rousseau, himself, planted the seeds in “The Social Contract.” There, Rousseau began his discussion of the best way to ensure democratic rule, by exploring how best to arrive at the “general will” of the people. He definitely did not advocate discerning the “general will” by periodically polling the public through elections, and he never made clear precisely how he would determine it.
But by the end of “The Social Contract,” Rousseau was telling us, “Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.” Here we see the concept of emancipation by coercion: forcing individuals to be free by forcing them to obey the “general will,” whatever that is. The enlightenment-era philosophy that underpins both Marxism and liberal democracy contains the seeds of emancipation by coercion. The contradiction begins at the beginning, and with that everything becomes a matter of what the would-be emancipators of humanity believe is necessary to emancipate humanity.
Now we are told that history’s march toward equality requires equal outcomes for arbitrarily-drawn groups–“equity.” And, somehow, the results of free and fair elections are a “threat to democracy,” evidently because they deviate from the general will, or from history’s inexorable march toward equality and justice, as liberal democracy’s determiners have determined.
The adherents of liberal democracy are merging with the Marxists.
Next time.
In my next blog post, I intend to explore why the common roots of Marxism and liberal democracy have led to increasing acceptance of socialism by American liberal-democrats (would it be better to call them liberal-democracyists?). It’s an odd development from the standpoint of the Cold War, which pitted Western liberal democracy and its free markets and personal freedoms, against communism with its centrally-planned socialist economy and severely curtailed personal freedoms. But in another sense, it’s just another aspect of the totalitarian demon that lurks in liberal democracy.
Until next time…
