"The lack of public buy-in is particularly easy to demonstrate in the case of liberal democracy, where it has long been known that these systems are not sustained by the prevalence of either liberal or democratic values in the public at large. (The fact that democratic institutions are essentially imposed upon the people by elites was referred to, famously, by Thomas Dye and Harmon Ziegler as The Irony of Democracy.)"
Reproducing civilization
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/reproducing-civilization
"[Intuitively, w]e should all pitch in and do our part, selflessly devoting ourselves to the larger social project, sharing equally in the benefits. And yet [in the world] what stands out most prominently are institutional arrangements that not only fail to promote these ideals, but in certain ways block their realization. In the political realm, we have a system of individual rights that recruits the power of the state to provide legal protection for self-evidently anti-social [...] behavior."