n response to my column of last Sunday, Prof Shahid Imtiaz has offered a deeply sceptical, almost civilisational critique of contemporary democracy. While he insists that there is no viable alternative to it as a political concept, in his view, democracy in its present form stands profoundly compromised. It has increasingly become a political system that serves capitalist interests, particularly those of global investors tied to war industries and military technologies. Rather than representing the will or welfare of the people, democracy now appears to function as an instrument for a small cluster of powerful corporations whose business, as he starkly puts it, is the organised killing of people.

According to Shahid Imtiaz, this transformation has been facilitated by Western hegemony over global narratives. Democracy, along with notions such as human rights, freedom and global peace, has been elevated by the West into a sacred ideology, almost a new holy text. Because Western powers control global media and communication technologies, their version is instantly disseminated and widely accepted as universal and unquestionable. As a result, alternative interpretations or critiques of democracy are marginalized. Meanwhile, Western political practices are sanctified regardless of their contradictions.

He further argues that the foundational democratic principle of majority rule has been hollowed out over time. What was once meant to ensure collective participation and consent has been replaced by the logic of brute power, where “might is right.” Electoral processes, particularly in the United States, have repeatedly been alleged to be manipulated, eroding democratic legitimacy. The fact that institutions such as the US Supreme Court have had to intervene to decide electoral outcomes, he suggests, is itself indicative of a deeper democratic crisis rather than institutional strength.

Prof Imtiaz situates this crisis within a longer historical arc. Democracy, he notes, has survived successive ideological challenges—from fascism and Nazism to communism and Cold War rivalries—not necessarily because of its moral superiority alone, but because the West successfully produced vast bodies of literature and intellectual discourse portraying democracy as synonymous with humanity itself. Those who stood outside or against this model were systematically depicted as enemies of civilisation, thereby narrowing the space for alternative political imaginations.

At the same time, he argues that humanity is now entering an entirely new technological epoch shaped by artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems. New generations are being educated and socialised through digital technologies, including AI platforms such as ChatGPT, which fundamentally alter human cognition and social organisation. Existing democratic frameworks, shaped by earlier industrial and geopolitical eras, appear ill-equipped to govern this new reality. Hence, Shahid Imtiaz calls for entirely new systems of rule and new modes of political thought.

His critique culminates in a bleak diagnosis of the contemporary world as a moral battlefield, populated by what he metaphorically describes as “devils.” In this world, naked and brutal force is routinely justified, even when deployed against one’s own people. States behave like mad bulls, trampling norms, laws and lives alike. The pressing question, for him, is no longer what democracy means, but who, if anybody, can restrain unchecked power in such a violent global order.

While this critique is powerful and unsettling, it also risks conflating democracy as an ideal with democracy as historically distorted and practiced under specific material conditions. The central theoretical challenge, therefore, is not to abandon democracy, but to rescue it from its capture by capital, empire and securitised nationalism. Political theory makes a crucial distinction here: democracy is fundamentally a method of collective self-rule grounded in participation, accountability, and equality before the law, whereas capitalism is an economic system organised around private ownership, profit and accumulation. The two are not conceptually identical, even though they have often been historically intertwined.

Capitalism has thrived under openly non-democratic regimes, from colonial empires to military dictatorships and authoritarian neoliberal states. Conversely, democracy has also existed in forms that actively restrain capital through redistribution, welfare provision and social regulation, as seen in traditions of social democracy and democratic socialism. What we witness today is not democracy itself, but what theorists such as Wolfgang Streeck and Colin Crouch describe as post-democracy—a condition in which electoral rituals persist while real decision-making power is wielded by financial and corporate elites.

This distinction becomes even clearer when imperialism is examined. Actions such as US interventions in Venezuela cannot be understood as expressions of democracy, even if they are rhetorically justified in its name. From classical democratic thinkers like Rousseau and Kant to modern theorists such as Habermas, democracy presupposes popular sovereignty. Imperialism, on the other hand, negates sovereignty by imposing external coercion in place of internal consent. When powerful states undermine governments, impose sanctions or engineer regime change, they act as empires, not as democratic agents. To judge democracy by imperial behaviour is therefore to mistake foreign policy power for domestic political legitimacy.

Another major source of democratic erosion lies in the inflated and often fabricated notion of national security. Critical theorists such as Agamben, Foucault and Chomsky have shown how security discourse creates a permanent state of exception, suspends civil liberties and criminalises dissent in the name of survival. In this respect, Shahid Imtiaz is right to argue that modern states increasingly rule through fear. Yet this too represents democracy hollowed out by securitisation rather than democracy in its normative sense. A redefined democracy would prioritise human security over military power, treat dissent as a democratic resource rather than a threat, and reject permanent emergency as a normal mode of governance.

His critique of Western media dominance also resonates with the classic analyses of Gramsci and Herman and Chomsky regarding ideological hegemony and the manufacture of consent. However, ideological domination does not invalidate democracy as a concept; instead, it highlights the need for media pluralism; democratic control over communication platforms; and public regulation of digital infrastructure. Scandinavian democracies offer partial but instructive examples here, where media is less corporatized; public broadcasting remains strong; and political financing is tightly regulated.

In fact, the Scandinavian experience as a whole serves as a living counter-example to the claim that democracy must inevitably serve capital and violence. Nordic democracies demonstrate that democracy can be social rather than corporate; welfare-oriented rather than militarized; and consensus-based rather than dominated by majoritarian tyranny. Their defining features include strong labour unions, collective bargaining, high but socially legitimate taxation, minimal influence of war industries, transparency, low corruption and a conception of security rooted in health, education, and human dignity rather than military might.

Shahid Imtiaz is also right to emphasise that artificial intelligence is reshaping human consciousness and governance. Yet this transformation does not necessitate abandoning democracy; rather, it demands its deepening. Emerging democratic debates around algorithmic accountability, participatory digital governance, democratic oversight of AI systems and the treatment of data as a public good point towards renewal rather than obsolescence. The real danger lies not in democracy’s failure, but in the rise of technocracy without democratic control.

The image of a world ruled by devils is morally compelling, but theoretically incomplete. What we are witnessing is not the failure of democracy as an ideal, but the failure to universalise the material and ethical conditions necessary for its survival. Democracy cannot endure under conditions of extreme inequality, permanent war, corporate sovereignty and fear-based governance. Where these conditions are resisted, as in social democracies, democracy not only survives but evolves.

In this sense, Prof Shahid Imtiaz offers a diagnosis of democratic degeneration rather than a final verdict on democracy itself. His despair stems from observing democracy as practiced by empires, not democracy as collective self-rule. If democracy is disentangled from capitalist interest groups, imperial ambitions and fabricated national security doctrines and re-grounded in social equality, peace, participatory ethics and human dignity, it does not come to an end—it begins anew. The Scandinavian experience, therefore, is not an anomaly but a proof of possibility: that democracy, once liberated from the devils of power, can still remain a human project rather than a holy text of domination.

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.