Trevor Jackson, at NYRB: Capitalism and democracy are not in a "difficult marriage" (as Martin Wolf would have it). Rather: "they proceed from entirely different premises. Democracy is predicated on formal, substantive equality: one person, one vote. Capitalism is not, and is incompatible with substative equality, because it is composed of workers and owners, success and failure, rich and poor. Capitalism is about self-interest and private gain; democracy is about public interest and civic responsibility. Capitalism's moral justifications revolve around deservedness, efficiency, and individual risk-taking, none of which are important justifications for democracy. Capitalism is predicated on atomized individuals, democracy on shared publics."
"Private property, which is at the core of capitalism, is fundamentally opposed to unfettered freedom, because property involves the ability to exclude all other human beings from some part of the world. I am not free to live in your house, or even perhaps to walk across your land. I am not free to eat your dinner, even if I am starving and you intend to throw it away--even if I cooked it."
"Scholars like Quinn Slobodian, Dara Orenstein, Amy Offner, Sam Wetherell, and Laleh Khalili have detailed at length the ways that neoliberal economic policies have worked to insulate property ownership from democratic policies in the postcolonial age."
"If capitalism and democracy are not fundamentally dependent on each other, then there is no crisis 'of' them as a coherent system. The capitalism part seems to be doing just fine. The problem is the threat that unfettered capitalism poses to democracy, and specifically, the inability of the ideology of political liberalism to contain that threat."