Karl Popper once argued that the defining virtue of democracy lies not in expressing a collective will or fulfilling a historical destiny, but in something more modest—and more radical: fallibility. A democratic society, in Popper’s view, is one that accepts its own capacity for error. It builds institutions that allow rulers to be removed without violence, policies to be revised without catastrophe, and political conflict to unfold through open debate rather than force. Democracy matters not because it guarantees truth or justice, but because it institutionalizes the possibility of being wrong.

This vision of the open society remains one of the most compelling defenses of liberal democracy. Yet today, it is colliding with political and economic realities it was never designed to withstand. Across much of the world, the procedures of democracy persist in form while their substance erodes under mounting inequality, imperial coercion, and authoritarian drift. The result is not simply democratic decline, but democratic hollowing—institutions that survive even as their capacity for self-correction withers.

From a Marxist perspective, this outcome is not surprising. Popper’s account captures something real and valuable about democratic procedure, but it abstracts from the material relations of power that structure those procedures in the first place. Political forms do not float above society. They are embedded in historically specific modes of production and global hierarchies. Liberal democracy emerged alongside capitalism and empire, and for much of its history it has functioned not only as a system of self-correction, but as a stabilizer of domination—absorbing dissent, regulating conflict, and preserving deeper relations of exploitation.

This does not mean liberal democracy is a fraud. It means it is conditional. Democratic self-correction has always been uneven, limited by the structural power of capital and the geopolitical interests of dominant states. Criticism is permitted—until it threatens property relations, imperial extraction, or entrenched class hierarchies. When that line is crossed, dissent is marginalized, co-opted, or repressed. The open society, in practice, has often been less open than advertised.

For decades, these contradictions were managed through ideology. Liberal imperial power cloaked itself in universalist language: development, modernization, democracy, human rights. Material interests were presented as moral obligations; domination as benevolent intervention. This ideological mediation did not eliminate coercion, but it softened its edges, securing consent at home and conditional legitimacy abroad. That mediation is now breaking down.

The return of what can only be described as vulgar imperialism marks a decisive shift in how power presents itself. Trumpism did not invent American imperial dominance. It stripped it of its justifications. “America First” replaced universal norms with openly transactional nationalism. Global politics was reduced to pressure campaigns, threats, sanctions, and deals. Iran was economically strangled, Venezuela isolated, Greenland treated as a purchasable asset. These were not policy aberrations; they were moments of candor—imperial power speaking without liberal disguise.

This vulgarity was not merely rhetorical. It reflected a deeper crisis of legitimacy. As Antonio Gramsci famously observed, ruling orders endure not by coercion alone, but by consent—by persuading societies that the existing arrangement of power is natural, inevitable, or beneficial. When inequality deepens, wars become endless, and economic insecurity turns permanent, that persuasion fails. Liberal universalism stops convincing even those it once reassured. What follows is not liberation, but coercion without apology.

Trumpism, in this sense, was not an anomaly but a symptom: a political form suited to an order that can no longer credibly justify itself. Where ideology once mediated power, spectacle and intimidation now take its place. Where institutions once absorbed conflict, personalization of authority increasingly dominates. Liberal democracy does not disappear overnight; it decays, becoming brittle, defensive, and increasingly hostile to dissent. This decay is most visible at the imperial core, but its consequences are most devastating on the periphery.

For countries outside the centers of global capitalism, liberal democracy has never arrived as a neutral institutional choice. It comes embedded in an international system defined by unequal exchange, debt, sanctions, and coercive trade regimes. Political freedoms may be proclaimed, but economic sovereignty is systematically undermined. Governments are forced to manage perpetual crisis rather than respond to popular demands. Under such conditions, democratic self-correction becomes structurally constrained, if not impossible. 

Nowhere is this contradiction more clearly exposed than in Iran. For decades, Iran has been held up in Western discourse as a site where authoritarianism might be undone through external pressure. Yet the policies pursued—especially under Donald Trump—reveal how little democracy actually figures into imperial calculations. Trump’s interest in Iran was never about human rights or the well-being of the Iranian people. It was narrower and more cynical: coercing the Iranian state into compliance with American power.

What Trump sought was not regime change, but regime reorientation. The goal was not to dismantle Iran’s political autocratic system, but to force it to alter its external behavior—its alliances, trade relationships, and regional posture—so they no longer conflicted with U.S. strategic interests. Within this framework, the internal character of the regime was largely irrelevant. What mattered was obedience. The “maximum pressure” campaign made this logic unmistakable. By withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear agreement and imposing sweeping sanctions, the United States did not empower Iranian society or expand political space. It crippled the economy, restricted oil revenues, and intensified everyday hardship. The intent was not democratic transformation but behavioral correction under duress. 

This approach was not unique to Iran. In Venezuela, U.S. policy did not seek to rebuild institutions or democratize political life. The state was left largely intact while its freedom of action was aggressively constrained. Sanctions targeted energy markets and aimed to sever ties with China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran. The objective was geopolitical discipline, not popular sovereignty.

The same logic appears elsewhere. Leaders with violent or extremist pasts have been recognized and engaged once they signaled willingness to operate within boundaries set by American power. Authoritarian figures such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Viktor Orbán have been treated as partners rather than pariahs so long as they aligned strategically. Even in formally democratic contexts, alignment has mattered more than accountability. Internal legitimacy is negotiable; external compliance is not.

This is vulgar imperialism in its purest form: power unconcerned with norms, indifferent to governance, focused solely on submission. The consequences for democratic struggle are profound. Trump’s threats, sanctions, and performative aggression did not weaken authoritarianism in Iran; they strengthened it. External coercion allowed the Iranian state to reframe internal dissent as foreign subversion, mobilize nationalist sentiment, and justify repression in the name of sovereignty. Activists and reformers were squeezed between domestic authoritarianism and external pressure, their political space narrowed from both sides.

This is the paradox of vulgar imperialism: it claims to oppose authoritarian regimes while systematically reinforcing them. By turning democracy into an instrument of coercion rather than emancipation, it discredits democratic ideals themselves. Freedom comes to be seen not as a universal aspiration, but as a weapon wielded selectively by powerful states.

From a Popperian perspective, this represents a rejection of fallibilism and institutional humility. The open society depends on stability, pluralism, and the protection of dissent. From a Marxist perspective, it exposes the material limits of liberal democracy under conditions of imperial domination. Together, these critiques converge on a sobering conclusion: democracy cannot survive on procedures alone, and it cannot remain legitimate while reproducing deep economic and geopolitical inequality. An open society cannot function as a learning system when political choice is reduced to permanent crisis management imposed from outside. Nor can democratic institutions thrive when their outcomes are continually overridden by market discipline, sanctions, and coercive diplomacy. Without a fundamental transformation of the international economic order, freedom risks becoming a tragic paradox—formally proclaimed yet substantively denied.

The age of vulgar imperialism has not killed the ideal of the open society. But it has exposed how fragile that ideal becomes when power no longer feels the need to justify itself, and when democracy is severed from material conditions that make self-correction possible. The question now is not whether liberal democracy will survive in name—it likely will—but whether it can survive as a meaningful practice. Without confronting imperial coercion and economic domination, the open society risks becoming little more than a procedural shell: intact on paper, hollow in reality, and increasingly unable to restrain the power it once claimed to civilize.

Contact Information:

Nader Rahimi   Email: nrahimi@bu.edu