If forced to choose between the “liberal” or the “democracy” in “liberal democracy,” I’ll go for “liberal” every time. I’m glad I don’t have to choose, of course, because democracy is an important mechanism for sustaining liberalism over time. But a liberal society can be just with remarkably little democracy. A democratic society is almost definitionally unjust without any liberalism.
“It was the merest Enchantment to suppose that any human beings, trusted with uncontrolled powers over their fellows, would not use it for exploitation; or even to suppose that their own standards of honour, valour, and elegance (for which alone they existed) would not soon degenerate into flash-vulgarity. Hence, rightly and inevitably, the Disenchantment, the age of Revolutions. But the question on which all hangs is whether we can go on to Re-enchantment.”
“What would that Re-enchantment be?”
“The realization that the thing of which Aristocracy was a mirage is a vital necessity; if you like, that Aristocracy was right: it was only the Aristocrats who were wrong. Or, putting it the other way, that a society which becomes democratic in ethos as well as in constitution is doomed. And not much loss either.”