The Rape of Consent, the Inconsistency of Liberal Ideology

Imagine you're in a modern American high school classroom learning about consent, Now one would imagine that consent is somewhat a universal concept-instead of being only applicable in the case of sexual contact-but you'll notice a considerable lack of talk of consent in other areas of society. Consent as defined by high schools is 'active, expressed through words or actions that create mutually understandable permissions'.

This would suggest that we must consistently check for consent and use body language and other non-verbal cues to check for consent. If we simply apply this frame of logic to our idea of governance in our liberal democratic format we can see a lack of similar human interactions being used to clarify the consent of the governed. In fact many of the studies on the state of our system shows a significant lack of faith in our current political order with many people believing that our system is corrupt and by our definition of consent our government does not allow this.

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How? You may ask, i will explain it as follows: You as an individual have little influence of checking local, state, and national governments actions actively. The key here is about the more active elements of consent, in our governmental system actions which affect us (the working class) the most are mostly in the hands of lawmakers-a majority of which have been bought off by the corporate elite-and do not hold the working class in their actions. While you may email a senator, you can not vote them out of office during their term and forcing them to keep their word is difficult when you have no leverage-unless you have abundant capital of course. This contradiction in the liberal ‘democratic’ system, which teaches that consent must be active, constant, verbal & reflected in actions which create a mutual permission between parties, is oddly not representative of our political system (of which has immense potential for exploitation of such a system as a result of the unequal power dynamic). We are told we have liberty and freedom in a liberal democracy, and this simply could not be true in a system in which we have no active monitoring of our government-instead they monitor us-to make sure they are carrying out actions which represent our country's working class interests. The rape of consent is a product of the individualistic nature of the philosophical base of liberal democracy, where the individual is the key part of society. This is clearly not true, simply look at the way consent must be taught in order to make sure we prevent potentially dangerous sexual situations.

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This is the rape of the supposed ‘consent of the governed’ we consider to be existent-when in reality we as individuals have no influence-in all liberal democracies.