In a post at Comment is Free the general theme of which is that emancipation from slavery or oppression is not just the work of individual 'great men' but is achieved by larger groups of people, Priyamvada Gopal concludes as follows:
Whether against explicitly repressive regimes or the many ostensibly democratic ones that shore up the interests of the wealthy and powerful few, the record of our times will honour a long tradition of collective self-emancipation.
You've got to love that 'ostensibly democratic' regimes. It's one of the more egregious tropes of a section of the contemporary left.
A standard implication of saying that something is ostensibly such-and-such is that it isn't really that. In the present case, the democractic nature of the polities thus referred to by Gopal would be, then, merely appearance, a facade. If this is what she means indeed to say, the distinction between democratic systems and what she calls 'explicitly repressive regimes' all but disappears. There has long been a tendency on the far left to minimize the difference between political dictatorship and (as they would have it) merely 'bourgeois' democracy. The tendency is a noxious one; leading its proponents now to underestimate the rights and resources which members of democractic societies enjoy, now to make light of the political disadvantages (to put it gently) of living under tyranny.
I assume, however, that even from inside her ideological fastness Gopal does understand something of the genuine differences between explicitly repressive regimes and 'ostensibly' democratic ones, and that she means only to say that the latter are less than fully democratic or are inadequately democratic or some such. Still, by casually tossing in that 'ostensibly' she licenses the inference that there is more in common between the two types of polity, dictatorial and democratic, than there is separating them. It's a minimizing locution; when any genuine partisan of emancipation would instead acknowledge the vast superiority of parliamentary-democratic systems over every type of political tyranny.
Notice, also, the assumption which probably grounds Gopal's minimizing claim; for she says, 'ostensibly democratic ones [regimes] that shore up the interests of the wealthy and powerful few' (italics added). A democratic system, you see, wouldn't do this; it would function in the way that she (and I) would like to see it functioning: that is, a way conducive to meeting the needs of all people more equitably. Only thing is that for egalitarian democrats this is a task to be achieved. It is a problem to be solved - how to win democratic majorities for moving in the desired direction. Gopal and those who think like her simply assume there is already majority backing for their view. There must be. Hence 'ostensibly democratic'. The fact that right now in most of the democracies of the world no party of radical leftist colouring can scrape together enough votes to begin implementing Gopal's preferred programme vis-à-vis the rich and powerful somehow fails to impinge on such delusions.