Comment by vkou
15 hours ago
The law wasn't in the state that you ascribe to it for the other 99% of its history if you were, say, African-American. Other less-extremely obvious examples also abound.
Liberal democracy with sometimes-fair application of it is the aberration.
By that reasoning any advance is an aberration and thus hopeless, but we've had liberal democracy for a long time. Again, certainly not perfect.
Advance or regression is not the way you probably want to look at it. There isn't a lot of evidence for historical inevitability.
And no, we have not been a liberal democracy for 'a long time'. We have been an illiberal democracy with very limited suffrage and distribution of rights for a very long time.