Geopolitics

Proposed one-sentence definition of democracy (or liberalism?) that's different from any I've seen:

**The government feels more like a game than like a player.**

That is, it's an environment for different people to interact, cooperate, compete etc, and not an actor exercising its own agency / intentionality.

I like to think of the role of government as trying to deliver an attractive standard of living to people in a certain geographical area. Democracy is the mechanism whereby the allocation of resources is aligned with the general population.