The achilles heal of liberal democracy

Camus said "totalitarian tyranny is built not on the virtues of tyrants but on the faults of (classical) liberals."  We are in an illiberal time helped in part by the fault of classical liberals.

One of the bases of liberal democracy is that the way to change behavior is more public and civic education (not solely in the schooling sense). It's based on the premise that failure to make wise decisions is based on lack of information or lack of credible information and can be remedied simply by filling that void. 

 

What liberal democracy responds to poorly is situations like the country and world are in now where credible information and misinformation or deceptive information are widely accepted as being equally valid. 

 

I'm constantly recalling an essay in The Guardian describing Trumpism as reminiscent not of 1984 but of Brave New World. We suffer not from an absence of information but an overload of it making it harder to know what to believe). 

 

This occurs when widespread trust in public institutions declines precipitously. What happens - and we are certainly seeing this with the rise of conspiracy theories - is that people have legitimate and well-founded concerns (such as malfeasance by big corporations) but decide to make the leap from "X is plausible" to "X must be true" when there's little or no specific evidence to actually make that leap. 

 

It can't simply be remedied by official sources offering "education" because those official sources lack the trust on the part of the people who really need to hear it. This is why I've been advocating for key systemic reforms for years. Best to avoid getting here in the first place because liberal democracy not well equipped to deal with this situation once we get here.