Liberal Democracy Is In Danger

As uncertainty rises, and society frays, freedom feels like a burden.

The roots of liberal democracy lie in murder.

For two hundred years, in the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants butchered Catholics. Catholics butchered Protestants. Lands were laid waste, generations were sacrificed, but neither side won definitive victory. Neither side was able to impose its ideology as the one, undisputed truth which all must embrace.

Exhausted, Protestants and Catholics called it a draw.

Protestants agreed not to kill Catholics. Catholics agreed not to kill Protestants. They did not suspend their disagreements, however. Both Catholics and Protestants could, if they chose, continue to believe that the misguided fools on the other side were doomed to hell. They could continue to use words to persuade those on the other side. But they would no longer try to compel belief by force. Instead, they would live and work together in peace, and perhaps, eventually, even learn to say “good morning” without glaring at each other.

Along with the Enlightenment that followed the wars of religion, it was this pragmatism born of atrocity that gave rise to liberal democracy.

The tolerance of difference is the core of liberal democracy. We can talk. We can argue. We can think each other foolish, deluded, even evil. But we cannot — we must never — settle our disagreements with fists, swords, or guns.

I think we urgently need to recall the meaning and value of liberal democracy — and not only because of the rising political violence in the United States, Charlie Kirk’s murder being only the latest awful manifestation. I fear that one particular dynamic promoting illiberalism and the rejection of tolerance will soon get worse. Which means that liberal democracy, already weakened, is in grave danger.

And we may soon be on a path to the horrors which inevitably arise in the absence of the tolerance of difference.

The 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

In a liberal democracy, the state provides only a very broad framework for living. Within that framework, people are free to think, speak, and live as they wish.

Whether and how to worship a god or gods. What a good life consists of. Which art, culture, and ideas are worthy. Which economic arrangements are fair and work best. It’s up to each of us to decide as we choose. Sometimes, as with religion, these decisions are entirely personal. In a liberal democracy, the state is neutral on such questions.¹ Sometimes we decide for whom to vote with the hope that our chosen person or party will turn our preferences into public policy — but such policy is not permitted to infringe on individual rights, and it can always be changed if more voters disagree in future elections. In that sense, again, the state itself does not decide what is permanently true or false, wise or foolish, good or evil. It is neutral. People make up their own minds.

Liberal democracy is often messy. Chaotic. Noisy. It is occasionally ridiculous and routinely exasperating. But as Winston Churchill said…

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Unlike most oft-cited Churchill quotations, Churchill actually said that. And the man who won the war and saved civilization and was rewarded by voters with unemployment was correct. Liberal democracy is as good as it gets.

But there’s a problem right at the heart of liberal democracy.

It is freedom.

The human brain is a machine for making sense of the world. That is its prime directive. That is what it does automatically and compulsively.

We crave understanding.

For the most part, that’s all to the good. Our brains generate plausible explanations as easily as they regulate breathing, and both these automated systems are essential for humans to survive and thrive.

But the human compulsion for meaning — to understand what’s happening, why, what it means, where we fit in, what we should do — is so strong that it can become torture.

I mean that literally. I once spent an unpleasant year studying torture in various countries where it is endemic and I was quickly shocked to learn that torture is not about pain. Pain is merely one tool used by torturers. It’s not even the most effective tool. Torture is about the psychological breakdown caused by the loss of control and understanding.

A routine technique of torturers everywhere is to shout nonsense orders backed by threats of violence. Sometimes the victim can comply but has no idea why the order is being given. (“Cluck like a chicken!”) Sometimes the victim can’t even comply. (“Levitate! Do it now! Float in the air!”)

Torturers do this to drive home the victim’s loss of agency, showing the victim he has no control. They do that by annihilating understanding. Why is this happening? What does the torturer want? What is the meaning of this? There is no sense in it so the victim cannot make sense of it. The victim is immersed in severe uncertainty. And that is devastating. As a CIA interrogation manual once stated quite explicitly, the anticipation of the blow is more potent than the blow itself, so uncertainty pushes the victim to psychological breakdown more effectively than mere pain.

There are countless other ways torturers make the most of uncertainty. A simple one is to avoid routine. Never let the victim know when the next interrogation will come, what it will consist of, or how long it will last. Keep him suspended in uncertainty — with his brain constantly struggling and failing to make sense of what’s happening.

Now, in that context, think about the essence of liberal democracy: It is the freedom to understand and decide for yourself. To make sense of the world and your place in it. To judge what is true and good. To choose how to live your life with meaning and purpose.

Put like that, freedom sounds like a job for a philosopher. Most of us aren’t philosophers, but we seldom we have trouble doing this work because we are social animals and we don’t make decisions alone: We are ensconced within families, communities, and cultures. Drawing on all this social support, people have little trouble living with freedom and making their own decisions. In fact, they flourish when they are free to do so. That’s precisely why liberal democracy is the best system of government.

But what happens when social connections fade? When families disintegrate and communities dissolve? When institutions falter and lose our trust?

Then, the social context that empowers us to make decisions about our lives begins to crumble. Increasingly, we face uncertainty on our own. We have to make sense of everything alone.

For a lot of people, that is a terrible challenge. It is daunting. Unsettling. Threatening.

How can we deal with that threat?

Following the Second World War, many researchers struggled with the question of how and why totalitarian movements arise. One was the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. (Lifton died last week at the age of 99. In The New York Times, Masha Gessen just published an excellent appreciation of his life’s work.)

What set Lifton’s work apart — which started with his 1961 look at Mao’s China — was his appreciation of the perspective of the ordinary person living within a totalitarian system.

Totalitarianism took freedom from people, Lifton noted. But it gave them something in return: It freed them from freedom.

For the ordinary person in a totalitarian system, facts and truth are all provided. Explanations for observations are provided. Meaning is provided. Everything is cut-and-dried. Clear answers. An important struggle between good guys and bad guys. You know exactly what’s happening, why, and what you should do.

Away with freedom! Away with liberal democracy and confusing disagreements that must be tolerated! In a snap, uncertainty is erased. You get everything you psychologically crave.

Lifton called this “totalism.” It is a worldview that shuts out other perspectives and provides all answers to all questions. It need not come from a state and its ideology. Religious cults can be totalist. Political movements can be totalist, as Islamism often is. So can political parties or any other form of organization shaped by ideas.

To illustrate how powerful our aversion to uncertainty is, I often use the example of the person who goes to the doctor, is told he may have cancer, gets tested, then waits for the results. The uncertainty is agonizing. And when he is told he does indeed have cancer, he feels … relief. “At least I know,” people always say. Totalism delivers the same sort of relief to those afflicted by uncertainty. It takes your freedom. But it calms the turmoil of uncertainty.

Many Western countries have experienced decades of declining social capital but nowhere is the trend more pronounced than in the United States. Social connections dwindle. Family ties weaken. Communities dissolve. Trust in institutions plunges. Modern America is an atomized society in which people increasingly feel alone and adrift on a sea of uncertainty, struggling to make sense of the world. For them, increasingly, freedom is not a blessing. It is a curse. For such people, some form of totalism — a worldview that explains all — is like washing ashore on a beach. It is a relief.

Lifton himself argued Donald Trump’s movement bore the hallmarks of a cult, including totalism and others. You can watch an interview with him here. I suspect something similar can be seen in the more extreme reaches of “woke” thinking, where a few crude analytical tools promise to explain all, as well as the many online regions where frighteningly large numbers of young men — they’re mostly men — seek out ideologies ranging from explicit fascism, to millenarianism, to whatever you call the claptrap Curtis Yarvin peddles to billionaires and the masses.

And we have only just begun to feel the effects of AI’s rapid profusion.

When the ability to generate undetectable frauds at industrial scale is cheap and universal, when we are awash in fakes, when even the humanity of the person you are speaking with is an open question, we will all plunge deeper into the depths of uncertainty.

How can we even begin to make sense of reality, much less understand it and find meaning, when we can seldom be sure what is real? Like a drowning man desperate to grab onto anything solid, we will be flail about for certainty. Many will seize on totalisms.

Or so I suspect and fear. Who can be confident of anything in this era?

This is why we urgently need to remind ourselves what liberal democracy is. Where it came from. Why it is best for people. And what it takes — starting with a categorical rejection of political violence.

Look again at the painting of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre above. Follow the path of totalism and the political violence it inevitably spawns and that is where we will go.

Not so long ago, people understood that from personal experience of the nightmares that ravaged the first half of the 20th century. Others learned it from the experience of their parents and their grandparents and the culture created by all that experience.

But today? Robert Jay Lifton was among the very last who possessed an intimate connection with that past. The experience is gone. The culture created by that experience is fading. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that faith in liberal democracy is waning as well.

Have a look at the chart below.

Note how liberal democracy spread and flourished following the Great Depression and the Second World War. But note also how, 19 years ago, that trend peaked. Then reversed.

But don’t despair.

This isn’t the first time liberal democracy has waned. See the trough in the 1930s and 1940s? When the Great Depression struck, it was widely believed that liberal democracy had failed, that a more aggressive order, a more confident order, was needed. Fascism or communism would be our future.

In time, everyone learned the painful lesson that both fascism and communism would take us to a permanent St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Both fascism and communism were hell, not the future. The future was liberal democracy.

I’m hopeful we’ll learn that lesson again. Whether we do it by learning from history, or by personal experience, is the question.

1. Technically, a number of liberal democracies are not neutral on religion as they have a formally sanctioned official church. In reality, these countries slowly evolved toward neutrality on religion and the supposed official sanction is now a meaningless relic, a dead letter. Anglicans are not favoured in England — and while King Charles, head of the Church of England, has the old title “defender of the faith,” he has been very vocal that he sees himself as a “defender of faiths.”