🧵
@jburnmurdoch.ft.com is spot on about the conditions in his FT piece. Liberal democracy held it together thanks to growth, good demographics, and the promise of a better future. Those days are gone, and that’s the "why" behind the erosion. However...
Democratic politicians have, though, pursued growth in GDP at the expense of other values. One response to
@jburnmurdoch.ft.com pessimistic scenario is refocus on those values, combined with egalitarianism, sufficiency and quality of life. Not "it's the economy, stupid" but "it's the the society"
Is liberal democracy in terminal decline?
The old system worked under a set of conditions that are no longer present
But here’s where the debate usually gets stuck, people mistake the weather report for the mechanic’s diagnosis. Economic stagnation explains the climate, but it doesn’t explain the machine. I've spent the last couple of years thinking about the systems behind the collapse.
Everyone wants to blame the content: misinformation, bots, polarisation. That mistakes catalysts and symptoms for the underlying causes. The crisis isn’t bad information, it's that the very information infrastructure we relied on to create a shared understand of the world had changed completely.
Jan 23, 2026 09:11We’ve spent years trying to fact-check our way out of this, and it failed. Democratic decay isn’t about bad information versus good information, it’s about the collapse of the systems that turn information into reality. If every bot and Russian troll vanished tomorrow, the rot would still be there.
People often talk about the "loss of trust" in institutions, but that's like a doctor telling you you're sick because you lack wellness. It says nothing of the underlying condition, just a vague definition of the symptoms.
As I've written before, people don’t trust institutions because institutions aren't doing the job. Democracy rests on three pillars: Verification, Deliberation, Accountability, which can be understood as being substantial, performative, and simulated.
demos.co.uk/research/ver...
Verification, Deliberation, Accountability: A new framework for tackling epistemic collapse and renewing democracy
Demos is Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank. We produce original research, publish innovative thinkers and host thought-provoking events.
Verification (establishing truth), Deliberation (arguing about it), and Accountability (binding power to it). When these work, you have substance. When they break, you slide into performance, and eventually, simulation, and people recognise this, even if they don't use a shared terminology.
In “performance,” institutions still go through the motions; reports are written, hearings are held, and processes exist. Think of endless inquiries that result in a civil servant resigning 5 years after the fact but no real structural change, or political accountability.
In “simulation,” the functions invert. Verification becomes loyalty testing. Deliberation becomes spectacle. Accountability becomes partisan punishment. Democratic form remains, but democratic function is gone. Sound familiar? 🇺🇸
What broke this was not ideology, it was an inversion of the information environment. The old system was defined by information scarcity and attention abundance, and it was slow, top-down, and gatekept.
The new system is defined by information abundance and attention scarcity. It is fast, peer-to-peer, and real time. This shift is structural, not political. The public are not just recipients of information, but creators and distributors, competing for attention in the same spaces as institutions.
In the old system, institutions had temporal buffers, which meant they could verify before public judgment cohered. In the new system, those buffers have collapsed. Meaning now stabilises for the public in hours, long before institutional processes can finish.
