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“_If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too

painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”_ ― CARL SAGAN, THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD: SCIENCE AS

A CANDLE IN THE DARK Complacency kills. Liberal democracies are especially vulnerable. It’s a kind of narcotic that works in tandem with wishful thinking to mask inconvenient truths.

Unaffordable economic policies, for example, or the gradual loss of civil liberties, until democracy itself is threatened. Liberals, who are preternatural wishful thinkers, love the sugar

high of altruism: being “fair” or “reasonable” or “cautious” — until it’s too late. We like to think that holding the moral high ground is enough — until somebody drills a tunnel under our

feet and blasts us to kingdom come. If you’re a liberal, someone who by and large, believes in live and let live, look around you. How confident do you feel that the freedoms you grew up

with are safe? How confident are you that our political parties, our media, our institutions are not being manipulated to fool us into voting one way or the other? Vladimir Putin and Xi

Jinping are the anti-democratic Apex predators of the 21st century. Unconstrained by the tedium of democratic accountability both men exude power and flaunt it, almost casually, in the face

of a weakened and divided Western alliance. But there are others, lower down the food chain and closer to home, whose malign effect on democracy is subtler but still dangerous. These are the

Fifth Columnists inside the tent. Take your pick: Victor Orban in Hungary; Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey; Javier “Chainsaw” Milei in Argentina; Georgia Meloni in Italy; Geert Wilders in

Holland; Robert Fico and his pro-Putin party in Slovakia; Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Looming over the horizon are Donald Trump II in the US and Marine le Pen in France. In Britain, in the

event of a landslide Labour victory at the next general election, we may see a lurch even further to the Right of the Tory party, led by disgruntled Trussites, die-hard Johnsonites, New

Conservatives and their poster-girl Suella Braverman. The broad consensual “natural party of government” would be no more, killed off by a generation that thinks democracy is a lifestyle

choice. We like to think that, as time marches on, so does human progress: we learn from our mistakes; enterprise, knowledge and science drive change for the better; we become wiser and

therefore less prone to turn on each other when we disagree. There’s some truth to that: vaccines, electric cars, the computer, the internet have revolutionised how we live and what we can

do, at a pace most of us can barely keep up with. AI promises a firestorm of change. We have an infinite number of tools with which to communicate with each other. Kindness is not dead.

Neither is reason. In some respects, we have more democracy than ever before. The internet and social media have given voice to millions across the planet who have never had one before. It

is as fundamental a change as the vernacular Bible and the Reformation in the 16th century that turned the world upside down. But these astonishing examples of man’s ingenuity have also

created a virtual world – a make-believe world — in which simplistic solutions to immensely complex problems are offered up by “strongmen” (or women) backed by powerful vested interests:

Make America Great Again; Take Back Control; Ukrainians are Nazis. The sad fact is that the sweet smell of optimism and freedom for millions that swept the world after the USSR collapsed in

1989 has evaporated. The 20th century saw the rise of liberal democracy. There was a consensus. Fascism, Marxist totalitarianism and malignant nationalism were bad. Western liberal

democracies were good. The 21st century has seen this trend go into reverse. The rule of law, the only dispassionate yardstick we have to choose between right and wrong, is eroding like a

riverbank in flood. Can’t get Parliament to agree on your immigration package because it breaks the law? Change the law. Even better, ignore it. Don’t like the legally binding Paris accord

on climate change? Dump it. Democracy — or at any rate a democracy that goes deeper than occasional visits by citizens to the ballot box – really is in trouble. Support for fundamental human

rights and resistance to totalitarianism were pillars of the post-war global order. If they’re not exactly in the last chance saloon, they’re in the queue. Complacency, as a cause, has

form, even if it is just one of a myriad reasons why bad things happen. The Roman Republic fell apart in 27 BCE after nearly 500 years of political consensus, partly because Romans began to

take their liberties for granted. Europe settled into a warm bath of self-approbation after the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. It then sleepwalked, in the historian Sir Christopher Clarke’s

striking phrase, into World War I. Faced with the rise of Nazism, liberal democracies withdrew into isolationism and appeasement. Then Hitler invaded Poland. The Second World War was

followed by the Cold War. When the Soviet Union fell apart we thought (complacently) that Russia would meekly accept the humiliation. Liberals do a lot of hand-wringing but, most of the

time, they hope for the best. “It can’t happen here” or “Surely that can’t happen again” is the lullaby that consoles us when things get too scary: Trump back in the White House; Russia

overrunning Ukraine; Pacific islands submerged as the poles melt; a loss of freedom – to protest, to vote, to speak out – in Europe. But it has. It is. Take Boris Johnson’s five Acts of

Parliament passed in March and April 2022: increasing government control over Parliament, the courts, elections, immigrants and public demonstrations. Not serious but no joke. Democracy

won’t survive unaided. It needs help. It needs the US and Europe to back the fight for democracy in Ukraine. It needs to push for a just settlement for both Israelis and Palestinians. It

needs one-nation Tories to recapture their party from shallow populists. It needs sane Republicans who believe this (and there are many) to stand up and say: “Donald Trump is unfit to lead

America.” It also needs voters to wake up and ask themselves whether they’re being told the truth. Not subtle half-truths, which are the bread and butter of spin doctors. But outright,

barefaced lies. As for liberals: it’s time they looked at what is staring them in the face, stopped being so polite and came out fighting. It’s time for a liberal uprising.