Truth: The first casualty of war. Democracy: The first casualty of the war on truth.

Reflections on the decline of liberal constitutionalism: The view from Canada

Foreword by Daniel Clarke-Serret:

Today Guerre and Shalom is honoured to publish an article from another highly-regarded thinker. Peter L. Biro is the Founder and President of the democracy think-tank Section 1, Senior Fellow of Massey College, Centre Associate of the University of British Columbia Centre for Constitutional Law and Legal Studies, and Editor, most recently, of The Notwithstanding Clause and the Canadian Charter: Rights, Reforms, and Controversies (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

This column has been updated from an earlier version published by RSA Comment in December 2020.

[Image: Retrieved from NYT. Donald Trump: “I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I'm like, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people.”]

The Greek Poet, Aeschylus, famously observed that “in war, truth is the first casualty”. In the wake of the 2021 Trump insurrection in America, grounded as it was on election denialism, and of its political and ideological coat-tails in other western democracies, we might extrapolate from Aeschylus to observe that in the war on truth, the first casualty is democracy, especially of the liberal constitutional variety.

But lest you believe, dear readers, that the assault on truth comes only from the right-wing populist autocrats intent on eviscerating all constitutional convention - indeed, hell-bent on sidelining the “Constitution” altogether – you’d best check your left flank as well. It turns out that the ideologues of the “progressive” left are every bit as determined to undermine your confidence in first principles, reason, empiricism and the historical record, produced as it was by adherents of the “western civ” curriculum.

The war on truth and on truth-seeking, both by design and direct means and also as an unintended, but inescapable, consequence and function of the fragmentation and polarization produced by the current medium of mass communication, namely, the internet and its social media subcultures, poses the greatest threat to liberal constitutional democracy – here in Canada and around the world. We are witnessing, in real time, Orwell’s prophecy play out, as Trump – now in his third campaign for the White House - along with his partisan enablers and co-conspirators, tells an astonishingly receptive constituency that white is black and black is white. Thomas Friedman once described it this way in a New York Times column: “Auto sales and durables were each down 10 percent last quarter; but lying grew 30 percent and economists predict that the lying industry could double in 2021.” This “lying industry” is, at bottom, essential for democratic backsliding to take hold.

The causes of democratic backsliding throughout the West are complex and the reasons are many. Not surprisingly, the usual suspects head up the list:

1) Exponentially increasing economic inequality – both as to income gap and, especially, as to wealth disparity, creating fertile ground for systemic destabilization;

2)The rise of populism in response to the increasing general, and, indeed, cultivated, mistrust in the effectiveness and integrity of established institutions (the administrative agencies of the state that are presumed to be the repositories of universal knowledge and expertise, including the professional civil service, the centers of learning and research, the legislative and regulatory bodies). Populism, with its natural hostility to pluralism, has also risen in response to an increasingly multi-ethnic, multicultural demographic;

3) The failure of political parties to perform their traditional filtration function of weeding out aspiring autocrats and demagogues and those otherwise unfit for leadership roles in a liberal democracy (This was, of course, the story of the 2015 Republican primary in the US and has become institutionalized in the Republican Party’s abandonment of liberal constitutionalist principles and values in favour of unqualified fealty to Trump); and

4) A weak civic culture resulting from, among other things, the complete failure of public education to teach civics, i.e., to instill in our students and future democratic citizens the sense of civic duty to defend political liberty.

There are several other factors and reasons for the backsliding.

Certainly, the willingness of leaders to depart from the norms and conventions of liberal democracy, that is, to disregard the independence of the judicial and prosecutorial branches of government, to rebuff the efforts of the legislative branch to conduct oversight of the executive branch, to attack press freedom and independent journalism, to undermine and belittle free, fair and meaningful elections (i.e. elections in which there is a genuine possibility of power changing hands) and, as corollary, to deny the peaceful transfer of power from one administration or government to the next.

But all of these factors, in one form or another, are either grounded in or further aggravate what we might call the “war on truth” emanating from both the right and the left. The assault on what I refer to as the shared epistemic foundation, that broad societal deference to the authority of fact, knowledge and truth, on which the existence of an effective marketplace of ideas rests and on which a functioning free and democratic society depends, is the grand strategy for transitioning hitherto liberal democracies into authoritarian societies.

What are the consequences, for our democracy, of a compromised epistemic foundation? The result is increasing public skepticism about and lack of trust in public statements emanating from government agencies and from experts about everything from the size of the national debt, the number of refugees seeking to enter the country, the rate of violent crime broken down by demographic category, the CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions rate by country, by industry and by region, the relationship between mask-wearing and COVID-19 transmission, and so on. What this means is that there can be no consensus-generation informed either by empirical evidence or reason. It was already apparent that the war on truth was making it near-impossible to produce societal consensus across partisan or ideological lines. But the problem has become even more acute. It is actually increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to muster popular support for a policy or any course of action predicated only or principally on truth, that is, on some authoritative statement of fact and reason.

That leaves only two other ways for leaders to elicit mass support for any government or societal initiative: propaganda and coercion. But this spells the end of a genuine democracy, that is, of a civil society in which political action is defined by the extent to which citizens actualize their agency, their civic potentiality collectively. This is to be distinguished from a civil society in which citizens are bamboozled and defrauded and intimidated into some kind of conformity masquerading as free and voluntary engagement and self-government. We see too many examples of this condition around the world and, indeed, in our own midst. The current U.S. administration led the way in this regard during the four years of the Trump presidency and it would be naïve to deny the level of success with which its concerted policy of misinformation and disinformation has met.

Ronald Deibert, Director of The Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre, writes of needing to “reclaim the internet for civil society”. Nina Schick, writes of “Deepfakes and the coming Infocalypse”. Marcus Kolga, founder of Disinfowatch, writes about the deleterious effect of disinformation on democracy and human rights. They are talking about the same thing, namely, the assault on truth, the hijacking of the contemporary information highway in the name of the democratization of communication and, indeed, of community-building, but not, in fact, in the cause or service of democracy itself.

The Canadian Context

So, what are the ramifications for Canada’s aspirations and responsibilities vis-à-vis the promotion of freedom and democracy within the community of nations?