Ideas - Why democracy needs 'heroic citizenship' to defy autocracy

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

There are just three ingredients in the recipe that could end constitutional democracy as we know it, according to scholar Peter L. Biro — fear, habituation and what he calls stupidification. He argues it is up to us, law-abiding average citizens, to save liberal democracy and defend against backsliding forces. Biro recently delivered a keynote address at the ominously titled conference Liberal Democracy in the Rearview Mirror? at Massey College in Toronto.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. In a 2012 interview, the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe described the elements he felt were necessary for democracy to flourish, quote, a healthy, educated, participatory followership and an educated, morally grounded leadership. In 2025, Canadian legal scholar Peter Biro outlined his deceptively simple recipe for democracy's demise. Fear, habituation, stupidification. Peter Biro is a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and at the University of Toronto's Massey College. Three of the essential ingredients in the recipe for a civic culture in which free citizens

will cede their agency and become indispensable enzymes in the reaction that produces their collective transition from accountability agents to useful idiots. In April 2025, Bureau delivered a keynote address at the rather ominously named conference held at Massey College entitled, Liberal Democracy in the Rearview Mirror? A title posed, I should add, as a question. And according to Biro, the answer to that question doesn't lie in the places you might expect – with our institutions, our elected officials, or the laws they pass. In this episode, you'll hear the conversation I had with him after he delivered his keynote

address. In that address, Bureaus suggests we are in the driver's seat, or at the very least, that we need to take the wheel, especially now. Well, what a field day we political scientists, democracy theorists, social scientists, historians, lawyers, jurists, and civil libertarians are having. Perhaps it's akin to being a climate scientist witnessing the collapse of an 18,000-year-old glacier before your eyes, breathtaking and terrible. This political moment, one that has been called a constituent moment, a moment in which everything

changes, this moment in which we're bearing witness to the decline, if not the outright demise, of liberal democracy all around us, calls upon us to reckon with the failure of liberal constitutionalism in order that we might rescue what remains of it and rehabilitate some more resilient version of it. Now, I'm not unmindful of the hubris in this statement. I acknowledge that liberal democracy is neither inevitable nor immortal, and also that from the vantage point of civilizations long sweep, its demise and replacement with some other system, perhaps a form of competitive authoritarianism or technocracy or some other illiberal societal arrangement is to be expected. But there's one proposition that I believe

does hold up pretty well to scrutiny, and that is that if there is to be a reckoning with democratic backsliding, it must begin with the acknowledgement that there can be no liberal democracy without a societal commitment to liberal democracy. Everything else is extrapolation and exegesis. In this constituent moment I want to suggest that the popular commitment to liberal democracy is very much in doubt, partly because such a commitment does not come naturally to us, but also because forces antagonistic to liberal democracy actively

undermine our basic competence to make such a commitment and to keep it. What's more, our capacity to form and to act upon our own rational assessments of events and to call things by their names has been severely damaged. So in an effort to buck this trend, let me begin by making a very obvious statement. The January 6th, 2021 insurrection has, with the second coming of Trump, finally succeeded. And the coup against the liberal constitutional order

of American government has transformed that government into an electoral autocracy with the makings of a police state and mafiocracy. Within the first weeks of his second inauguration, Trump neutralized or eliminated altogether entire categories of independent oversight offices, including firing most of the inspectors general and the head of the Office of Government Ethics, shutting down the world's most important foreign aid agency.

He's fired a large swath of the government-employed truth-telling class, scientists, environmental protection, and public health experts. He's threatened the impeachment of judges and the defunding of their judicial districts. He's instructed the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute his critics. And he's bullied Republican senators and congressmen into abdicating altogether their oversight

responsibilities. And so very much more. As America's neighbor and target of vassalization, if not also of outright conquest, we in Canada and what remains of the so-called free world cannot afford to be indifferent to this development. Most crucially, we can't afford to be smug about the character and resilience of our own democracy.

Stephen Lewicki and Daniel Ziblatt stated some years back that democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box. That the tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy's assassins use the very institutions of democracy gradually, subtly, even legally, to kill it. And in the case of Trump, we can add, and also illegally. Not so long ago, many of us believed that Trump did not so much possess a clear agenda,

ordered within the framework of a coherent ideology, as he does in modus operandi. One expressive of his malignant narcissism, terminal insecurity and resentments, reflexive, vengeful and transactional nature, and of course his unquenchable thirst for absolute power. But it must now be conceded that in Trump's case, modus operandi is agenda. One inspired by Putin's predatory imperial vision and ordered by Orban's methodology. Although it must be said that Orban has demonstrated a great deal more discipline and patience than does Trump. And so the breakneck pace of Trump's wrecking ball may well be his ultimate downfall and

democracy's saving grace, But I highly doubt it. The factors and conditions that contribute to liberal democracies decline are many. They're complex and they operate as if in some perfect storm to produce the backsliding that is very much in evidence in the United States and throughout much of the world, not just in the West but also in the global South. My partial list includes exponentially increasing economic inequality, both as to income and wealth disparities. This is the product of both regulatory and market failures and goes to the root of liberal democracy's key post-war

broken promise of distributive justice that ultimately laid the groundwork for a civic culture of grievance and resentment. There's the rise of what I refer to as the internet's dark side, social media's echo chambers, the internet's use in the deployment of disinformation by foreign and domestic state and non-state actors, the malevolent possibilities of artificial intelligence. Taken together, these sabotage the marketplace of ideas, shattering the shared epistemic foundation,

that societal deference to the authority of facts, knowledge, and truth required for consensus generation, cooperation, and problem- problem solving in a free and democratic society, and all of which makes the culture ripe for polarization and its resulting toxicity manifested in our discourse. Then there's a factor that doesn't get enough attention. That's the failure of political parties to discharge

their filtration function of weeding out aspiring autocrats and those otherwise unfit for high office. Think of the Republican primaries in 2015. And of course there's the rise of populism alongside multi-ethnic, multi-cultural demographic shifts to which populism is naturally hostile as it is to pluralism in general. But I want to consider backsliding from a different perspective, and that is to view it through the lens of the basic social psychology influencing the sensibilities and inclinations of individual citizens and of the general population, a social psychology that trivializes and therefore renders dispensable adherence to the norms and conventions of accountability in a liberal constitutional democracy. Three elements in this

story are of particular interest to me here. Fear and its weaponization, habituation, the consequence of not noticing, and what I'm calling the stupidification, not the stu-pification, the stupidification of our minds and of our discourse. As I reflected on the evident presence and influence of fear in the current American political story, I was reminded of Machiavelli's famous admonition to Lorenzo Di Medici that it is better to be feared

than loved. And I harken back to another historical moment in which fear was both palpable and consequential. It was not as the flame of democracy was being extinguished, but as it was being reignited. Soon after the election of Raul Alfonsín to the presidency of Argentina in late 1983, following the end of a seven year military dictatorship,

a small team of prosecutors assembled to gather credible, producible evidence of the horrors inflicted on the civilian population. A trial took place in 1985, which resulted in several convictions and long prison sentences. Almost two decades after that trial, I had occasion to meet with Luis Moreno Ocampo,

the assistant prosecutor in that trial, and later, the founder and first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to discuss the trial and later the founder and first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to discuss the trial and the general state of international human rights law at the time. I asked him what he had found most challenging and most surprising about the process of bringing the junta leaders to justice. And he answered without hesitation that it was the reluctance of so many civilians, including

many who had been abducted, tortured, and disappeared, los desaparecidos, of which some 30,000 never did reappear. It was their reluctance to cooperate with the prosecution, to come forward and bear witness to the atrocities. Within a year of the 1985 trial, the Alfonsine governments, stating that the military personnel involved in the torture had been doing their jobs,

enacted legislation putting a moratorium on any further criminal proceedings against the military for the human rights atrocities of the dirty war. In 1994, President Carlos Menem went further and pardoned all those sentenced in the original trial. It was not until 2003 that Congress repealed Menem's pardon laws, 2005 that the Argentine Supreme Court ruled those pardons to have been unconstitutional in the first place, and finally 2006 that the government of Nestor Kirchner

reopened its investigations on crimes against humanity and genocide and began the prosecution of the military and security officers. That's how long it took the country, from the election of Alfonsine in 1983 until 2006, to feel sufficiently bold and committed to undertaking in earnest the national reckoning that human dignity was owed.

That's how long it took Argentinian civil society to overcome the fears of reprisal from the former military dictators and their friends, fears of violence from a junta sympathizer, of excommunication from their church, and of ostracism from friends and even from family. In the United States today, and in every society living under autocratic or impending autocratic rule, fear operates as perhaps the most efficient democracy-proofing agent.

Undocumented migrants, visa students, foreign workers afraid of deportation. Government scientists and other experts afraid to tell the truth or to give honest professional advice. Independent private lawyers and law firms including Big Law, afraid of being disqualified from government contracts.

Journalists afraid of violence at the hands of the president's supporters. Universities afraid of violence at the hands of the president's supporters. Universities afraid of being defunded. Judges afraid of being impeached or worse. Even billionaires and oligarchs afraid that their corporate interests will be regulated or that they will be stripped off or excluded from government business.

Citizens afraid of being punished for what effectively amounts to the crime of apostasy. The surrendering of our principle, of our moral courage to fear, is perhaps one of history's most striking lessons. Despite our self-comforting fantasies to the contrary, history shows that the great majority of us would not have stood up to autocratic power.

We would not have been heroes. We would not have been rescuers like Raoul Wallenberg pulling Hungarian Jews off the trains by putting Schutzpasses into their hands, thus saving them from deportation to the gas chambers. Most of us, average, decent, law-abiding citizens, would have chosen to go along to get along out of fear. But fear doesn't operate alone or in a vacuum.

It's weaponized in conjunction with other forces, other factors, and other realities. The habit of compliance, of docility, of resignation, of inaction and of disengagement accommodates and compounds the effects of a background condition of fear. But there is more to it than that. And that brings me to the second psychosocial factor I want to consider, and that is habituation. In a recent study on the public's response to democratic backsliding, Katherine Clayton examines the research that purports to explain why voters fail to punish anti-democratic politicians and to hold them accountable for their anti-democratic actions and policies.

One of her main findings is that citizens may simply not recognize anti-democratic actions as they unfold. The uncertainty about the nature of elite behavior, Clayton explains, undermines the public's ability to check anti-democratic elites. She concludes that the public is unable to identify aspiring autocrats until it is too late and they've taken control of the levers of power. But the phenomenon of early stage incremental undetected or at least unrecognized backsliding cannot without more explain why we fail to take cognizance of the relevant phenomena

that are in plain sight. In a recent volume, Tali Sharad and Cass Sunstein observed that people's preferences adapt to what is available. This includes adapting to crime and to corruption and even to deprivation and diminished freedom. Studies including some that inquired into the mass psychology at work in the German population in the 1930s leading to the collapse of Germany's first democratic government and its descent into fascism disclosed a tendency to normalize a kind of moral self suppression

and to incline people to take comfort, if not refuge, in the automatic continuation of ordinary life of the mundane habits and rituals of regular existence while all around them terrible things were happening. of the mundane habits and rituals of regular existence, while all around them, terrible things were happening. In 1993, the late US Senator and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a seminal essay in which he described the tendency of societies to respond to destructive behaviors by lowering standards for what is permissible.

He called this tendency defining deviancy down. We've been redefining deviancy, he argued, so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized and also quietly raising the normal level in categories where current behavior would have been abnormal by any earlier standard. We come to accept, or at least to tolerate, toxicity in our public square, in our social media exchanges,

even on the floors of our legislative assemblies. We come to accept the public upbraiding of judges whose decisions we find inconvenient. We come to accept the corruption and self-dealing of a leader and his cronies. We come to accept the corruption and self-dealing of a leader and his cronies. We come to accept our own humiliation along with the demonization of those with whom we are instructed to disagree. Now there's one other psychosocial factor in the story of democratic decline that I

want to touch on and as I said I call this the stupidification of the mind and the popular sensibility and the resulting dumbification of our political discourse. Stupidity and autocracy are not mutually exclusive. M. Gesson wrote several years ago that these go hand in hand. It's one of the defining characteristics of autocratic regimes that they're antagonistic to speech, and by extension, to thought that is critical of their hegemonic premises and justifications. Such regimes cannot suffer the scrutiny of reason,

logic, science, empirically valid evidence, or the presence of the inquiring mind, especially that of the skeptical mind. The Orwellian device of doublespeak, the language in which the regime speaks in order not merely to assert, but to render unassailable its authority, makes refutation impossible

by making all propositions unintelligible. Doublespeak is not merely the language of obfuscation. It's the instrument of stupidification, and that's the point. Elections were rigged and stolen. Pandemics were plotted. Tariffs are paid by the foreign manufacturers and exporters, not by the importers and the consumers. Illegal immigrants are eating our pets.

The news is fake. Insurrectionists are patriots. Honest judges are corrupt. Anthropogenic global warming is a hoax. Ukraine is responsible for starting the war with Russia. Zelensky is a dictator. The 2016 presidential inauguration had the highest turnout in history, and everyone is entitled to their own alternative facts.

Thank you, Kellyanne Conway. These are all very stupid ideas but instead of discussing genuine and serious problems we're having all-consuming and deadly serious discussions about these stupid untrue claims and unreal things and it's making us dumber and less competent by the day to steward our democracy. And most perniciously, this war on truth, this elevation to respectable status of the right of each person to their own facts, is not intended to advance the growth of knowledge. These are not epistemic claims, but they're very opposite. The mission is to discredit the very idea of truth altogether so as to denude it of all authority and importance.

As Gaston wrote more recently, bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media, and our society dumber, and they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is one of the keys to totalitarian control. This was, of course, one of Hannah Arendt's key insights in her groundbreaking work on the logic, psychology, and politics of totalitarianism. Our discourse, having been seeded with terrible, stupid ideas and theories, becomes the instrument

with which those very ideas and theories are then justified. This makes gaslighting rather than argument the most efficient and successful form of political speech, for it is able to bypass entirely the validation filter of the marketplace of ideas. Conspiracy bootstrapping is one especially baleful variant of stupidification. Stephen Rauch has explained it this way.

First you introduce a false idea, spreading it by every available means. Then, once people are talking about it and some believe it, you cite its prevalence as evidence that it might be true, an epistemic slate of hand by which propaganda validates itself. Election denialism is a case in point. In the result, not only do elected autocrats proceed to dismantle democracy upon taking or retaining office, but in displays of mega chutzpah, they validate their power grabs and declare their so-called mandates as actually being expressions of the popular will.

Query whether the Constitution notwithstanding, Trump's musings about a possible third presidential term will ultimately translate into yet another such fabricated mandate. Fear, habituation, stupidification. Three of the essential ingredients in the recipe for a civic culture in which free citizens will cede their agency and become indispensable enzymes in the reaction that produces their collective transition

from accountability agents to useful idiots. Watching this process take hold in real time in America and in other parts of the world, it becomes obvious how the decommissioning of the machinery of accountability actually occurs with our necessary cooperation and participation, if not also with our tacit consent. It turns out that that machinery of accountability is, in the first instance, not the institutions we design and construct, nor the laws we enact, nor even the practices to which we adhere and which we respect as norms and conventions.

These are all essential, of course. But the true machinery of accountability in a liberal democracy is us. It is each of us as individuals and all of us as a society. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau underscored this when he ushered in Canada's new constitution on April 17th, 1982, with the following sage admonition. Let us celebrate the renewal and the patiation of our constitution, but let us put our faith first and foremost in the people of Canada who will give it life. The people will give it life. America's democratic reckoning will not occur until Americans and the rest of us first reckon with our own basic nature and its enlistment and weaponization against our own agency.

The America of Trump is not, or certainly not yet, the Argentina of Videla and Galtieri. But even a reversion in the next one or two election cycles to democratic control of Congress or the White House will not alone deliver the measure of accountability. I've called it sufficient accountability, commensurate with the standards and requirements of a liberal democracy. And so I say that it is time for the recommissioning of our machinery of accountability to begin.

It's time to learn how to help each other find our moral courage and our strength and resolve to resist and overcome the fear that is meant to paralyze us and to hobble our institutions causing us and them to retreat and to capitulate. It's time to learn how to disabituate, how to pay careful attention, how to notice what is there. And it's time for serious people and serious institutions, especially our free press and our universities,

to call out lies, conspiracies, and just plain stupid political speech for what it is, and to deny stupid notions and propaganda any space in our discourse, in our media, and in our heads. We must learn to become more discerning, to distinguish between the right to stupid speech, which, as civil libertariansarians we will always defend, and the duty to take stupid speech seriously, which as truth seekers we ought to repudiate. These things will not come easily. They require skill and practice.

As our government prepares to rearm the Canadian military and to defend against the impending challenges to Canada's sovereignty, especially in the North, it's also time to arm the civic immune system, to defend our liberal democracy against the forces of backsliding and decline. This is the work that we're most interested in at Section 1, and it ought, in my submission, to be the paramount concern and mission of public education. In his book Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haefner asks, what is history, and where does it take place?

Historians tend to give the impression that no more than a few dozen people are involved who happen to be at the helm of the ship of state, and whose deeds and decisions form what is called history. We anonymous others, he says, are not just pawns in the chess game. On the contrary, the most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large. This is quite an astonishing and extraordinary observation. These

decisions must be taken individually in order for them to be taken almost unconsciously by the population at large. First we must notice what is taking place and we must consciously and actively choose to not accept the unacceptable. Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose reflections always leave me both humbled and just a little bit wiser, wrote that we must learn how to be surprised, not to adjust ourselves.

If we as a society value our freedom and our democracy we need to heed this council. It is our dignity after all that hangs in the balance. Thank you very much. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National. You can stream us around the world at cbc.ca.com and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayaad.

You just heard democracy scholar Peter Biro's keynote address at a conference called liberal democracy in the rear view mirror. Biro is a senior fellow at Massey College and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights. He's also the founder of Section 1, a think tank dedicated to combating democratic backsliding. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. And educating students on how to be

what he calls heroic citizens. Peter Biro joined me in studio to talk about his keynote address. Peter Biro, thank you for being here, listening to you and your lecture. It was hard for me to kind of discern whether you are pessimistic or optimistic about liberal democracy. So I thought I'd ask you to start. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of liberal democracy? I'm pessimistic about the world, and so I have to be pessimistic about the future of

liberal democracy. I'm hopeful, however, that there's a great deal of good we can do. I think we have the ability to build capacity to restore liberal democracy in those places where it is backsliding and to build a more resilient version of it. But that is not going to be an easy task by any means. And the probabilities of that coming to pass are not great. A lot of the conversation that we hear these days about democratic backsliding focuses on

what's happening down south in the United States, as you did in your speech. But you said in your address that we cannot quote, that we cannot afford to be smug about the character and resilience of our own democracy here in Canada. What is it that we're failing to see in our own country or that we're being, that we've been habituated to that might be dangerous? All of the same things that they're failing to see down there. We're just not as far down the road of decline as they are. So we've got a lot to celebrate here, a lot to be proud of. And in the wake of this most recent election, you've seen a lot of celebratory reaction,

right? Not to the fact that it was Carney versus Puef, but to the fact that there was a free and fair election, that winners and losers were both gracious, that there is no question about the fact that in Canada we respect the peaceful transfer of power, we respect our institutions, you know, we respect the rule of law, lots to celebrate, especially at the institutional level. Even in our practices there's, lots to celebrate, especially at the institutional level. Even in our practices, there's a lot to celebrate, but that's only skin deep. When you scratch the surface, I'm not sure that the deeper commitment to liberal constitutionalism

is really there. I think that what passes in Canada for the democratic spirit is really a function to a significant extent of our good luck, our good fortune that we've continued to live with, you know, relative to other parts of the world, a relatively fair distribution of resources. Economic inequality is not as ugly here. It's certainly occurring here as everywhere else at an exponential pace or rate. It's getting worse. It is getting worse. And so the grievances that accompany that, those economic disparities

are going to become amplified over time. But we still live in a society with a decent social safety net, a strong social welfare system. We're not ashamed of our commitment to public health care and to entitlements. But that's only because we've had it pretty good more or less for a long time. It's not because our civic culture is as strong as we would like it to be. You mentioned the economic inequality. Are we becoming habituated to that idea? Absolutely.

It's not that we're habituated to the idea of inequality. We're becoming habituated to our existence as unequals. There's a concentration of power and of wealth that is increasingly marginalizing the middle class or the so-called middle class, a term I don't particularly love because it's been weaponized for various purposes by different political factions over the years. But we are habituated, we're becoming habituated in Canada to the idea that our standards of living are not going to be what they used to be. We're completely accepting of the fact

that our children, my children's generation, have no prospect whatsoever of enjoying the same standard of living as their parents and grandparents. Those kinds of things were, I don't know if habituation is the right term there. I use the term habituation and dishabituation in connection with behaviors and standards, particularly political conduct. So back to the question of what kind of is an example of something that you see that's dangerous

when we talk about democratic backsliding here in Canada. What's the first thing that comes to mind? The first thing that comes to mind is that a lot of things that should bother us don't bother us. That's why I have this sort of term, I use this metaphor of immunology, if you will. I talk about arming the civic immune system. And I think in Canada, our civic immune system is not sufficiently well-armed or conditioned such that it would produce, or that threats or transgressions or perils to our liberal democracy don't trigger the kind of allergic civic responses that they should. So things that should trouble us a great deal don't seem to bother us at all.

I'll give you a couple of perhaps silly examples. A few years ago, you'll remember the SNC-Lavalin scandal, a prime minister and those around him directed an attorney general to offer a major company a deferred prosecution agreement. And there was nothing wrong, by the way, with the idea that they should be granted a deferred prosecution agreement. What was problematic was that the prosecutorial independence of the attorney general and her underlings was violated in that moment. The kind of thing we would call out in other countries.

It's not the kind of thing that is occurring in the United States where you've got a president. Hungary. Well, I mean, Orban and Erdogan and others have perfected that. But you didn't see, I mean, other than the chattering classes, no offense to the people in your profession who I have a great deal of admiration for, other than the pundits and the commentators, you didn't see anyone going to the barricades over that issue. You didn't see anyone going to the barricades when Premier Ford, following an election in which the issue never arose, decided to cut the size of city council in half in mid municipal election. Of course, a lot of people were troubled enough that there

was litigation over it, but there wasn't the sense of being deeply offended and troubled that this kind of action by a political leader was more than just a policy initiative. It was actually fundamentally offensive to certain, you know, democratic sensibilities, if you will. Those are just two examples, but there are many, many examples that may in isolation seem trivial or silly, but taken together reflect the fact that we tend, generally speaking, to sort of let things fly, let things go. So you mentioned something in your speech

called Section 1. Yes. It's a think tank that you started as a response to democratic backsliding. Yes. Can you explain why it's called Section 1? What is that referring to? So it's referring to Section 1 of our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,

which is generally referred to by constitutional lawyers as the reasonable limits clause because it's the provision that both guarantees our fundamental rights and freedoms, but also sets out the conditions under which they can be restricted. I call it the liberal democracy clause and that's why I call it the Liberal Democracy Clause, and that's why I used it as kind of the name. Took me a long time to get that trademarked, by the way. A few people weren't happy about me using our Constitution as our trade name.

But it's the Liberal Democracy Clause because for me, what it stands for and what it inspires is the conditions necessary under which free and equal citizens are prepared to compromise their interests and even provisionally their rights and freedoms so long as those compromises occur in a way that is just, and that actually demonstrates respect for the very rights and freedoms in issue. That's what section one actually does constitutionally. So it's very appropriate.

Was there one specific thing that prompted you to, that concerned you so much that it led to the founding of this, of this think tank? Absolutely. so much that it led to the founding of this, of this think tank. Yeah, absolutely. And what that was, was the answer to my years long question of what are the key causes or factors in the backsliding. I talk a little bit about this in the Massey lecture, but the principle answer that I settled on was that it didn't have as much to do with rogue leaders and aspiring autocrats and political elites as

it did with the general acceptance or tolerance of society in general for behaviors that were utterly, utterly antagonistic to the core values and principles that underpin liberal democracy. So what section one was for me was a response to that. I looked at the principal institutional authority for the conditioning of our citizens, of our students, the public education system, and more specifically looked at the social studies curricula, the civics curricula. That curriculum in general contains a lot of very good information, but very little moral guidance. And so what section one sets out to do in its mission is actually to be an argument, to act as an argument for the moral necessity of liberal

constitutionalism and as a sort of banner, a substantive banner, if you will, promoting the idea of conditioning our students to become effective stewards of their democracy. I call it education for heroic citizenship. Right. So students who will be more attuned to what's necessary to be a good citizen, essentially. But you call them heroic citizens. So how would you define the heroic citizen? Well, thank you for that question because people do ask that and it's not meant as a pretentious statement and it's certainly not meant to be sensational in any way. For me, heroism in the civic context is not,

you know, jumping from tall buildings to save damsels in distress. It's simply the impulse of an average, well-conditioned citizen to notice what is going on and to be troubled by it, to feel bothered by it. What that citizen chooses to do is his or her own business. I'm not interested in enlisting students in particular social justice causes or particular

political agendas. I trust that well-educated, free, equal persons, you know, liberal democratic citizens, will make good judgments for themselves as to how they think they ought to react. Run for office, write a letter, pick it in front of an office building, organize in your community, read some books, do whatever it is, have some important conversations. But what a heroic citizen is, is someone who notices when perils to core liberal constitutional conditions are threatened and sits up, takes notice, and then decides what, if anything,

is to be done about that. And I suppose the ideal would be that we would all be attuned and watching and acting when we see something like that. I'm wondering whether part of the thinking would be to eliminate even the necessity of calling someone who acts a hero. Yeah, I'm fine with that. You know, I don't, I'm not particularly hung up on the nomenclature.

And I'm, you know, I'll take your critique under advisement by all means. But I use it because I want everyone to aspire to the heroism that is within them. Yeah. So in your speech, you said, quote, history shows that the great majority of us would not have stood up to autocratic power, that we would not have been heroes like Raoul Wallenberg, who helped Jews escape a terrible fate by preventing their deportation from Hungary. I guess the question is, what makes you think that you can create heroes today in this context when there were so few and far between back then? Well, it's not a question of then versus now.

I mean, what was going on then is going on now in every part of the world. And we see heroes, but we see them as being exceptional. I don't want them to be exceptional in this sense. It's not a question of creating heroes. It's a question of conditioning all of our students to achieve their own heroic potential. That's all it is.

It's actually far more modest a proposition than you might think. In your speech, you talk about fear being, you describe it as the most efficient democracy-proofing agent. Very powerful statement about how fear prevents action and prevents people from standing up. How much of a barrier do you think fear is today to what you describe as civic heroism? Well, it's everything in the United States right now. I mean, the United States at this very moment, as we're doing this interview,

is not a liberal democracy. It doesn't mean that there aren't liberal Democrats there. And it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a liberal constitution, laws, institutions, practices, etc. But it is not a liberal democracy and fear has a great deal to do with that right now. Motivated by? Motivated by the loss of status, loss of liberty, loss of personal security, loss of reputation, loss of membership, loss of financial well-being. I mean, every kind of loss that you can imagine. Fear is operating big time in the United States right now. The president and his acolytes are using fear more than any other strategy in their effort to destroy the country. I mean, I talk about the United States now suffering from a kind of autoimmune disease where effectively the administration and the government as a

whole, to the extent that the entirety of government is now complicit in this, is in a sense cannibalizing the vital organs of American democracy. Wow. Yeah. Quite an image. Yeah. I wonder what you make, what are we to make of your argument about the stupidification

of the conversation? You say that we spend so much time talking about stupid ideas based on lies and alternative facts, and that doing so makes us less able to steward democracy. What do you make of the argument, I guess, is that we have to engage people, even if they have stupid things to say,

or they spend all this time talking about stupid things, do we just cut them out of life or is it, I mean, just, could you talk about that tension between, you know, our need to talk to people who agree with us, but also the necessity in a democracy to be able to exchange ideas even if they're stupid? Well, first of all, that's a very important question or series of questions you just asked. First of all, I'm not talking about cutting anybody out first. Secondly, I make the distinction, and I think I did in the lecture, between our duty as civil libertarians to defend all kinds of speech And our supposed duty, which I think is completely misguided, and it's people who don't understand what academic freedom and free speech is actually

intended to be about, this notion that you have to accommodate and take seriously stupid ideas. That as truth seekers, right, whatever that might mean to you as a concept, were, I think, bound to disavow and repudiate. It's very, very difficult to talk about this, you know, in an age of such moral relativism where subjectivism is actually held out as a virtue. You have your truth, I have mine, you have your story, I have mine, your voice and mine. And we live in this world where everybody's position and everyone's unique standpoint is somehow equally morally valid. It's a ridiculous proposition. We're doing terrible damage to ourselves. We've got to be able to discern between good ideas that we disagree with and just downright foolish talk. Foolish talk. But one man's foolish talk is another man's religion, I mean, or, or, or mantra. So that, that's true. And I, you know, what I, the way I've just framed this, you know, people are going to say, oh, he's, he's really antagonistic to the true marketplace of ideas,

to true freedom of speech. Absolutely not. We have a limited amount of space in our heads, a little, a limited amount of time on our airwaves, all right? We've got to consecrate as much space as we can for serious ideas. And all I'm saying is those notions that are just patently ridiculous need to be set aside. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying that if you want to make some kind of argument that I happen to think is crazy or offensive, that you shouldn't be allowed to make it. And if you ask me to take it seriously, I think I should. I think I should, but I need to make a decision

very early on in the process as to whether I'm going to simply reject it out of hand because it's just not consistent with any reality that I understand or because I have refuted it. I mean, there's a very big difference between taking bad ideas seriously and subjecting them to a process of falsification and refutation.

That's what the marketplace of ideas is designed to do. That's what your program is all about, that ideas. I mean, that's what we want. We want unpopular speech to be taken seriously enough that it is considered both as to its merits and demerits, and if it is to be repudiated, it should be on the basis of serious arguments and serious evidence. But a president of the United States who wants the world to believe that, as I said in my speech, that illegal immigrants are eating our pets, when you look at the amount of space

and time that that took up on social media, that's what I'm talking about. Conspiracy theories. So we have to have enough respect for ourselves, and enough confidence in our good judgment that we don't feel that we are offending principles of free speech and free expression or academic freedom in the context of the university, generically speaking, when we simply say, I'm sorry, we're not going to give time and space to that notion. Yeah. Because it's not just a question of taking up time. It also has detrimental consequences for our democracy, right?

And for just the quality of our thought process. Yeah. So, looping back to the very beginning where I asked you whether you're optimistic or pessimistic, your hopes for the future of liberal democracy, is it in the education system? Well, it's in many places, but it has to be there. If it's not happening there, it doesn't matter what happens anywhere else. We can have economic prosperity. Mark Carney can come up with a decent industrial strategy or post-industrial strategy.

We can have a great Arctic sovereignty and security and defense policy. We can have a great trade policy. But those are policies, they are externalities. If we don't have a liberal democratic sensibility, consciousness, we can never trust those externalities to safeguard our freedom and democracy. Even the courts themselves only do their work because citizens expect them to.

And so finally, what would be a sign, you think, that we're turning a corner on that measuring stick? Well, the fact that I'm here speaking with you is one of them. I think we need a lot more emphasis in the public square, so to speak, on the kind of issues that we're talking about right now. That would be a sign for me that, you know, if I saw evidence of concern amongst those who curate these critically important public conversations for the kinds of things that I'm talking about, that would be a very hopeful sign.

But another hopeful sign that I experience every day in my work with Section 1 is young people who call me or write me and say, I heard you speak, I wanna get involved in this, I wanna learn more, I wanna participate in your side program. What you're saying resonates with me.

And it's not about me or Section 1, it's that it shows that there is a basic intuition that we have as human beings for what justice demands of us. And we yearn to live in a state that is free and just for everyone. That gives me hope. Yeah. Peter Bero, thank you so much for coming in. It was wonderful to listen to you. An honor to speak with you. Thank you. Thank you.

You were listening to my conversation with democracy scholar and advocate Peter Biro. Special thanks to Joe Costa and Emily Mockler at Massey College for helping us out with the recording of Peter Biro's keynote address. This episode was produced by Donna Dingwall. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed.