“As Adrian Vermeule puts it, liberalism fears that its dependence on and fundamental difference from democracy will be exposed if a sustained course of non-liberal popular opinion comes to light. The solution is to offer an idealised concept of democracy, sharply distinguished from “mere majoritarianism.” By this device, the liberal may get to preserve his self-understanding as a democrat. This can become quite strained, as in the reflex to call the popularly elected governments of Poland and Hungary “antidemocratic”. When Pew did opinion polling in Afghanistan a decade ago and found that something like 95% of respondents expressed a preference that sharia law should be the law of the land, this was not allowed to interrupt the conviction that making Afghanistan “democratic” would require a feminist social transformation. That is, an explicitly anti-majoritarian revolution.

(..) and it was Rawls who insisted on this crucial point: if you could just establish the right framing conditions for deliberation, the demos would arrive at acceptably liberal positions. We should be able to formalise these conditions, it was thought. And conversely, wherever the opinions of the demos depart from an axis running roughly from the editorial page of the New York Times to that of the Wall Street Journal, it was taken to be prima facie evidence that there was some distorting influ­ence in the discursive conditions under which people were conducting their thought processes, or their conversations among themselves. The result was opinion that was not authentically democratic (i.e., not liberal).

(..) I remember there was one grad student in my department who was running experiments on focus groups, seeing if he could get them to think the right thoughts.

To my unsympathetic eye, this looked like an exercise in self-delusion by aspiring apparatchiks for whom a frankly elitist posture would have been psychologically untenable. I don’t know if that grad student got his subjects to think the right thoughts. But I have little doubt he got them to say the right thoughts, and thereby lend those thoughts the demotic imprimatur he was looking for. Maybe that was good enough. Political correctness might be understood as a device that became necessary for liberalism to continue to claim the mantle of democracy, even as prosecution of its program would require increasingly antidemocratic measures.

(..) One of the central tenets of progressives’ self-understanding is that they are pro-fact and pro-science, while their opponents (often the majority) are said to have an unaccountable aversion to these good things: they cling to fond illusions and irrational anxieties. It follows that good governance means giving people informed choices. This is not the same as giving people what they think they want, according to their untutored preferences. Informed choices are the ones that make sense within a well-curated informational context.

(..) As Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal, “[O]ne idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you having to type. . . . I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

(..) More recently, the relative risks of the virus versus the vaccine for different demographics has been dismissed as irrelevant, for the sake of combatting vaccine hesitancy. But such deceptions, however well-intended, can succeed only if you have control over the flow of information. So once you go down this road of departing from the truth, you’re committed to censorship and rigorous narrative enforcement, which is very difficult to do in the Internet era.

(..) Covid is likely to do for public health what 9/11 did for the security state. Going through an airport, we still take off our shoes – because twenty years ago, some clown tried to light his shoe on fire. (..) One tries to put out of mind facts such as this: in independent audits of airport security, about 80-90% of weapons pass through undetected. The microwave machine presents an imposing image of science that helps us bury such knowledge. We have a duty to carry out an ascetic introspection, searching out any remaining tendencies toward rational pride and regard for the truth, submitting them to analysis. Similarly, the irrationality of the Covid rules we comply with has perhaps become their main point. In complying, we enact the new terms of citizenship.”

https://unherd.com/2021/10/the-new-covid-despotism/