DEMOCRACY’S greatest virtue is its humanity. It trusts people to think, argue, dissent, and decide. It believes political legitimacy comes from consent, not coercion, and that progress is best made through persuasion rather than force. Bertrand Russell’s Liberal Decalogue remains a powerful moral compass for this worldview — one rooted in doubt, critical thinking, respect for dissent, and the refusal to sanctify authority.

But what happens when a crisis demands speed, certainty, and unilateral execution — qualities that liberal democracies, by design, resist? As the climate crisis accelerates and the world edges beyond the 1.5°C threshold, this tension has moved from philosophical debate to an existential question. Can liberal democracies with their slow churn of deliberation, electoral cycles, and competing interests take the drastic actions needed to avoid catastrophic warming? Or will authoritarian regimes, for all their moral costs, prove more capable of implementing harsh but necessary measures? The critical question is whether democracy can survive the climate emergency and is liberalism ill-suited for an age of hard choices.

The answer lies in an uncomfortable but essential examination of liberalism’s strengths and weaknesses when confronted with planetary emergency.

Liberalism was built in an age when the greatest threats came from the overreach of power — kings, tyrants, majorities, churches. Its commandments were forged to protect the individual from being crushed by political authority. Russell captured this ethos perfectly: do not be certain, do not suppress opinions, overcome opposition through argument not........

© Dawn