How should we talk about a crisis of liberal democracy?

Recently, there has been much concern that liberal democracies face an existential crisis. However, this claim has been criticised as unfounded and unduly alarmist. In particular, some question whether the popular use of ‘crisis’ is a result of problematic adherence to overly high and unrealistic normative ideals. Put differently, the current use of the label is unwarranted, critics say, because it merely denotes an inescapable distance between the actual regime and its ideal. I call this the worry of ‘permanent crisis’. In this paper I defend the concept of crisis against this worry. First, I develop a conceptual safeguard against the worry of permanent crisis. This is done by introducing a definition of crisis wherein it denotes a systemic shortfall in reaching a fundamental aim and is diagnosed using a historical or comparative benchmark. So-understood concept of crisis pinpoints a specific type of challenges to liberal democracy. Namely, the challenges which are at once serious and urgent. By serious I mean that ‘crisis’ encompasses threats to liberal democracy that are existential so threaten its very survival. Urgency, here, entails that ‘crisis’ must cover actionable shortcomings. This requirement ensures that the concept of crisis is not evoked to describe the distance between a democratic ideal and its realisation. Second, I motivate this paper by outlining the importance of the concept of crisis. For supporters of democracy, there is a practical benefit to effectively understanding the gravity conveyed by the term crisis in that it can motivate a call for action. I illustrate this argument by discussing the shift of language from climate change to climate crisis in the environmental debates. The fact that ‘crisis’ successfully transmits urgency, and that this can be utilised as a political call for action, will be of particular interest to the crisis diagnoses which consider the lowering turnout as an increasing threat to liberal democracies. Since in these diagnoses part of the initial problem is citizens’ insufficient participation in the democratic process, understanding this as a crisis could be the first step of a solution. The second benefit to the term ‘crisis’ is that it is open-ended. This benefit is particularly valuable because it is not shared by other, commonly used evaluative labels. Typically, negative evaluations and worrisome trends of democratic deficits are expressed by labels such as ‘democratic erosion’, ‘democratic backsliding’, ‘de-democratisation’ which presume the destination where liberal democracies in trouble are headed. Uniquely then, as I argue, ‘crisis’ transmits the gravity of the threat and open-endedness of its aftermath. As such, it communicates both danger and hope which makes it exceptionally useful for democratic theory.