Hundreds of books have appeared since the early 2000 forecasting the erosion of liberal democracy in connection with what is identified as deep disruptions of media and communications in the digital age. Much collected evidence suggests that the best days of democracy are over, and that democracy might soon come to an end. Intellectuals have given up believing in the future of democracy, not because they embrace a better project, but because evidence speaks against it. But what binds democracy and the media so closely together? Why is democracy's destiny so intimately related to the health of public communication and the media?

The diagnosis of democratic failure does not start with a discussion of media infrastructures and dynamics but with political ideas and ideologies (Muller, 2011; Zielonka, 2018). The assumption that Western politics had witnessed the ‘end of ideology’ actually predates the fall of the Iron Curtain and of the ideologically divided world in 1989 (Bell, 1962) and relates to the sociological diagnosis of open societies shaped by secularization, individualization and enhanced reflexivity where collective projects lost their shine (Beck et al, 1994). Liberal democracy proliferated precisely because it did not require collective ideological commitments and allowed for the establishment of some sort of technocratic government with an emphasis on politics as ‘problemsolving’ (Giddens, 1994). Yet democracies are not simply made by individuals, and the ‘neglect of the collective’ has thus become ‘ideological’ in the way it has been promoted by some of the hardliners of neoliberal thought. In parallel, collectives began to be reshaped in the post-‘89 counter-revolutions and search for new expressions of popular sovereignty in the form of ethno-nationalism and populism (Snyder, 2003; Wodak and Boukala, 2015; Zielonka, 2018).