What we hailed as liberal democracy was never based on deliberation about the common good, but rather on the dialectic between conflicting interests, checked in a dynamic power balance. It is only when industrial society fully blooms into postindustrial society (and education levels rise dramatically and class distinctions and the categories of class become blurred), that liberal democracy begins to live up to its own mythos as a deliberation between equal citizens. In such societies we begin to observe a situation in which arguments and reasoning of informed citizens actually do matter.
