Former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is in hot water over this unwelcome bit of advice to President Donald Trump:

The Grand Jury has acted upon the facts and the law.

No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.

Hopefully, the former President will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) March 31, 2023

Predictably, Pelosi’s tidbit on ‘proving innocence’ has plunged the Twittersphere into meltdown. Most reaction has centered on her purport to reverse the judicial process: guilt is now assumed, and innocence must be proven.

Before one jumps to total condemnation, it is worth mentioning that Pelosi is unlikely to have either voiced the tweet to staff, or typed it out herself. Of course, we can only speculate, but she remains a busy woman, despite her loss of the speakership. Most probably, the tweet was punched out by an Aide.

Perhaps an average mid-level staffer, roaming the halls of the Capitol, was looking for loose grenades to lob over the trench walls at the boss’s orange-tinged arch-enemy… Or maybe Pelosi really did dictate it herself.

Either way, such a statement is a dangerous thing to reckon with, and points to a larger problem emerging in Western democracies: Liberal illiteracy.

Liberal illiteracy is the loss of functional understanding of how our world works. It is the inter-generational disappearance of the technical knowledge that informs how the levers of freedom-fairness and action-consequence interact. It divides into two broad competencies: financial-economic literacy, and social-legal literacy.

I have written previously about the intergenerational loss of Western financial-economic literacy. This economic literacy governs the sphere of public prosperity essential to the health of thriving Western democracies. The liberal free market, though it remains alive in principle, is an invention functionally lost to today’s generation of political movers and shakers. They do not understand the virtue of the profit motive, nor do they grasp the inherent societal fairness of a market system left to its own devices, kept free of government intervention or regulatory overreach.

It appears a similar story is playing out in the rule of law, which governs the sphere of public liberty, a sphere equally essential to the health of Western democracies. Citizens of a free society need to be able to count on such liberty in order for their nations to function coherently.

The primacy of the rule of law, and the primacy of the free market, are the two complimentary pillars that hold aloft the grand experiment in freedom that the United States and its allies purport to represent.

Incensed at the abandonment of legal norms, many commentators on the right today have already moved beyond anger at the mission to ‘Get Trump’, and are pointing the ‘hypocrisy’ finger at the Democrat-controlled DOJ, State Attorneys General, and various Soros-backed prosecutors. Some are even further ahead of the game, pointing out that the hypocrisy is not the point – Democrats know what they are doing and don’t care if there’s a double standard, so long as they win.

Each of these positions ignores a frightening truth: that an entire generation of the political class has lost a functional understanding of how liberalism works. All political systems depend for their functioning, on user literacy. Liberals hate the restraints placed upon them by the rule of law, so they skirt around them at every possible opportunity. Whilst this won’t cause the upending of the world overnight, over time, a functional literacy in the rules of civilisational order is lost. Once this process is complete, we find ourselves waking up and doing as we please, unaware that the entire system supporting our existence is on the precipice of chaos.

There is strong evidence for the role played by civilisational illiteracy in the fate of the communist states which rose and fell throughout the 20th Century. Karl Marx’s historical system of unlimited revolution failed, ultimately, because he appropriated the mechanism of his philosophical predecessor Hegel, but failed to balance the functional ingredients when adapting Hegel’s work to his own designs. I acknowledge it is a contested point, especially on the right of politics, but I maintain that Marx was no grand master of civilisational destruction, calculatedly setting about his work to undo society forever. He was, rather, a man with a grandiose idea, who didn’t know what on Earth he was doing in advocating for that idea’s functional execution.

In their hubris, modern-day liberals (post-liberals, as some like to say) make the same mistake as Marx. They claim to love, care for, and promote their system as one that promises ultimate freedom for the individual. But in executing its governance, they fail to understand the way liberalism functions. They give in to tribalism where systemic restraint is required, and they enslave themselves to rule by passion, where reason ought to be the order of the day. They cannot see that the consequence of their decision to hunt Trump at all costs – a decision which has seen them necessarily destroy the predictability and reliability of the justice system – will be the crumbling of the rule of law’s effectual governing power in the United States of America.

This blindness – this liberal illiteracy – is the core problem of which Nancy Pelosi’s shocking tweet is a mere symptom. We are likely only seeing the beginning of its consequences. Only with a radical reinvestment in good education, may we be in time to stop the whole show – the very liberal democratic order itself – from coming apart at the seams.

Ben Crocker is a research fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC. His Substack is Crocker’s Columns. @RealBenCrocker

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