We all feel different things.

There’s an anecdote about Derek Parfit watching a video of Hitler celebrating a Nazi military triumph, doing a little dance. Parfit’s response was: “At least something good came out of the German victory.” This was truly how Parfit felt. He wasn’t a Nazi sympathizer or a bad person—just someone who genuinely felt that, ceteris paribus, any additional happiness in the universe was a net good, no matter what. This wasn’t an abstract intellectual position; he actually felt this.

Last year, a Tyler Cowen podcast episode took the nerdy internet community by storm.

Cowen got heated—emotional, even angry—at Jonathan Haidt over what seemed like an innocuous issue: restricting social media access for young children. But his outburst wasn’t surprising to me. Cowen is a longtermist who cares deeply—like deeply, deeply, deeply—about maximizing innovation. He believes that super-geniuses having unrestricted access to the firehose of information and discovery on the internet is of utmost importance. So when Haidt advocated for restrictions, Cowen truly felt this.

Bryan Caplan is a zealous advocate for open borders in the U.S. He presents cold, rational economic arguments for his position. And while his economic reasoning is persuasive, most people remain unconvinced. Why? Because Caplan’s argument is divorced from what many people actually care about: their culture, their sense of community, their social fabric. They want to preserve these things, even at the cost of economic inefficiency. But Bryan does not feel this. He simply wants to maximize well-being, as measured by known economic indicators. While nearly everyone else feels the weight of cultural and social cohesion, he does not.

I bring all this up because something I feel deeply, but many others seem relatively indifferent to, is the idea of a rule-of-law-based, liberal democratic state.

I’ve spent a huge portion of my life studying history, public policy, and government. I’m a lawyer with a master’s in public policy. I’ve traveled extensively in every kind of country imaginable. And if there’s one fundamental lesson all of this has taught me, it’s how precious what we have in the West is—and how little separates us from a world with orders of magnitude more misery. In short, a rule of law rule-of-law-based, liberal democratic state is the most important virtue imaginable.

One of the biggest blind spots people have is viewing democracy in binary terms: either we have it, or we descend into fascism—Hitler 2.0. But the U.S. is not on the verge of becoming a full-blown fascist state. What it is doing, however, is sliding toward becoming one of the countless variants of illiberal, menacing governments that exist around the world.

To be clear: living in Turkey, Hungary, or Brazil is not a nightmare. Many people there are happy, and life goes on, often in ways that look remarkably similar to life here. Frankly, there’s a good chance I would have been happier if I were born in Brazil rather than Canada. And, regardless of political shifts, the U.S. will remain the richest country in the world.

So this is certainly not doom as most people envision it, just something that produces less human flourishing and increases medium and longer term risks.

But even with all that minimizing out of the way, the erosion of a rule-of-law-based liberal democracy is something I feel deeply—not because of some statistic, but just something I feel within myself that seemingly, many others dont. And it causes me great sadness.