I for one refuse to "normalize" what is occurring and to close my eyes to what I perceive to be an existential threat to Western democracy.

My sense is that many continue to sleep walk and that we in the West are entering a very dangerous period of history - politically and militarily.

If the West continues to lose its social cohesion - its moderate, centrist, balanced and reasoned public discourse then the geopolitical order that we have known since the end of World War Two may well give way to a more violent non-democratic future - up to and including another world war - if others are emboldened and miscalculate.

Canada is terribly exposed for it has only a very small population and is entirely dependent on its exports. Canada, as we know it, is a creation of the western liberal order that has allowed us to trade and has given us security - both these things have allowed us to create a tolerant caring society on the cheap (however imperfect it may be)

There has been a steady rise of the number of people in our western societies that do not inform themselves of public policy issues, who do not vote or when they do fall prey to populism. This is a cancer that must be arrested for what we see emerging today has been made possible by that ignorance.

The western democracies have always been numerically inferior and they may soon be economically inferior to the dictatorships.. as our science and technology globalizes. Military power is shifting... and not in the democracies' favour.

Our greatest enemy lies not in the Moslem world (which is ignorant, poverty ridden and fragmented) but within the western democracies. It lies with those who would use the non-existential threat of moslem extremism to tear apart our democratic institutions and values and attempt to create a world order based on race and ethnicity - an Orwellian vision, a dark dis-functional vision. They and their allies in the dictatorships are an "existential threat".

There is an cultural undercurrent, an angry nationalist nostalgia for a time that never was as simple or perfect as in the minds eye. It was in fact a time of two world wars, a great depression in between, racism and the slaughter of millions. At the conclusion of those world wars we built an international order to protect the democracies and western liberal traditions. In the East and in the West there are those that would dismantle that order.

Democracy and western liberal traditions are under real threat as I write and we would all do well to consider what action needs to be taken to safeguard our future.

WEF: This isn't the 1930s, but there are political similarities