It is impossible, I think, to blame the chaos on "the failure of citizens to conduct due diligence" without recognizing the degree to which the traditional tools of such "due diligence" have become corrupted.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/01/07/jill-lepore-capitol-insurrection-historical-context

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How do citizens in a democracy "conduct due diligence" on the "state of affairs" in their government? Three major sources:

— the media: newspapers, TV, radio, etc.

— political elites: elected officials and leaders within their prefered party or sect

— their friends

The "media" they consume tells them lies all day long.

The "political elites" they look to have been lying to them for years.

And the "friends" whose counsel they seek increasingly do so through the extremism-amplification filter known as Facebook.

If you are *actively interested* in politics and government — and thus willing to expend significant effort seeking, evaluating, and confirming information — it's certainly possible to recognize the bullshit that you're being fed.

But if you are only *semi-interested* in politics — more of a passive receptor of political information that a hunter/gatherer of it — you have no particular interest in doing the evaluative work.

40-50 years ago, a temperamentally conservative American with only middling interest in politics was getting news from a mainstream local newspaper and someone like Walter Cronkite. The political leaders they looked to were establishment Republicans of the sort who won elections.

Today, that person is getting their news from Fox News and Facebook's algorithm, neither of which have shown much skill or interest in truthfulness.

And the political leaders they turn to are happy to lie and excuse the lies of others.

I certainly wouldn't want to hold the consumers of all that propaganda/bullshit blameless for believing (pick one: Obama is a Muslim, that Raphael Warnock is a Marxist, that China pulls Ossoff's strings, that Ruby Freeman forged 10,000 ballots, that Trump's reelection was stolen)

But I think you have to recognize that the *exact same level* of due diligence that used to work for non-news-junkie Americans no longer produces a democracy-appropriate level of knowledge. /end