> People are quite aware (imperfectly , but still pretty well) of what can go wrong, and they 've decided that losing some liberties is a small price to pay.

In other words: They do not understand that they are losing all liberties?

> It's been too many years of revelations and media campaigns. I think at this point we just have to admit that most people don't mind, not that they don't know.

I very much disagree. Do you have an idea what media people consume? What absolute bullshit they are being fed? Do you really think that people on that basis have an accurate understanding of where all of this will lead?

> Right, but where do you draw the line.

You don't, there is no need to, it's not a binary matter. You might for pragmatic reasons in order to have terms to use for effective communication, but there is no actual line between "dictatorship" and "democracy", between "libertarianism" and "totalitarianism", it's a scale with many steps in between the two extremes. The point is that just because something might be considered a democracy under some pragmatic definition, doesn't mean it's therefore equivalent to everything else that you might label a democracy.

> Did the germans in 1933 think they have a democracy? Do Turks or Russians today think they have a democracy?

I think that's somewhat the wrong question to ask, in that it assumes "the Germans", "the Turks", or "the Russians" to be homogeneous groups. There most definitely were and are lots of people in all of those societies who would not consider their political system a functional democracy.

> It's easy to tell post-facto, or from the outside, not so easy when it's happening in real time.

Well, but is that actually true? If you understand power structures somewhat, it's not really that hard to see, is it? It seems to me this is much more a matter of competence than of your location in time or space. While it may be hard to get the full picture of what is going on, it's not really that hard to see whether you are free to say whatever you want, to inform yourself about whatever you want, to vote securely, i.e., whether the structural prerequesites for a democracy are there. It's just that a lot of people are not competent at recognizing what authoritarianism looks like and are more than willing to accept any authoritarian apologetics they are presented with.

> Do the UK or US think they have a liberal democracy ? absolutely. Is that 100% true? less clear

But do they? As above: I am pretty sure a significant proportion of people don't think that, at least not without reservations. And a large section of the public wouldn't even know what you mean by "liberal democracy" as opposed to just "democracy", so you can not really meaningfully say that they think they live in a liberal democracy. They would understand your question to mean "can you vote?", which they would, correctly so based on their understanding of the question, answer with "yes".

I think it might be helpful to draw an analogy with religion: Many religious people have a very warped understanding of reality and in particular of how to understand reality. They simply lack the competence to understand the failures in their reasoning. They think they do understand the world in terms of their preferred fictional story, but they don't realize it's all fictional. So, based on their rather confused understanding of the world, they then demand that slavery should be upheld, or that gay people should be oppressed, or that women must not be allowed to control their own bodies, or whatever the case may be, because they think that those are the right things to do. But then, there is a not insignificant group of people who overcome their religion, who come to understand how reality actually works and how it can actually be understood. And with that understanding usually comes a rejection of their previous political stance, because they now understand the actual consequences of their former ideas. These are not people who are actually fundamentally OK with the damage they were doing before, they simply were lacking an understanding of how their actions were damaging, because based on their previous fictional world view, they were doing the right thing to prevent bad things from happening.

You have to consider that people might just be incompetent at this democracy thing, rather than that they all have an understanding that reflects all the things that they could know if they were paying attention to the right sources that you might be paying attention to.