I would say that the crisis we face is a crisis of justice. Justice necessarily involves both epistemology and ontology.

Knowledge has been recognized to be a matter of personal inclination: from religious beliefs to observation within material existence, whether any bit of information received, however it might have been received, is accepted as knowledge is up to each human being individually. So President Obama was correct in his concern for democracy if democracy is seen as being dependent on knowledge that all people are required to accept as valid. Fortunately, that is not the case.

(Among other outcomes for society) a democratic political process follows from recognizing mutual respect as the ethic of justice. Mutual respect as the ethic of justice follows from asserting (as John Locke did) that injustice is "being subject to the arbitrary will of another person." It is simply intuitively satisfying as the ethic of justice: what motivation could exist for rejecting it? Mutual respect as the ethic of justice follows from a belief in equality (which can be a secular/ideological belief or a sacral/theological belief). It follows from the (ontological) observation that human beings have no choice but to effect choices.

The last of those is the most important. It explains why arbitrariness in human relations is injustice and it explains how mutual respect as the ethic of justice following from that observation obviates arbitrariness.

In a society governed by mutual respect people who rejected that ethic would still be granted, as fellow human beings, its protections. They would, like all people, be subjects of the laws of the society.

That account of mutual respect as the ethic of justice validates recognizing mutual respect as the ethic of justice from any of those other perspectives. Why people resist recognizing mutual respect as the ethic of justice is beyond my comprehension.