Base failure/s ? Just one choice out of many:

Externalities. A glacier has no vote; a frog species finances no election campaign; a stable climate could not be voted for; the global dumpsters (atmosphere, oceans, etc) are free to use; cheap oil costs nothing but drilling refinery transport (and military) but neither the nonrenewability, nor the resulting pollution has to be paid for; (and without politics taxing all those, the economy misses out on that vital information completely, so it cannot deliver proper optimization); and almost no one gives AF about anything after the current election cycle - let alone future generations. All the services that a no-longer-tame nature had delivered, were never in any government budget balance sheet.
So in short, we are losing literal INVISIBILITIES that only a tiny minority ever cared about, but which played zero role for everyone else.

"Minority" is a key observation here.

Diversity - what if the "base failure" is totally different, for different subgroups?:

I've watched plenty elections. The vast MAJORITY gets it all wrong. Each time. And still. Largely not even by their own thinking, but then they did not free themselves in time.
More (much more?) than three quarters of voters are just different shades of conservativism; perhaps that's why "democracy" has such horrible outcomes when completely new societal, technical, economic paradigms would have been needed instead? Only when the relevant timescales are longer than a human life, the situation might sometimes progress and improve, because old views can literally die out. And gerontocratic subsystems try hard to postpone that.

The ecological MINORITY has been growing, but much too slow. Perhaps only very recently out of the one-digit percentages? With its super slow growth, the biggest "base failure" of the ecological minority might have been ... in spite of better knowledge (and while time was running out) still believing in ...

the majority vote principle.