Democracy Is
Devouring Itself —
and It Always Was

In the summer of 2019, a paper was presented before the International Society of Political Psychologists that made people in the audience audibly uncomfortable. They shifted in their seats, whispered objections to their neighbors, grew loud enough to drown out parts of the presentation. The argument was not radical in its data — it was radical in what it refused to look away from. Its core claim: democracy is devouring itself, and not because of any particular leader, economic shock, or wave of immigration, but because of a structural flaw built into the system from the beginning. The paper's author, Shawn Rosenberg — a professor at UC Irvine with degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Harvard, and one of the most respected figures in political psychology — was not predicting a distant future. He was describing a present already well underway. Six years later, with far-right parties governing or surging across the United States, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, France, and Italy, his argument no longer sounds provocative. It sounds accurate.

What Democracy Actually Asks

Liberal democracy is, at its core, a cognitive and emotional project. It requires citizens to reason about complex institutional arrangements, tolerate deep uncertainty, engage constructively with people who hold fundamentally different values, and distinguish credible information from manipulation. These are not trivial demands. Rosenberg's research identifies three broad types of political reasoning, and the distribution matters enormously.

Liberal democracy was built on the assumption that citizens could be reasoned with, that they would engage across difference, and that they would, over time, improve. Rosenberg's empirical work suggests that assumption was always more aspirational than real.

The Guardrails That Are Gone

For most of the twentieth century, an informal democratic oligarchy managed the contradiction. Political and cultural elites — who genuinely internalized democratic norms, and who also happened to be their primary beneficiaries — used mainstream media, established parties, and educational institutions to set the limits of legitimate political debate. It was imperfect and often exclusionary. But it compensated for citizens' cognitive and emotional limitations by quietly limiting the range of choices they were asked to make. Social media shattered that centralized public sphere. Postmodern globalization eroded the cultural hierarchies that once gave people a stable sense of place and identity. The democratization of everyday life — in workplaces, schools, families — emancipated people from old structures of deference. All liberating, in principle. The problem is that emancipation without the psychological infrastructure to handle it produces not freedom but anxiety, disorientation, and resentment. The guardrails came down and what was revealed was a population that had been depending on them all along.

Why Populism Feels Like Relief

This is the context in which right-wing populism needs to be understood — not as a political mistake or a passing fever, but as a psychologically coherent response to a genuine problem. For people experiencing the vertigo of a complex, leaderless, morally ambiguous world, populism offers certainty: clear categories of belonging (we the people versus a corrupt elite or alien other), simple causation, authoritative direction from a leader who speaks as the authentic voice of the collective, and profound emotional relief. The shame of not understanding dissolves. The resentment finds a legitimate target. The rally replaces the lost community with something warmer and more immediate.

It is worth noting that left-wing populism — grounded in class conflict and redistribution rather than nativist exclusion — exists as a significant political force, most powerfully in Latin America, from Chávez to Kirchner to López Obrador. But in the contemporary Western world, it is the right-wing variant that is reshaping democracies. The left's version tends to be internationalist and redistributive; the right's is nativist and authoritarian — and it maps directly onto the cognitive architecture Rosenberg describes, onto the linear and sequential thinking that thrives on clear enemies, strong leaders, and the comfort of a homogeneous "us."

Two Exits. One Hard, One Easy.

Rosenberg sees two possible responses, and he does not pretend they are equally attractive. The first tailors governance to citizens as they are: strong directive leadership, simplified national narratives, a public culture organized around solidarity and obligation rather than debate and difference. Think Singapore's technocratic paternalism or Hungary's self-declared illiberal democracy. It works, for a version of order. The price is democracy itself. The second path — what Rosenberg calls Pedagogical Democracy — means redesigning educational institutions and deliberative spaces to actively build the cognitive, emotional, and civic capacities that democratic life requires. Slow, unglamorous, generational. The only path that does not end in managed decline.

Can democratic education be redesigned at scale, and fast enough to matter? Can deliberative institutions be rebuilt in a media environment engineered for outrage? Is there political will to invest in citizen development when the easier electoral payoff is to exploit citizen limitation? And can a democracy choose, collectively, to confront the cognitive roots of its own unraveling — or is that very capacity already the thing eroding?

What Rosenberg offers is not despair but diagnosis — and the integrity not to look away from what the data shows. Democracies are not failing because of bad leaders or bad luck. They are failing because they were built on assumptions about human capacity that were always more aspirational than empirical, and because the institutional scaffolding that quietly compensated for that gap has been dismantled — by technology, by globalization, and, with profound irony, by democracy's own deepening. Facing that honestly is the necessary first step. What comes after requires more than scholarship. It requires will.