Democratic Decline

In the fall of 2019, Shawn Rosenberg (n.d.) delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychologists entitled “Democracy Devouring Itself.” As Rosenberg spoke, the mood of those in the audience changed; according to Rick Shenkman (2019), they began nervously “shifting in their seats.” What caused the reaction was Rosenberg’s (n.d.) prediction that democracies, like the U.S., will not last much longer. The decline had been coming for some time, as witnessed by the emergence of the evangelical right in the 1990s, the rise of the Tea Party in the aughts, and the election of Donald Trump in the mid-2010s. Rosenberg (n.d.) saw these events not as causes of the decay, but rather symptoms of a weakness inherent in all democratic states—namely, that most people “do not have the cognitive or emotional capacities required” to make self-governance work.