"...Then, the mood changed.As one of the lions of the profession, 68-year-old Shawn Rosenberg, began delivering his paper, people in the crowd of about a hundred started shifting in their seats.
They loudly whispered objections to their friends.
...What caused the stir?
Rosenberg, a professor at UC Irvine, was challenging a core assumption about America and the West. His theory?
Democracy is devouring itself—his phrase — and it won’t last.
As much as President Donald Trump’s liberal critics might want to lay America’s ills at his door, Rosenberg says the president is not the cause of democracy’s fall—even if Trump’s successful anti-immigrant populist campaign may have been a symptom of democracy’s decline.
We’re to blame, said Rosenberg.
As in “we the people.”
Democracy is hard work.
And as society’s “elites”—experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule—have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy.
As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists.
His prediction?
“In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail.”...
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