A frisson of excitement swept through the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychologists in Lisbon, in the summer of 2019, as American scholar Professor Shawn Rosenberg began reading his paper, Democracy Devouring itself: The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right Wing Populism. The excitement soon segued into murmurs of protest as Rosenberg claimed that democracy was devouring itself, and then went on to predict, according to Politico Magazine: "In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail."

Rosenberg's thesis is that democracy requires its citizens to do hard work, sift from an avalanche of information the true from the false, the good from the bad; they must respect diversity and judge the impossibility of securing a promised political outcome. Until recently, he said, the democratic culture was nurtured by those who manned public institutions such as legislators, judges, journalists, intellectuals, and experts in myriad fields. Their marginalisation has lowered the quality of public discourse and made citizens susceptible to conspiracy theories and fake news.