Something is unsettling the democratic world, and it isn’t a coup. Instead there’s a slower, stranger phenomenon: millions of people, voting freely and correctly by every procedural measure, for outcomes that dismantle the norms and institutions upon which democracy depends. Brexit. MAGA. The rise of illiberal governments in Hungary, Poland, Italy, Argentina, and beyond. Dog whistling politicians in Australia. Distrust of vaccines and medical experts, science and scientists, the UN, the EU, NATO, and the very idea of expertise. Disregard for human rights except when used to support presumed individual privilege. A movement away from the collective, towards the individual.
So… is democracy dying? Not exactly. It might be worse than that: democracy may be working exactly as designed, while delivering results that erode the conditions it needs to survive.
What the data actually shows
Political scientists have a term for this: democratic backsliding — the gradual, often lawful weakening of checks on executive power, judicial independence, and press freedom by leaders who were themselves elected. According to the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report, nearly a quarter of the world’s countries were undergoing autocratization in 2025 — including several in Europe and North America, with growing pressure on media and journalists worldwide.
Crucially, this isn’t confined to fragile or new democracies. Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in their influential book How Democracies Die, argue that modern democracies rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment; instead, critical institutions like the judiciary and the press are worn down slowly, and long-standing political norms erode gradually — often at the hands of leaders who came to power through entirely legitimate elections.
Trust itself is also collapsing, and not just in governments. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer — a survey of nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries — found that seven in ten respondents are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, backgrounds, or sources of information, a pattern the report calls “insularity,” cutting across income, gender, age, and nation. Edelman’s own framing is stark: trust has stopped being something people extend toward the common good, and started retreating into smaller, more homogeneous circles.
Strengthening the backlash
It would be intellectually lazy — and simply wrong — to treat every Brexit or MAGA voter as a passive dupe or a bad actor. There is real, well-documented material behind the backlash.
Political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, in their widely cited analysis of populism’s rise, tested two competing theories: that populism is driven by economic insecurity among the “left behind,” or by a cultural backlash against rapid social change. Their research found the most consistent evidence for the cultural backlash thesis — but economic grievance is far from irrelevant. Harvard’s Weatherhead Center notes that political elites have channelled genuine public grievances — anxiety about the Great Recession, terrorism, and mass migration — into ethnoracial resentment and distrust of political institutions, resonating with voters who feel dishonest politicians and distant institutions have failed them.
This matters for how the essay should be read: the people voting for Brexit or for populist strongmen are not, in the main, uniquely narcissistic individuals. Many are responding — rationally, if not always accurately — to decades of deindustrialisation, stagnant wages, and institutions that talked past them rather than to them. Any honest account of “the death of democracy” has to hold that truth alongside the concern about where the backlash has been steered.
Putting the ‘Cult’ in Culture
A further shift beneath democratic backsliding is the way fractured information worlds begin to behave like cults. Not cults in the religious sense, but in the sociological one: closed belief systems, charismatic micro‑authorities, and rigid boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Research across political science, media studies, and sociology shows this pattern emerging when societies lose a shared factual world (Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018; V‑Dem Democracy Report 2026; Edelman Trust Barometer 2026; Sunstein, #Republic, 2017).
Political scientists describe this as a breakdown in common reality. Media scholars show how algorithmic sorting creates insulated information loops. Sociologists studying cultic behaviour note that closed informational systems produce predictable dynamics: identity fused with belief, distrust of external authority, and moralised narratives that frame disagreement as betrayal (Elias–Lasch debate; ResearchGate 2013).
Across countries and political orientations, the same features recur. Information from outside the group is dismissed as biased or corrupt, while internal sources are treated as inherently trustworthy — a pattern reflected in Edelman’s 2026 finding that seven in ten respondents are unwilling to trust anyone with different values or information sources. Beliefs become markers of belonging, and changing one’s mind risks social exclusion rather than intellectual revision. Influencers, niche commentators, and partisan media gain more authority than institutions with formal expertise, a dynamic documented in studies of populist mobilisation (Inglehart & Norris, 2016). Political issues are reframed as purity contests or existential threats, and norm erosion accelerates when opponents are cast as enemies rather than competitors (Levitsky & Ziblatt). Criticism from outside is interpreted as validation — “If they attack us, it proves we’re right” — a pattern widely observed in research on conspiratorial movements (Weatherhead Center, 2016). Conformity is enforced through shaming, ostracism, or withdrawal of trust.
These dynamics matter because they block the basic mechanisms democracy relies on: persuasion, correction, and shared evidence. When information worlds become self‑sealing, citizens no longer revise beliefs in response to new facts. Institutions lose legitimacy not because they fail, but because they sit outside the group’s informational boundary. Elections still occur, but they no longer arbitrate between competing visions of the future; they arbitrate between incompatible realities.
This is the “cult in culture” problem: informational tribes that cannot be left without losing identity, community, and moral certainty. Once enough citizens inhabit these sealed worlds, democracy continues procedurally while losing the shared factual ground it needs to survive.
When “My Rights” Replaces “Our Rights”
Where something does seem to have shifted is in the language of rights itself — from a shared claim (“our rights,” exercised collectively, in solidarity with others) toward an individual one (“my rights,” asserted against the collective, including against public health measures, environmental limits, or the authority of experts).
The American historian Christopher Lasch anticipated a version of this decades ago in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), arguing that economic change — rising prosperity alongside a scarcity of meaningful work — had devalued the wisdom of experience and brought all forms of authority into disrepute, producing a self-absorbed character type more interested in personal validation than collective purpose. It’s worth being honest that Lasch’s thesis has always been contested: critics have called it an empirically unproven, conservative reaction to the social liberalisation of the 1960s and 70s rather than a rigorously demonstrated cultural shift. Lasch himself insisted narcissism wasn’t simply a synonym for selfishness, and blamed both the progressive left (for undermining family structures) and the market right (for dissolving traditional communities) — it was never a partisan diagnosis in his own telling, however it’s since been used.
Whether or not “narcissism” is the precise clinical term for it, something like this dynamic is visible in the data: the same Edelman survey found people increasingly unwilling to trust anyone outside their own circle, and institutions increasingly judged not by whether they serve the common good, but by whether they serve me.
The moment we are living through also exposes the old argument about isms: capitalism versus communism, collectivism versus individualism, authoritarianism versus narcissism. These debates have always been framed as contests between competing ideologies, each claiming to organise society more justly or efficiently than the others. But the present disruption suggests a different reading: the problem is not which ism wins, but what happens when any system — economic, political, or cultural — loses the shared factual world it depends on. Once that common world fractures, the isms stop being frameworks for organising society and start becoming identities people defend, perform, and weaponise. And that is the point at which democracy begins to undo itself.
What can actually be done
This is the harder question, and the honest answer is: nothing fast, and nothing purely rhetorical. But the research does point somewhere.
Cross-partisan coalitions, not culture war. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that pro-democratic forces need to transcend the partisan divide, building broad coalitions across racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic lines rather than treating democracy’s defence as one side’s project against the other’s. A coalition that only ever recruits from the already-convinced doesn’t reach the people whose trust has been lost.
Take the economic grievance seriously, not just the cultural one. Ziblatt and Levitsky’s reviewers note that economic and social reforms aimed at a more equitable distribution of wealth tend to reduce the polarization that feeds democratic decay. If status anxiety and economic precarity are real drivers of backlash politics, addressing the material grievance is not a concession — it’s part of the fix.
Rebuild trust deliberately, at the local and relational level. Edelman’s own recommendation, drawn directly from the 2026 data, is what they call “trust brokering” — recognising that trust is now rebuilt through relationships (employers, doctors, local voices) rather than declared by distant institutions, and that leaders who consult people with different values and engage constructively with critics can widen circles of trust rather than assuming those circles will widen themselves.
Defend the institutions without pretending they’re beyond criticism. The UN, the EU, NATO, and national governments are not sacred; they are flawed human structures that have, in real instances, failed the people now rejecting them. Defending democratic norms convincingly means acknowledging those failures honestly, not dismissing distrust as ignorance.
A humanist closing thought
None of this fixes itself, and none of it happens quickly. But there is something genuinely humanist in refusing both despair and easy blame — in holding, at once, that democratic backsliding is real and dangerous, that the backlash driving it often has legitimate roots, and that the antidote isn’t nostalgia for institutions as they were, but the same expanding circle of concern humanism has always argued for: one wide enough to take in the people who feel it has left them out.
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Bibliography
“Democratic Backsliding.” Wikipedia, citing V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.
“How Democracies Die.” Penguin Random House.
“A Discussion of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die.” University of Washington Department of Political Science.
“How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future.” Consilium (Council of the EU library blog).
“2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals Trust Is In Peril As Society Slides from Grievance into Insularity.” Edelman, January 18, 2026.
“2026 Edelman Trust Barometer on How to Build Trust in Organizations.” Interfaith America, March 25, 2026.
Inglehart, Ronald F., and Pippa Norris. “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash.” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP16-026, 2016.
“Background to Brexit: Populism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Resentment.” Harvard Weatherhead Center Epicenter, 2016.
“The Culture of Narcissism Summary.” SuperSummary.
“Narcissism or Informalization?: Christopher Lasch, Norbert Elias and Social Diagnosis.” ResearchGate.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.
Bibliography — New Sources for “Putting the Cult in Culture”
Sunstein, Cass R. “Echo Chambers.” University of Chicago Public Law Working Paper, 2001.
Sunstein, Cass R. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Penguin, 2011.
Tufekci, Zeynep. “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics.” First Monday, 2014.
Mozilla Foundation. “YouTube Regrets: How the Algorithm Drives Extremism.” 2021.
Vosoughi, Soroush, Roy, Deb, and Aral, Sinan. “The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science, 2018.
Trust Collapse and Insularity
Edelman. “2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: Society Slides into Insularity.”
Pew Research Center. “Political Polarization in the American Public.” 2014.
Pew Research Center. “Americans’ Trust in Government: 2022.”
Cult Dynamics, Identity Fusion, Group Psychology
Hogg, Michael A. “Uncertainty–Identity Theory.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2007.
Langone, Michael. “Cults: Questions and Answers.” International Cultic Studies Association.
Singer, Margaret Thaler. Cults in Our Midst. Jossey-Bass, 2003.
Hassan, Steven. Combating Cult Mind Control. Freedom of Mind Press, 2015.
Populism, Identity, and Closed Belief Systems
Inglehart, Ronald F., and Pippa Norris. “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash.” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP16-026, 2016.
Gidron, Noam, and Hall, Peter A. “Populism as a Problem of Social Integration.” Comparative Political Studies, 2020.
Mudde, Cas. The Far Right Today. Polity Press, 2019.
©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared, and show my respect for Elders past and present. Research assistance supplied by AI.