Democracy as Self-Correction

The central political paradox of our analysis of the current state of democracy is that the key factors that contributed to the democratization of society have also led to the erosion of trust in democratic institutions. The current crisis of democracy then is not an outcome of some institutional failure of democracy; on the contrary it is a product of democracy’s success. It is the result of five revolutions that have shattered our world in the last 50 years and made us more free but less powerful than before: the Woodstock-Wall Street revolution of the 1970s and 1980s; the end of history revolutions of 1989; the digital revolution of the 1990s; the demographic revolution; and the political brain revolution brought by the new discoveries in the brain sciences and behaviorist economics. The question is, will democracy transformed be able to function as a self-correcting society?