There is a moment in the affairs of political forms when the crisis no longer presents itself as an event, but as a climate. It is not yet the collapse, but something very much like a vital organ is ceasing to function as it should. It is a widespread fatigue, a loss of internal energy that does not need external enemies to manifest itself. It is in this grey area that democracy seems to find itself today.

For a long time it was thought that its main danger came from outside: totalitarianisms, wars, economic crises. Today, however, the breaking point seems to be moving within its own functioning. Not because there is still a lack of elections, parties, formal freedoms, but because what makes these structures alive is disappearing: the ability of citizens to orient themselves in reality and form an autonomous judgement.

The decisive issue is the imbalance between the amount of information available and the ability to process it critically. Modern democracy presupposes an informed, or at least informable, citizen. But Walter Lippmann had already intuited the problem in the 1920s: the world is too complex for the average individual to know it directly, and what we call public opinion is actually formed through simplified images, stereotypes, mediated representations. Today, that insight has radicalised beyond belief. Not only is the world complex: it is flooded with a continuous flow of information, interpretations, counter-interpretations, in which the true and the false are no longer distinguished by evidence but by affiliation.

In this environment, critical capacity does not grow, but is lost. Not because individuals are less intelligent, but because the amount of stimuli exceeds the threshold of possible processing. A new form of passivity, disguised as participation, thus asserts itself. People comment, share, react, but rarely understand. And when understanding fails, judgement turns into reflex.

It is here that Hannah Arendt’s reflection acquires new relevance. Arendt distinguished between factual truth and opinion, showing how the former is fragile and easily manipulated in the political space. Today, however, we are not only witnessing the manipulation of truth, but its dissolution in an environment in which every assertion can be challenged, relaunched, deformed in real time. It is not so much lies that triumph as indifference to the distinction between true and false.

In this context, Herbert Marcuse’s contribution appears partly prophetic. In his analysis of the advanced industrial society, Marcuse argued that the democratic-capitalist system was capable of integrating dissent, neutralising it. Freedom, far from being suppressed, was absorbed and rendered inoffensive. What emerges today is an even more subtle form of this process: not only is dissent integrated, but it is multiplied ad infinitum, until it loses consistency. Everything can be said, and for this very reason nothing really matters. The plurality of voices does not produce fruitful conflict, but noise.

This diagnosis goes hand in hand with that of Byung-Chul Han, who described our age as a society of fatigue. No longer dominated by repression, but by self-exploitation, continuous performance, excess of positivity. Applied to democracy, this reading suggests that the problem is not just manipulation, but exhaustion. The citizen is not so much oppressed as exhausted. Exposed to an infinite amount of stimuli, called upon to express himself on everything, he ends up no longer having the energy nor the cultural and intellectual resources for true critical judgement. Participation turns into sterile fatigue, and fatigue into disengagement.

But the fatigue is not only individual; it is systemic. The public sphere, which Jürgen Habermas imagined as a space of rational confrontation, is shattered into a multiplicity of micro-spaces, often impermeable to each other. There is no longer a common place where arguments can be subjected to shared scrutiny. In its place is a constellation of information bubbles, each reinforcing its own beliefs. Dialogue gives way to the coexistence of monologues.

In this scenario, technology is not just a tool, but a multiplier of power. Artificial intelligence, data profiling, and the ability to construct tailor-made messages enable those with these resources to steer consensus in an increasingly precise manner. It is no longer a matter of convincing, but of preparing the environment in which certain convictions are more likely to be held. The will is formed within an already structured context and is embedded in the places where a kind of media fluid dynamics decides it should be located.

One could argue that democracy has always known forms of manipulation and propaganda, and this is true: but the difference lies in the scale and depth. Today, manipulation acts not only on content, but on the very conditions of perception and attention. It does not merely propose a version of the facts; it helps to define what appears relevant, visible, worthy of consideration.

Hence the increasingly widespread suspicion that democratic forms can survive emptied of their content. Elections, parties, freedom of expression continue to exist, but the process through which the collective will is formed is increasingly opaque, influential, fragile. Democracy is not abolished; it is consumed.

There is no need to resort to catastrophic scenarios to describe this transformation. It is sufficient to observe the progressive loss of trust in institutions, the growing polarisation, the inability to construct shared decisions on fundamental issues. These are all signs of a system that is struggling to function according to its own promises.

And yet, this very diagnosis invites caution. To speak of the ‘end of democracy’ may be misleading if it suggests an inevitable outcome. More than an end, it is perhaps a metamorphosis, the outcome of which remains open. Tiredness may precede decline, but it may also precede transformation.

There remains, however, an awareness that is difficult to avoid: democracy is not guaranteed by its institutions, but by the cultural and cognitive conditions that make it possible. If these conditions are lacking, if the citizen is no longer able to distinguish, evaluate, judge, then democracy loses its foundation, even if it retains its forms, and is heading for its decline.

Among its various historical proponents, Thomas Jefferson was also convinced, who taught that democracy was impracticable without the proper education of the people. When this is not the case, the risk of its drift cannot be avoided. The antidote to such a drift is the relentless exercise of what Jürgen Habermas calls ‘communicative reason’, and thus also a vigorous support for the expression of unpopular opinions in order to nurture substantive debate, a common familiarity with critical thinking and a methodological scepticism towards the claims of those who tend too often to rely on their authority.

In practice, this is exactly what has been happening less and less for years. It is in this sense that the current crisis appears more radical than those of the past: it is not just about what democracy does, but what democracy is. And perhaps, for the first time, its fate depends less on the strength of its enemies than on the fragility of trust in its assumptions, which seem to be present in an increasingly remote and approximate form in the consciousness of western citizens.