Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention has witnessed constant assaults on personal liberties and the Constitution. What I want to argue is more unsettling: what we’ve seen over the past months is not only distressing, but boring, and that’s the real danger.
Nearly every day brings new, outrageous statements and behavior from Trump, his loyalists in key political positions, and most elected Republicans in Congress. Each controversy makes us wonder: Can it get any worse? But after years of similar actions dating back to 2016, that question has lost its bite. The predictable cycle of outrage and inaction has created something dangerous: civic numbness.
There are at least four reasons why current threats to American democracy have lost their capacity to shock us.
- The Predictability Problem. If one considers Trump’s first term (2017–2021) or his 2024 campaign promises, nothing happening now should come as a surprise. With the assistance of Project 2025, DOGE, etc., his administration is systematically implementing exactly what he outlined, including, but not limited to: mass deportations, dismantling the Department of Education, reducing federal oversight functions, replacing career civil servants with political appointees, and expanding executive power through emergency declarations. When the March 2025 firing of 2,000 EPA scientists barely registered as news, it confirmed that even dramatic actions feel routine when they follow a predictable pattern. This predictability leads to “emotional habituation,” where repeated exposure dulls our emotional responses. Just as we ignore city car alarms, we’ve grown desensitized to political crises. The erosion of democratic norms no longer shocks, even though it’s damaging.
- A Deficit of New Insights. Public intellectuals, social media influencers, news media pundits, and even our late-night talk show hosts have fallen into a repetitive cycle of moral outrage or mocking indignation without offering meaningful solutions. Cable news panels endlessly rehash the same talking points. Op-ed writers catalogue abuses without proposing helpful things the public can do. Even fact-checking has become performative rather than persuasive, preaching to the converted while failing to reach those who might change their minds. In some respects, this entire process creates an illusion of engagement. People feel they’re participating in democracy by consuming outrage content, but consumption substitutes for action. The result is a public that feels informed but remains passive.
- The Participation Paradox. While 2024 saw relatively high voter turnout at 66.6% of eligible voters, other forms of civic engagement have declined sharply. According to the Pew Research Center, only 12% of Americans contacted an elected official in 2024, down from 22% in 2020. Protest attendance has fragmented across dozens of causes, diluting impact. The January 2025 Women’s March drew 200,000 people nationwide, a significant decline from the 3.3 million who participated in 2017. Meanwhile, social media creates false equivalencies between online activity and real political participation. Sharing an angry post may feel like activism, but it has no meaningful impact. This “clicktivism” reduces the likelihood that people will engage in more demanding forms of political action.
- The Fatigue Factor. Constant crisis coverage has created “a finite pool of worry” (i.e., people’s capacity for sustained concern is limited). When everything is urgent, nothing feels urgent. The 24-hour news cycle minimizes the kind of sustained attention that successful social movements require. Consider how quickly major stories disappear from public consciousness. For example, the February 2025 resignation of three federal judges over “judicial interference” dominated headlines for 48 hours before being replaced by the next scandal. This rapid turnover prevents the accumulation of sustained public pressure that might change political behavior.
Beyond digital media, consumerism itself offers another layer of distraction. Large retail districts bustle with people shopping, eating out, and treating consumption as entertainment. Even our anxieties seem anesthetized, not through civic engagement, but through alcohol, cannabis, and the infinite scroll of social media. Americans have never been uniformly politically informed or engaged, but the last two decades have accelerated the drift toward superficial novelty over sustained attention. The Internet, social media, and now artificial intelligence flood us with noise at the expense of meaningful democratic participation.
To be fair, resistance to assaults on democracy exists. Since the beginning of the new Trump administration, public protests connected to Trump 2.0 era policies and practices have occurred. And organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have filed over 200 lawsuits challenging federal policies, while Democracy Forward has filed 60. State attorneys general from Democratic-led states have coordinated legal challenges. Local election officials have successfully defended voting procedures despite federal pressure.
But these efforts coexist with widespread disengagement, and their efforts are uncoordinated. Too many citizens are politically apathetic, and many others mistake low-effort social media activity (e.g., clicktivism) for meaningful participation.
This brings us to the most troubling aspect: the absence of strategic thinking about how to respond to democratic backsliding. Most media focus on documenting problems rather than solving them. Democratic politicians largely stick to conventional electoral strategies (i.e., running campaigns, raising money, hoping for better turnout), even though these approaches haven’t prevented the current crisis. Most elected Democratic politicians appear to be content to wait until the midterms, hoping that they can recapture a few seats in Congress. While these strategies are the default for understandable reasons, they’re inadequate given the scale of the threat.
What’s missing from public debate is a serious discussion of how democracies that are threatened defend themselves. Historical examples suggest that successful resistance requires coordination across institutions, sustained civil society pressure, and creative, adaptive tactics. In post-authoritarian Chile, for instance, opposition parties, professional associations, and grassroots groups coordinated to force constitutional negotiations. Instead, we get recycled strategies from political moments that may no longer apply.
I don’t have easy answers, but the refusal to engage seriously with these questions guarantees continued failure. The problem isn’t just that democracy is dying — it’s that we’re watching it happen with numbed indifference, mistaking spectatorship for participation.
Otherwise, we’re like the proverbial frog in the pot, failing to notice the heat being turned up until it’s too late.
If the death of democracy is boring, it’s because it’s become predictable, repetitive, and met with staggering indifference. We’ve confused familiarity with inevitability. Perhaps that’s what the political and economic elite backing Trump and MAGA counted on: that normalization would dull resistance until democracy collapsed not with violence, but with a yawn.
Meanwhile, we’ve become spectators to our own political system’s decline, consuming crisis-like content.
The most depressing part isn’t the shortage of solutions; it’s our collective unwillingness to demand them and the public’s willingness to accept the status quo.
When shock becomes routine and resistance becomes performance, democracy doesn’t die with a dramatic moment; it fades with a shrug.
The question isn’t whether we can still be surprised, but whether we can still be motivated to act before our indifference becomes irreversible.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Dr. Jeffrey Ian Ross's work on Medium.