CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Our Disappearing Democracy

Amidst yet another year of startling declines for democracies everywhere, Hungary has seemingly defied the odds. Despite being the poster boy of the far-right populist threat to European democracies, recent elections ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party from 16 years of power, effectively shifting the tide on one of the starkest democratic erosions in the European Union. And yet, Orbán’s defeat does not necessarily guarantee democratic revival for his international friends and cronies, including President Donald Trump. Today, behind this celebration in Hungary lives the looming shadow of Trump’s executive overreach in the United States, with Orban’s friendship and autocratic legacy offering a roadmap to America’s sharp democratic regression.

According to the V-Dem Institute’s recently published Democracy Report, the United States is no longer considered a liberal democracy. The V-Dem Institute, an independent research organization that measures democratic growth and regression across 202 countries, now labels the U.S. as merely an ”electoral democracy.” The report details that American democracy has “fallen back to the same level as in 1965,” primarily marked by executive branch overreach. For comparison, this single year of democratic erosion under the Trump administration “took Hungary’s Viktor Orbán over four years” and “Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić eight years.” For many Americans, the democratic institutions in 1965 were gained through grueling, consistent, and targeted civil rights activism. Such gains, according to V-Dem, have practically disappeared in America today.

These findings do not come as a surprise to many — at least they shouldn’t. V-Dem’s report emerges in the........

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