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This past weekend, millions of protesters showed up at “No Kings” marches at thousands of locations, including in multiple MAGA strongholds, to register their profound rejection of Donald Trump’s conduct over the course of his first year of his second term in office. They have grounds to worry. Three major studies have recently found that American democracy is on an unprecedented downward trajectory. And other Western democracies and allies around the world have begun to take note. But the damage done is by no means permanent or irreversible, and indeed the trappings of American autocracy may be thinner than they appear. Trump is wildly unpopular. Elections are not yet being stolen. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by Ian Bassin, the co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, which organizes to claw back liberalism from authoritarianism. He previously served as associate White House counsel in the Obama administration. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Earlier this month, the Varieties of Democracy Project declared that “Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed.” You have been taking these rankings, and similar data points, seriously, long before anyone else was seeing around the corner of why they should matter.

Ian Bassin: What I find helpful about those numbers is that from a historical context, from an international context, they get us out of a mindset that I think you and I probably encounter when we talk to people, which is either: A) Oh, the United States is the greatest democracy in the history of the world, or: B) Oh, those people in Washington, the reds and the blues, this is just them bickering again. Those responses suggest that some of the chaos and dysfunction we’re seeing is just status quo normal, and it allows people who are otherwise not obsessively focused on politics to tune it out.

When you zoom out and you look historically and internationally at trends, like the V-DEM index, and see that democracy, not just in the United States, but around the world, has been in decline for most of the 21st century, and that it’s happening at rates that when you compare it to other moments in history portends pretty dangerous weather on the horizon. These rankings help focus on the fact that what we’re experiencing now is generationally, almost on an epochal level, different. Looking at those measures is helpful to get us to say, “OK, so what does that mean about this moment we’re in?”

I often think it’s just helpful to know there’s a playbook. Somehow, knowing all of these things—going after the judiciary, going after a free press, going after the academy—are all from a playbook we’ve seen in other illiberal democracies, authoritarian governments, there’s just some tiny comfort in knowing this is what it looks like, and it is maybe startling to us, but it’s hardly startling. 

Having that context is both a warning and a comfort in a couple of ways. It seems weird to say that looking at us go off a democracy cliff is comforting, but here’s what I mean by that. There have been three major indexes that for the last decades have measured the state of democracy in the U.S. and around the world. One is that Varieties of Democracy Index out of Sweden, another is the Economist Intelligence Unit out of the U.K., and a third one is Freedom House in the United States. V-Dem and Freedom House both recently put out their annual reports showing yet further declines for U.S. democracy.

A fourth one recently entered the mix, and that’s the Financial Times, which built another version of these, studying the trends when it comes to democracy and measuring its quality around the world. It put out its inaugural report a couple of weeks ago and it showed that the decline of U.S. democracy since the start of the second Trump term has been more precipitous than the decline of Hungarian democracy under Orbán, the decline of the Turkish system under Erdoğan, the decline of the Venezuelan system under Chávez and Maduro, and the decline even of Russia under Putin. If you look at the trend line, the U.S. one has gone off a cliff faster than those other four.

I want to suggest that that is both bad news and good news. It’s bad news because: holy crap, the U.S. is declining faster than those canonical examples of Democratic backsliding! I think the speed of that decline is, in a weird way, good news. It’s crucial to note that Donald Trump is historically unpopular. He won a razor-thin election in 2024. We forget this because it was so devastating for those of us who thought it would be dangerous if he won again, but he did not win a majority of votes cast. And in the Electoral College, 230,000 votes across three states would’ve changed the election. This was a razor-thin election that Donald Trump took and proclaimed was a mandate for a radical overhauling of American government. There’s a real problem if you’re going to try to radically overhaul the American system with that slim a majority,........

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