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The Rapid and “Unprecedented” Collapse of American Democracy

The V-Dem Institute, the world’s chronicler of democracy and autocracy, has determined that the United States is no longer “a liberal democracy.”

A poster featuring President Donald Trump in a SS uniform on the wall in Margate, United Kingdom.

Last week, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute in Sweden published its annual Democracy Report to considerable fanfare. It charted what it called a “great reversal” in democratic processes and a reversion to autocracy in a growing number of countries. The numbers are stark: In 2005, with the Soviet Union a thing of the past, with India a vibrant democracy, and with China showing signs of liberalization, V-Dem determined that only 9 percent of the world’s population lived in countries that were moving toward greater autocracy. Last year, with Vladimir Putin’s Russia a dictatorship in all but name, with India under Narendra Modi an increasingly autocratic country, and with China firmly in Xi Jinping’s grip, 41 percent were. But it wasn’t all about India and China: Amongst the 41 percent of humans living in autocratizing countries were the more than 330 million residents of the United States.

The V-Dem report is almost certainly the world’s most data-heavy democracy and autocracy chronicle, claiming to utilize upwards of 30 million data points from 202 countries and territories from 1789 until the present day. More than 4,200 experts take part in its data-gathering and interpreting. As a result, when a country is downgraded by V-Dem, it is the political equivalent of Moody’s downgrading a country’s debt rating.

In this year’s report, the United States slipped from 24th to 51st place in the rankings of countries’ democratic attributes, with legislative constraints on the executive being weaker than at any point in the last century. “Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed,” the authors wrote. “The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in over 50 years, primarily due to ongoing autocratization in the USA.”

In part because of America’s stampede toward autocracy, global democratic scores have regressed to where they were in 1978. In recent years, freedom of expression declined in 44 countries, with the United States leading the way. And then the report delivered its gut punch: “The USA loses its long-term status as a liberal democracy—for the first time in over 50 years.”

The researchers found that the magnitude of the United States’s democratic decline was the fourth largest in the world, behind Hungary, Serbia, and India—though all three of those countries have been in decline for nearly two decades; the US, by contrast, experienced a vast democratic retrenchment in just one year. “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” the report bleakly notes.

“What we see is decline in checks and balances. Congress has effectively abdicated its power,” Marina Nord, a postdoctoral research fellow at the V-Dem Institute and a co-author of the report, told me. US politics, Nord said, has become increasingly personalized around Donald J. Trump. “The Republican Party is not........

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