The other day, we did a wellness check on the First Amendment. But democracy in America itself needs a wellness check. We can see movement inside the house, but no one’s opening the door.
This week, a group of political scientists in Sweden who have spent more than a decade building the world’s most comprehensive democracy database put a number on what a lot of us have been feeling but couldn’t quite put into words. The Varieties of Democracy Institute — V-Dem, out of the University of Gothenburg — released its annual report, and the section on the United States reads less like an academic assessment and more like a chart from a patient who came in looking fine and left with a serious diagnosis.
The title of this year’s report is “25 Years of Autocratization — Democracy Trumped?” The question mark in the subtitle is doing a lot of work.
What the Numbers Say
For the first time in more than twenty years, there are more autocracies than democracies on the planet. We have crossed a threshold.
The level of democracy for the average world citizen is back to 1985. Two and a half decades of democratic progress, erased.
The United States got special attention in the report — and not the good kind. V-Dem identified the country as undergoing the fastest democratic backsliding in American history. In one year, the U.S. Liberal Democracy Index score fell 24 percent. Our world ranking dropped from 20th to 51st. The level of democracy is now back to where it was in 1965 — the year most analysts consider the real beginning of American democracy as we understand it.
Sixty years of progress, gone in a year.
