The numbers don’t lie

There was a time, not so long ago, when the United States could credibly claim to be among the world’s finest democracies. That claim has always required caveats — the legacy of Jim Crow, the systematic suppression of voting rights, the corrosive role of money in politics. But the scaffolding of democratic governance has held throughout our 250 years of existence as an independent nation. Courts and Congress checked executives, a free press held the powerful accountable, and the peaceful transfer of power was something Americans could take for granted.
Not anymore.
The evidence of democratic decline is no longer speculative. It arrives in the form of hard data, from some of the most rigorous monitoring institutions in the world, and what they show is alarming.
The Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg has tracked democratic health across more than 170 countries since 1789. Its findings on the United States should stop every American cold. The institute has been tracking the decline of democracy in the U.S. for years, and our slide began even before the political rise of Donald Trump, due to several factors, including intense partisanship and the growing role of big money in elections.
But Trump has accelerated the fall of our democracy at a rate we’ve never experienced before, as we fell an astonishing 18 points on V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index in a single year, the largest one-year drop in American history. Indeed, it’s one of the biggest declines in a single year ever recorded by the institute and the handful of countries that have experienced similar declines were mostly subject to military coups.
The areas of steepest decline are telling and relate to constraints on the executive, the rule of law, and individual liberties.
Freedom of speech and the press took a major hit and that’s only going to get worse in 2026. Trump’s dismissal of independent government watchdogs, combined with Congress’s failure to investigate unconstitutional activity and the widespread corruption within the administration are eroding the load-bearing walls of democratic governance.
Trump’s sustained and systematic denigration of our electoral process, and his current efforts to pass legislation designed to entrench Republican control of Congress, is equally troubling and is a page ripped straight from the authoritarian handbook.
V-Dem is hardly the only democracy watchdog raising the alarm. Freedom House, founded in 1941 and based in Washington D.C., has monitored countries around the world for 85 years. Like most other democracy watchdogs, it shows a dramatic decline in democratic practices in the U.S. beginning around 2016, a decline that accelerated last year. The organization now rates America’s democracy on par with South Africa.
And Bright Line Watch, the political science consortium, now rates the U.S. on par with Mexico in terms of democratic functioning.
The Century Foundation’s Democracy Meter offers perhaps the starkest summary of where the United States now stands. Starting from a baseline score of 79 out of 100 in 2024 — imperfect but passing — the Democracy Meter rated the United States at just 57 in 2025, a 28 percent drop in a single year. The assessment found that the country went from a flawed but functioning democracy to behaving like an authoritarian state: frequent law-breaking, ignoring court rulings, engaging in corruption, targeting critics for persecution, and conducting a campaign against immigrants that flagrantly violates civil rights.
Some will no doubt dismiss such concerns as the assessments of biased partisans, out to unfairly tar President Trump. But much of what these organizations have concluded simply can’t be denied. The democratic backsliding in America hasn’t taken place behind closed doors— it’s been out in the open in many cases. We’ve seen the regular use of regulatory threats against the news media, issued by Trump’s own officials. Courts across the country, including those run by conservative Republican appointees, have accused the administration of failing to abide by court orders hundreds of times. We’ve seen the dismissal of inspector generals throughout the government. We’ve seen President Trump overstep his constitutional authority time and again.
There are those who will argue that democracy is resilient — that courts will hold, that elections will correct course. That hope is not unreasonable.
Crucially, as of this writing, elections remain free, despite the administration’s full-court press to rig the midterms.
We have a window to save the country we all grew up in. But that window will not remain open indefinitely. The lesson of every democratic backsliding episode in modern history is that erosion becomes collapse when the institutions meant to arrest it are too weakened to act.
The numbers are in. The question now is whether Americans will care enough to add them up.