The V-Dem Institute, a global chronicler of democracy and autocracy, has determined that the United States is no longer “a liberal democracy.”
A poster depicting President Donald Trump in SS uniform on the wall in Margate, UK.
(Elek Krisztian / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) Last week, the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) in Sweden published its annual report Democracy Report with great fanfare. He describes what he calls a “great reversal” of democratic processes and a return to autocracy in a growing number of countries. The numbers are striking: In 2005, when the Soviet Union was a thing of the past, India was a vibrant democracy, and China was showing signs of liberalization, V-Dem determined that only 9 percent of the world’s population lived in countries moving toward greater autocracy. Last year, with Vladimir Putin’s Russia a dictatorship that has nothing to do with the name, with Narendra Modi’s India an increasingly autocratic country and with China firmly in the grip of Xi Jinping, 41% were. But it wasn’t just India and China: Among the 41 percent of humans living in autocratic countries were the more than 330 million people of the United States.
The V-Dem report is almost certainly the most data-rich global chronicle of democracy and autocracy, claiming to use more than 30 million data points from 202 countries and territories from 1789 to the present. More than 4,200 experts participate in data collection and interpretation. 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 reportthe United States slipped from 24th to 51st place in the ranking of countries’ democratic attributes, with legislative constraints on the executive branch weaker than at any time in the last century. “Democracy in the United States is deteriorating at an unprecedented rate,” the authors write. “The level of democracy for the average citizen in Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in more than 50 years, mainly due to ongoing autocratization in the United States. »
Partly because of America’s rush toward autocracy, global democracy scores have regressed to where they were in 1978. In recent years, free speech has declined in 44 countries, led by the United States. And then the report delivered its punch: “The United States is losing its long-term status as a liberal democracy – for the first time in more than 50 years. »
(Want) The researchers found that the extent of democratic decline in the United States was fourth in the world, behind Hungary, Serbia and India – although these three countries have been in decline for almost two decades; the United States, on the other hand, has experienced a vast democratic retrenchment in just one year. “The speed with which American democracy is currently being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” the report darkly notes.
“What we’re seeing is a decline in checks and balances. Congress has effectively abdicated its power,” Marina Nord, a postdoctoral researcher at the V-Dem Institute and co-author of the report, told me. American politics, Nord said, has become increasingly personalized around Donald J. Trump. “The Republican Party is not coercing Trump in any way,” Nord noted. “All the major decisions of 2025 were taken by decree.”
V-Dem Institute researchers analyzed data from hundreds of countries since the French Revolution of 1789 and were able to identify only 35 cases in which a democracy collapsed so quickly – and most of them were the result of a military coup or military invasion. But one of the most important, Nord told me, “is Adolf Hitler, who came to power in free and fair elections in 1933 and dismantled democracy in 53 days.”
As Trump surely knows, one of the side effects of unleashed autocracy and the destruction of institutional safeguards is rampant corruption and cronyism. In a desiccated democracy, political leaders use their power not to improve public opinion, but to line their own pockets and those of their allies. Kleptocracy is normalized. We see this today with growing evidence that advanced knowledge of life-and-death political decisions, particularly regarding the war against Iran, is being used to deceive markets and make huge profits.
Last week, Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz – a global trade chokepoint that America’s foreign and military policy geniuses had apparently neglected to think about before sending bombers and missiles to fly over Iran – or face the destruction of its power grid. Unsurprisingly, the Iranians responded with threats of their own: filling the Persian Gulf with mines, destroying power and fuel production sites around the Middle East, and targeting the region’s desalination systems. Then again, it’s no surprise that markets around the world have crashed and oil and natural gas prices have soared.
All this should have been predicted Before Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth began “raining death and destruction from the skies all day,” in Hegseth’s piquant, fascist phrase. Instead, Trump found himself looking for a way out, which he apparently created Monday morning, just before markets opened, when he discussed what now appears to be a fictitious negotiation between the United States and some unnamed Iranian leader, as well as an equally fictitious claim that Iran was about to comply with Trump’s key demands (whatever those were).
That Trump lied and then lied again should surprise no one. But what should send chills down our spines, even in these ultra-cynical times, is that a number of people apparently aware of what Trump was about to say began a series of large-scale abnormal trades in the oil markets just minutes before Trump’s announcement. On his Substack, economist Paul Krugman called this “betrayal in the futures markets.” Around the same time, other individuals apparently surrendered Polymarketa site that allows punters to win (or lose) fortunes by predicting geopolitical movements before they happen, and has begun betting big on a soon-to-be-announced end to hostilities, followed by a ceasefire. Equally strange betting patterns have been uncovered in recent months around the capture of Nicolas Maduro in January and a series of other major political announcements and actions.
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When issues as serious as war and peace become nothing more than investment opportunities to be manipulated, the daily corruption of Trumpism reaches a new level of filth.
But why stop there? This week, without congressional intervention or legal justification, Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, brought ICE to an airport near you. Ostensibly, this was to deal with the hours-long lines faced by travelers trying to pass through TSA lanes, six weeks into a partial government shutdown, which Trump could have avoided if he had been willing to rein in his ICE shock troops. In reality, because ICE agents have no training in airport security, their function is to intimidate and normalize the presence of Trump squads in even more public spaces. And so, six weeks later, travelers still face long lines as well-paid and heavily armed ICE thugs harass and arrest immigrants or anyone they think might be one.
Autocratic tendencies can, Nord noted, be reversed, but the most successful reversals occur in the first few years after an autocrat comes to power. The longer they remain in power and the more electoral cycles they go through, the lower the chances of restoring democratic governance. “Two electoral cycles are usually enough to institutionalize an autocratic form of government,” she explained. To resist it, she continued, populations need “constant and sustained societal mobilization”.
The next round of protests against the Kings will take place this Saturday. May Americans pour into the streets by the millions to express their revulsion at the wrecking ball that Trump is throwing at our democracy and human rights, both at home and around the world.
Support independent journalism that breaks the rules Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding popularity couldn’t have been clearer: rampant corruption and billions of dollars’ worth of personal enrichment during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided solely by his own abandoned sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Today, an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire across the region and Europe. A new “forever war” – with an ever-increasing likelihood of US troops on the ground – could very well be upon us.
As we have seen time and time again, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory justifications for attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are threatened by non-citizens registered to vote. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is the only one that can uncover the lies that threaten our republic – and civilians around the world – and shine a light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors and fact-checkers understand the scale of what we face and the urgency with which we must act. That’s why we publish critical reporting and analysis on the war with Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
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