The Rapid and “Unprecedented” Collapse of American Democracy

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 constraining Trump in any way,” Nord noted. “All the big decisions in 2025 were done by executive orders.”

The V-Dem Institute researchers analyzed data from hundreds of countries going back to the French Revolution in 1789 and could identify only 35 instances in which a democracy had unraveled so quickly—and most of those either came about via military coup or military invasion. But one prominent one, Nord told me, “is Adolf Hitler, who came to power in a free and fair election in 1933 and dismantled democracy in 53 days.”

As Trump is surely aware, one of the side effects of rampaging autocracy and a breaking down of institutional guardrails is endemic corruption and cronyism. In a desiccated democracy, political leaders use their power not to better the general public but to line their own pockets and those of their allies. Kleptocracy is normalized. We are seeing this now with growing evidence that advanced knowledge of life-and-death political decisions, especially around the war on Iran, is being used to game the markets and make huge profits.

Last week, Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz—a global trade choke point that the geniuses gaming out US foreign and military policy had apparently neglected to think about before sending the bombers and missiles flying over Iran—or face the destruction of its power grid. Not surprisingly, the Iranians responded with threats of their own: to fill the Persian Gulf with mines, to destroy electrical and fuel-production sites around the Middle East, and to target the region’s desalination systems. Again, not surprisingly, markets around the world tanked, and oil and natural gas prices soared.

All that ought to have been predicted before Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began “raining death and destruction from the sky all day long,” in Hegseth’s piquantly fascist phrasing. Instead, Trump was left looking for an off-ramp, which he seemingly created on Monday morning, just before the markets opened, when he conjured what now appears to be a fictive negotiation between the United States and some nameless Iranian leaders, as well as an equally fictive claim that Iran was about to bow to Trump’s main demands (whatever those might be).

That Trump lied and then lied again should surprise no one. But what ought to send shivers down our spines even in this über-cynical age is that a number of people apparently with inside knowledge of what Trump was about to say began a series of anomalous large-scale trades on the oil markets minutes before Trump’s announcement. On his Substack, the economist Paul Krugman called this “treason in the futures markets.” At about the same time, other individuals apparently went onto Polymarket, a site that allows punters to win (or lose) fortunes by predicting geopolitical moves before they happen, and began placing large bets on a soon-to-be-announced winding down of hostilities followed by a ceasefire. Similarly strange betting patterns have been uncovered in recent months around the capturing of Nicholas Maduro in January and a slew of other major policy announcements and actions.

When issues as serious as war and peace become little more than investment opportunities to be manipulated, that takes the daily corruption of Trumpism to a new level of foulness.

But why stop there? This week, with no congressional input and no legal rationale, Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, brought ICE to an airport near you. Ostensibly, this was to deal with the hours-long lines facing travelers attempting to navigate TSA lanes six weeks into a partial government shutdown that Trump could have avoided had he been willing to rein in his ICE shock troops. In reality, since ICE agents have no training in airport security, their function is to intimidate and to normalize the presence of Trump’s goon squads in yet more public spaces. And so six weeks in, travelers are still facing long lines as well-paid and heavily armed ICE thugs harass and arrest immigrants or anyone who they guess could be one.

Autocratizing trends can, Nord noted, be reversed, but most successful reversals occur within the first few years of an autocrat’s assuming power. The longer they remain in power and the more electoral cycles they weather, the lower the prospects 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 “a constant societal mobilization, a sustained one.”

The next round of No Kings protests is this Saturday. May Americans pour into the streets by the millions to express their revulsion at the wrecking ball that Trump is taking to our democracy and to human rights both at home and around the world.