Erosion of US Democracy Exceeds Hungary, Turkey, India: V-Dem

Politics & Elections
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In their latest annual report, the University of Gothenburg-based Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem), “the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy” according to the Guardian article on the topic (or a ‘rando on the internet’ according to the considered opinion of one poster here), calls the de-democratization in the first year of Trump’s second presidency “the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country”. According to the group’s founder:

“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.

I’m not sure regarding the legality of reproducing graphs from the V-Dem report, but I highly encourage everybody to look especially at Figures 22 (p.33) and 23 (p.34) in the linked report, showing first the magnitude of erosion as measured by the Liberal Democracy Index, showing basically 40 years of gains being undone in just the past year, and second the speed at which this happened compared to other ‘third wave’ autocracies (Hungary, Russia, Turkey, India, Serbia)—all of which the US eclipses.

I have to admit that, even taking a rather dim outlook at the current state of democracy in the US (and worldwide; we shouldn’t pretend like this is an American problem, even if its effects are perhaps seen most starkly there), these data somewhat took my breath away. Both magnitude and speed of the erosion of liberties (“civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s”) took me by surprise regardless.

The pertinent question, of course, is: what can we do to stop, perhaps even reverse, this trend? Is there truly any hope that we’re merely experiencing an autocratic ‘extinction burst’? Or do we have to resign ourselves to the idea that the oft-touted ‘end of history’ was, in the end, little more than a local plateau of stability in a world speeding into totalitarianism and/or collapse? Or is there something in between, a ‘nothing ever happens’-thesis where somehow, throughout all of this, things aren’t getting better, but they aren’t also getting (much) worse than they are now (which of course is already plenty bad, especially for those less privileged by history, geography, and wealth)?

Right now, I genuinely have to admit that I find it hard to even have hope for a middle-of-the-road scenario.

2

Do they explain why there is so much autocratization happening? Is it the advent of better surveillance tools, and bad actors filling social media with pro-autocrat stuff? The explosion of propaganda on social media and the super-rich’s turn towards autocracy seem like likely explanations in the US.

There is a ton of info in that report! I mostly looked at the pretty graphs.

The Internet was supposed to be some great force for democracy, but instead it’s a way for Russian bots to convince Americans to vote for autocrats, and for the rich to become stupid rich and buy elections.

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  1. I think (opinion only) that our national character has gone down the toilet. In, say, 1980, a guy like Trump wouldn’t have received ten percent of the vote because there are simply too many things about him that would have been deal breakers back then. Heck, Nixon had to resign because he got caught spying on the other party. That’s laughable compared to what Trump has done. Heck, he openly exhorted his followers to storm Washington and got away with it.

  2. Again, only opinion, but I believe our ability to con and condition people on a massive scale has significantly outstripped people’s ability to recognize it and combat it.

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I think the 2008 financial crisis started the ball rolling, but enduring economic issues that existed before it and continue to exist (like the near total impossibility of buying a home) plus general uncertainty about jobs and the economy contribute to a general climate of fear and anxiety, autocrats thrive in that kind of environment.

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I don’t think that’s a valid opinion for one simple reason. Unlike those other quasi dictators Trump has not yet successfully used his position as head of state to win an election, and remain in power. Everyone else on that list has, to greater or lesser degree of brazenness or illegality, and that’s kind of the reason we call them quasi dictators. Until Trump does that (that he absolutely will attempt it later this year) I don’t think you can say Trump has exceeded Ergodan et al.

It’s only been a little over a year though, given him time :frowning:

6

I mean, there’s probably not just a single cause, and there will be contributing causes that differ between individual countries (e.g. in Russia, a good case can be made that autocratization was severely pushed forward after the 2011 ‘Snow Revolution’ in the wake of the Arab Spring gave Putin a good scare, but that influences US developments at best indirectly, by providing a good working example). But as a total WAG, I think one point is competition for a bigger slice of a diminishing pie: we’re looking at a world where future stability seems increasingly dubious, both for economical and ecological reasons—the 2008 financial crisis was already mentioned, add to that the looming AI and private equity bubbles, while climate change, biodiversity loss, and wholesale ecosystem destruction threaten easily-exploitable sources of cheap resources and labor. So everybody is scrabbling to secure as large a cut as they can, as long as they still can, which leads to increased foreign adventurism supported by domestic nationalist and totalitarian ‘fuck them, got mine’-tendencies.

But I think maybe the larger question is what exactly demands explanation: the autocratic backlash of recent years, or the period of relative, local stability and democratization before? What’s the baseline, what’s the outlier? Maybe we owe last century’s leap towards equal rights and representation, woefully short though it fell, rather to an unlikely confluence of factors, with the economic boom after World War II providing the groundwork of stability capable of supporting at least the appearance of a ‘rules-based order’. Maybe then this is a course correction—right in the moment where we desperately need to come together across borders and ideologies to counter threats of climate change and resource shortage that won’t be stopped by lines either on maps or in minds.

That is of course part of the assessment—the LDI has a sub-index, the Electoral Democracy Index. And indeed, as the article notes:

A single bright spot in the assessment of the US is that free and open elections are still being held, and the electoral system “remains stable for now”.

But of course, democracy is in danger and liberties are revoked long before elections are cancelled. And that the US hasn’t yet caught up with other burgeoning autocracies along this axis doesn’t mean it’s not on a similar track, and it’s definitely meaningful to compare the relative progress there.

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I’d argue thats like having a scoring system for burrito joints, that doesn’t make the “how good are the burritos” the most important factor. That’s in a different “burrito quality” sub-index. You can do that of course, and dedicate a great deal of time to your “burritoscore.com” with all sorts of graphs and scientific sounding numbers, but I’m not giving your opinion that much credence. To be clear we all agreed these are some truly awful burritos (sub gas station microwave burrito, major salmonella risk) we talking about here, but I’m not trusting your opinion no matter how many graphs you draw.

Though that’s quite a no sh_t sherlock. I look forward to their equally exhaustive scoring system for the sylvan defecation habits of the genus ursus, and the religious denominations of the Roman pontifex maximus 500CE-present day :wink:

To be clear we are all agreed democracy is nosediving in the US. But it’s not quite dead yet, and it’s not inevitably going to die. Saying it’s already dead reduces (the admittedly small :frowning: ) changes of saving it. We aren’t in a Ergodan style quasi dictatorship yet, we could be this time next year. And we could be in a Putin style one (or a Kim Jong Il style one) by 2028.

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I haven’t read the article, so perhaps this is mentioned. The move towards autocracy in the US is not a sudden thing that just came out of nowhere. Many groups have been working towards it for decades, what we’re seeing isn’t one year of remarkable backsliding, but rather the (hopefully only initial) success of plans in the works for generations.

Perhaps the oppressive regime equivalent of the old joke about the band/actor that took 10 years to become an overnight sensation.

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It’s more like evaluating a buffet on how healthy it is. If the salad is wilted, the meat funky, the bread moldy, and so on: all of these will contribute to a lesser degree of healthiness. Saying ‘but that doesn’t count unless the eggs are rotten’ is just weirdly specific special pleading—sure, rotten eggs are a pretty big strike against the buffet being healthy, but even if the eggs are perfectly fine doesn’t mean the rest of the meal is.

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A big part of what drives authoritarianism is ethnonationalism. The idea that a nation should serve a certain race, gender, religion, geography, etc.

The US is rapidly becoming feminist, multicultural, secular and non-white. Obama being elected president (a black man with an african name who MAGA thought was a muslim immigrant) really kicked the ethnonationalism into overdrive. Supposedly the US’s democratic decline, at least according to freedom house, started in 2011 when the GOP won congress and won a bunch of state legislatures.

One issue I have with OP’s article is that in several categories like downgrading the US from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy, Canada and the UK have also been degraded too to the same level.

Also the article implies a big part of the decline is the fact that the legislative branch has chosen to give up its power since its run by republicans. They haven’t had their power taken away, they just don’t want to use it.

In Venezuela, the party opposed to Maduro has won legislative elections, but Maduro took all their power away. In the US, the legislative branch still has power its just that they willingly gave it away. One would hope that if the democrats win in 2026 they will take some power back. But with people like Jeffries and Schumer in charge, even if they win I don’t expect much democratic improvements to happen. Republicans are evil and organized, democrats are spineless and submissive. The country will keep getting worse due to that. If Biden had picked someone competent for AG, who knows how things would be now.

A big risk is that mass immigration from the middle east and Africa is going to cause a massive authoritarian movement in Europe too.

The risk is what happens in 2032 or 2036 when someone as evil as Trump but who is actually competent gets elected by this stupid country?

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That’s part of the irony of the American situation. People voted in autocracy. Democracy brought down by democracy. (That’s simplistic, of course; part of the problem is also Trump just ignoring laws and our system unable to react properly, and a complicit SCOTUS that doesn’t have to worry about reelection and term limits.)

I see the real bright spot being that there are people who have buyers’ remorse, and I think there will be many (hopefully enough?) that might at least slow down the erosion in the next couple of national elections by not reelecting the people who disappointed and/or enraged them.

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My WAG would be that that would have elicited a far fiercer eventual backlash from most on the further right that would make Obama’s two terms look like a PTA squabble. (as in - this 30/40(?) percent in question wouldn’t just go slithering back under their rocks again once an effectual AG actually did their job - on the contrary - they’d only dig their in heels more in trying to somehow Make America Bigoted Again)

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In my entire adult life, politics has basically followed this pattern.

The republicans are the default party. They get elected, they fuck everything up, and then the public votes in the democrats to fix it. After the democrats get things back on track, the public vote the GOP back into power.

The American voters are like a mentally unstable teenage girl who likes bad boys. She dates a bad boy and he crashes her car, cheats on her, spends her money, etc. Then she has buyers remorse and dates a good guy. Things get better, but soon she gets bored and goes back to the bad boy. Wash/rinse/repeat

Thats the American public sadly. I don’t see that pattern changing. Will there be buyers remorse in 2026 and 2028? Probably, but the idiots who voted for him will just vote for the GOP in 2030 and 2032 to undermine democracy, wreck the economy, destroy our reputation, fuck up our foreign policy, etc.

This is a stupid, evil, pathetic country.

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FWIW, Freedom house just released its 2025 report on the US, we’ve dropped to 81/100. Keep in mind we were 94/100 in 2010 When Obama was president and democrats controlled congress as well as a lot of state houses. Now we’ve dropped to 81/100 due to Republicans, Trump and MAGA.

Freedom House

As part of their Freedom in the World survey series, Freedom House downgraded the United States’ score significantly in their civil rights and political liberties index between 2010 (94) and 2020 (83), including an accelerated 6-point loss during the first presidency of Donald Trump alone, citing the need for three main reforms: removing barriers to voting, limiting the influence of money in politics, and establishing independent redistricting commissions.[178][9][50]

This country will never get better until the voters become better. And I don’t see that happening. I’m glad so many decent women refuse to date or have sex with Trump supporters. We need more of that. Businesses need to be boycotted, relationships need to end.

FWIW, Poland has also undergone democratic backsliding due to right wing authoritarians. Their peak freedom house score was about 93/100 in 2015, and dropped to 80/100 due to the law and justice party.

The US is almost tied with Poland under authoritarian democracy.

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Do you think folks on the right could guide off the Julia Roberts commercial, only the other way around?

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The ‘problem’ is that people on the left are more than happy to never date people on the right. People on the right however want to date people on the left.

I think its because people on the right have more selishness and less emotional intelligence, and they want a partner with higher emotional intelligence. For people on the left, its a net drain. For people on the right, its a net gain. They get a partner with more emotional intelligence to deal with their issues.

I’ve seen relationships between two right wingers. Its usually two self centered, mean, emotionally immature people which tends to go badly. Right wingers want to date left wingers because they feel left wingers will soothe their self centeredness and emotional immaturity. But left wingers are more than happy to not date right wingers, while right wingers want to date left wingers. Hence why there is an entire movement of right wing men trying to find ways to manipulate left wing women into never finding out they are Trump supporters. There is no countermovement of left wing women trying to manipulate Trump supporting men into dating them.

I think the right view themselves as emotional takers and view the left as emotional givers. But the left are more than happy to never date the right, while the right to a large degree don’t want to date each other.