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American democracy is being threatened as never before. American democracy is a rules-based system, laid out in the American constitution, that defines the roles and limited power of the various institutions of government: the legislative branch, the executive branch, the judicial branch as well as the way in which power and authority is divided between the federal government and the individual states. It is also a system that determines who is in power through free and fair elections. The loser of an election cedes authority to the winner and waits for his or her next chance to go before the voters in two or four years. While the system has had a number of hiccups (see the election of 1876), no incumbent loser has ever decided not to leave office despite losing the election.
Until now.
Most of us agree with Winston Churchill’s evaluation of “democracy:” ” Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ However, democracy around the world, and particularly democracy in the United States, has been hemorrhaging support for twenty years. The University of Cambridge’s Center for Democracy has been surveying global attitudes toward democracy for over thirty years. Their conclusions are disheartening:
- “Across the globe, democracy is in a state of malaise. In the mid-1990s, a majority of citizens in countries for which we have time-series data – in North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia – were satisfied with the performance of their democracies. Since then, the share of individuals who are “dissatisfied” with democracy has risen by around +10% points, from 47.9 to 57.5%. This is the highest level of global dissatisfaction since the start of the series in 1995.
- After a large increase in civic dissatisfaction in the prior decade, 2019 represents the highest level of democratic discontent on record. The rise in democratic dissatisfaction has been especially sharp since 2005. The year that marks the beginning of the so-called “global democratic recession” is also the high point for global satisfaction with democracy, with just 38.7% of citizens dissatisfied in that year. Since then, the proportion of “dissatisfied” citizens has risen by almost one-fifth of the population (+18.8%).
- Many of the world’s most populous democracies – including the United States, Brazil, Nigeria, and Mexico – have led the downward trend. In the United States, levels of dissatisfaction with democracy have risen by over a third of the population in one generation.“
These changes are depicted graphically in the charts below:
Graphics by David H. Montgomery; source: University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy
The decline in support for democracy has been accompanied by a decline in the performance of American institutions. Freedom House, a US Government funded non-profit, founded in 1941, regularly evaluates “freedom” in over 200 countries around the world. It should be noted that Freedom House tilts more to the right than to the left. Its 2019 Report describes American democracy as follows:
“The United States is a federal republic whose people benefit from a vibrant political system, a strong rule-of-law tradition, robust freedoms of expression and religious belief, and a wide array of other civil liberties. However, in recent years its democratic institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in partisan manipulation of the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, flawed new policies on immigration and asylum seekers, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity, and political influence.“
The erosion of American democratic institutions is described in the chart below. Between 2009 and 2019, the index of freedom in the United States fell by eight points, moving it out of the company of the Western democracies to a new neighborhood populated by Mongolia, Poland and Argentina. Some of this erosion occurred on Trump’s watch, but before 2020.
This erosion of democracy has been going on in the United States for several decades, but it has reached crisis proportions with the last-ditch attempt by Donald Trump to invalidate the 2020 Presidential Election. That will be the subject of the next post.
