Is the United States Still a Liberal Democracy?

I'm afraid the question must be asked.

Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

Longtime readers might be sensing juuuuuuust a tinge of pessimism from the hard-working staff here of Drezner’s World when assessing the future of the United States under unified GOP rule. But the genius of U.S. constitutional democracy is that it can self-correct, right? Even if the Trump administration squanders a bountiful political inheritance with policy fiasco after policy fiasco, the country will endure, yes? As Winston Churchill famously said, “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.”

Here’s the thing, though: there’s no actual record that Churchill ever said those words. While the sentiment is a reassuring one, it is time to consider the possibility that it might not be true. The United States might not still be the United States if the events of the last three weeks repeat themselves over the next three-plus years.

Or, to state it plainly: will the U.S. still be a liberal constitutional democracy come January 2029?

Lest this seem like a hyperbolic question, consider that even prior to Trump’s re-election political scientists were raising questions about how to code the status of American democracy:

Anocracies are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic; their citizens enjoy some elements of democratic rule (e.g., elections), while other rights (e.g., due process or freedom of the press) suffer. In the last weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the respected Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) calculated that, for the first time in more than two centuries, the United States no longer qualified as a democracy. It had, over the preceding five years, become an anocracy….

This might come as a shock to many Americans. While we were going about our daily lives, our executive branch continued its decades-long accumulation of power to the point where a sitting president refused to accept an election result. Democratic backsliding had happened incrementally, like the erosion of a shoreline. The process is especially difficult for Americans to recognize because exceptionalism is baked into our founding myth: We are a city on a hill. We are different.

Or not. The CSP ranking, called the “Polity Score” — well regarded partly because of its historical and geographic scope — uses various criteria to place governments on a scale ranging from -10 (most autocratic) to +10 (most democratic). Anocracies are in the middle, between -5 and +5. The United States’ Polity Score dropped from +10 in 2015 to +5 — an anocracy — for 2020.

The previous paragraphs were written by my political scientist colleague and civil war expert Barbara Walter — back in January 2022.

Those questions persisted into 2023. This is from the Brookings Institution’s Vanessa Williamson:

The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions: election manipulation and executive overreach.

Most obviously, after the 2020 election, the sitting president, despite admitting privately that he had lost, attempted to subvert the results and remain in office. But democratic erosion in the United States is not synonymous with Donald Trump. Since 2010, state legislatures have instituted laws intended to reduce voters’ access to the ballot, politicize election administration, and foreclose electoral competition via extreme gerrymandering. The United States has also seen substantial expansions of executive power and serious efforts to erode the independence of the civil service. Against these pressures, the gridlocked and hyperpartisan Congress is poorly equipped to provide unbiased oversight and accountability of the executive, and there are serious questions about the impartiality of the judiciary….

Democratic decline has ramifications throughout society. It is associated with certain changes in public attitudes, including vilification of members of the opposing party and widespread misinformation. There tends to be a decline in non-governmental institutions critical to a healthy public sphere, such as an independent media, a vibrant education system, and an engaged civil society. All these symptoms of decline are present in the United States.

Does this assessment hold for February 2025? Well…

The current Polity score for the United States is much less democratic than it was in 2020. On its front page, Polity states flat out: “The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy.”

So what if the U.S. Polity score has gone down, though? As Walter and others noted, the U.S. Polity score fell to anocracy levels in 2020 — by 2024, however, the USA had bounced back to be categorized as a full democracy. Maybe this is just one slightly wonky coding schema? Does intimidating inspectors general really signal the end of democracy? I mean, even now, despite Trump’s myriad attempted power grabs, the executive branch is complying with federal court orders that freeze such actions, yes?¹ University of Minnesota administrative law professor Kristin Hickman told NPR that the U.S. is not in a constitutional crisis: “We're not there yet and we have no guarantee we're ever going to get there. It is not healthy for our body politic for us to overreact and roll around a lot of overheated rhetoric.”

If there is anyone who could settle this question, it is Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die. That 2017 book was an outstanding and accessible analysis of how consolidated democracies can degrade over time. More recently, both authors expressed concern about the trajectory of American democracy.

On Tuesday, Levitsky and co-author Lucan Way published “The Path to American Authoritarianism” in Foreign Affairs, and, well, it is safe to say that they are not optimistic about the state of American democracy:

Democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. America has been backsliding for a decade: between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House’s annual global freedom index, which scores all countries on a scale of zero to 100, downgraded the United States from 92 (tied with France) to 83 (below Argentina and tied with Panama and Romania), where it remains.

The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing. Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he attempted to overturn the results of an election and block a peaceful transfer of power. Yet neither Congress nor the judiciary held him accountable, and the Republican Party—coup attempt notwithstanding—renominated him for president. Trump ran an openly authoritarian campaign in 2024, pledging to prosecute his rivals, punish critical media, and deploy the army to repress protest. He won, and thanks to an extraordinary Supreme Court decision, he will enjoy broad presidential immunity during his second term…..

U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.

The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.

But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.

Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy….

The depletion of societal opposition may be worse than it appears. We can observe when key players sideline themselves—when politicians retire, university presidents resign, or media outlets change their programming and personnel. But it is harder to see the opposition that might have materialized in a less threatening environment but never did—the young lawyers who decide not to run for office; the aspiring young writers who decide not to become journalists; the potential whistleblowers who decide not to speak out; the countless citizens who decide not to join a protest or volunteer for a campaign.

I cannot shake those last two paragraphs. The welter of civil society and private-sector actors that opposed Trump in 2017 Trump seem much more concerned about appeasing him this time around. No doubt some of them might have changed their mind about him, but it sure seems as though this is more about fear than interest.

More disturbing is that the current administration is laying down a blueprint for how future populists can wield executive power in an illiberal manner. Sure, in theory Congress can pass laws that check against moving too fast and breaking too many things. Absent a wholesale public rebuke of this administration, however, I don’t see that happening. And right now, that public rebuke does not exist. When it comes to Donald Trump, I have been waiting for an categorical public rebuke for ten years now. It has not happened.

In short, it is hard to disagree with Levitsky and Way. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World remains committed to Making America Democratic Again. But it is going to take time. Even if it happens, the political constant for the rest of my days will not be the resilience of American democracy, but its precarity.

[CORRECTION: The initial version of this post incorrectly stated that Levitsky and Way co-authored How Democracies Die. Levitsky co-authored that with Daniel Ziblatt.]

1. No, the compliance has not been perfect. Yes, the Trump White House is talking about the judicial branch in a very illiberal, undemocratic manner. Yes, the administration is innovating in its illegality. But this is how I organized this particular newsletter, so please cut the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World some slack.