U.S. Democracy Is In Freefall - And the Press Is Barely Covering It
One of the world’s leading democracy trackers says America is no longer itself a liberal democracy. The finding should have dominated national political coverage.
In March 2026, one of the world’s leading democracy monitors reported a democratic catastrophe in the United States. But three months later, you’re probably hearing about it for the first time right now.
V-Dem, among the most respected global democracy monitors, stripped the U.S. of the “liberal democracy” title for the first time in 50 years in its 2026 Democracy Report. American democracy is collapsing at an unprecedented rate, with the rate of political autocratization outpacing even the most prominent world autocrats.
Most notably, the U.S. autocratization assessed in the report sees these declines without factoring in electoral components, such as voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the like. The reason is that the report analyzes data from the past year, and the midterms haven’t happened yet. So the downgrade from “liberal democracy” to “electoral democracy” represents the non-electoral parts of Trump’s second term. If election indicators decline after the midterms, the next report could move the U.S. even further toward autocracy.
One should expect such a horrific collapse in a major U.S. democracy ranking to be front-page news across the country, but most Americans are unaware it even happened. And that’s not their fault. The finding received coverage, but not the sustained, front-page, civic-emergency treatment it warranted.
Cable news still metabolizes democratic collapse as a sequence of discrete scandals, clashes, and daily controversies rather than as a broader regime-change process. Sometimes this is driven by revenue generation, other times by intentional complicity, and often a mix of both. Media consolidation makes the problem even worse, especially as key figures in that consolidation strategically align with America’s autocrats.
This happens alongside American newspapers that continue to see budgetary cuts squeezing newsrooms to the point that even covering all breaking stories is a heavy lift. Important coverage is being missed, not because journalists lack integrity, but because they lack resources.
All of this is symptomatic of democratic collapse itself.
The Republican Party works as the primary vehicle of autocratization in the U.S., especially as Trump continues to succeed at purging the party of his enemies to create an apparatus of total fealty. But the Democratic Party ranges from ineffective to complicit in combatting autocratization, with Democratic states like New York passing protest bans and national party leaders attempting to undercut their own voters when they stray too far to the Left, which is to mean at all to the Left.
The autocratization of the U.S. is not cause for nihilism, but serves as a wake-up call to its citizenry to engage robustly with civic life and exercise rights regularly.
Restoration of democracy has precedent, despite the doomerism of public discourse. Eighteen countries saw an increase in democratization this year, with 3 new democratizers representing “U-turns,” in which countries that were marching toward autocracy reversed direction. The success rate is also high for autocracies that start a democratization process: 70 percent.
The restoration of democracy in America will not come from its feckless national Democratic political leaders, but from everyday citizens engaging in civic life together across demographic lines - through the exercise of speech, ousting complicit leaders, marching in protest, and engaging in targeted civil disobedience.
Without such civic action, the slide into outright autocracy will only escalate.
 | A guest post by
|