The Slow Unraveling of American Democracy

Are We Still a Democracy? V‑Dem Says: Not Exactly

We like to tell ourselves that the United States is “the world’s oldest democracy.” But the people who actually measure democracy for a living are now saying something very different. The Varieties of Democracy project—V‑Dem, based at the University of Gothenburg—publishes an annual Democracy Report that tracks the health of democracy in nearly every country on earth, using thousands of country experts and hundreds of indicators.

In its 2026 report, Unraveling the Democratic Era?, V‑Dem finds that global democracy has fallen back to roughly 1978 levels and singles out the U.S. as a “conspicuous, exceptional new autocratizer,” noting that our decline is “unprecedented” for a wealthy Western country. According to their data, the U.S. began a measurable democratic backslide with Trump’s first term in 2016, saw that trend slow and partially reverse under Biden, and then experienced a sharp acceleration after Trump returned to office in 2025.

Today, V‑Dem no longer classifies us as a liberal democracy, but only as an electoral democracy—a system that still holds broadly free and fair elections with near‑universal suffrage, but where the “liberal” guardrails (independent courts, strong checks on executive power, and robust protection of civil liberties and minority rights) have been badly weakened.

We Were Never a Full Democracy to Begin With

When people hear that, they often jump straight to 2016 or to the latest headline. But the truth is deeper and more unsettling: the ground for this moment was laid over decades, across both parties, in our courts, in our political culture, and in the ways we have systematically protected the powerful from consequences. To see how we got here, we have to tell a longer story—one that starts by admitting that for most of our history, we weren’t a full democracy at all.

We began with slavery, disenfranchised women, property and taxpaying requirements, and the exclusion of Native peoples. The Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th and 15th) briefly opened a path to Black political participation, but Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and terror wiped Black voting off the map across much of the South by the early 20th century. Women could not vote nationwide until 1920, and even then many women of color—especially in the South and Southwest—remained effectively blocked by the same machinery. Only with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 do we begin to approach something like a multiracial, near‑universal franchise. The era we nostalgically call “stable American democracy” was, for most of its history, democracy for some. Only in the mid‑1960s do we start to build democracy for all—and that is exactly when the modern backlash takes off.

Drained Pools and Closed Schools: The Backlash to Inclusion

The landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, but many Southern states responded with “massive resistance” rather than compliance. Prince Edward County, Virginia, is infamous for shutting down its entire public school system for years rather than integrate, while white children attended private “segregation academies.”

Author Heather McGhee in her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together uses the image of the “drained pool” to capture this mentality: when ordered to integrate public pools, many towns literally closed or filled them in so no one could swim. Better to destroy a public good than share it. That logic repeated wherever schools, parks, and transit were expected to serve a more multiracial public. Funding was withdrawn, goods were privatized or abandoned, and universal benefits were turned into private privileges. This “better to destroy than share” politics did not just entrench racism; it slowly eroded the very idea that government exists to provide shared, public goods.

At the same time, faith in government was taking other hits. Vietnam created a yawning “credibility gap” between official statements and reality. Watergate exposed systematic abuses of power and cover‑ups at the top. Political violence, assassinations, and urban uprisings shattered the postwar sense of stability. Into this disillusionment stepped a new ideological project—“movement conservatism”—that drew a straight line from those events to a larger claim: government itself is the problem.

From “Government Can Work” to “Government Is the Problem”

Ronald Reagan turned that claim into a governing philosophy. In his 1981 inaugural address, he announced, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That line did more than get applause. It justified a sustained project of cutting taxes, deregulating, and privatizing. Republicans rode that project enthusiastically. Democrats, especially from the 1990s onward, internalized much of the same logic: cutting and means‑testing welfare, worshipping balanced budgets, and leaning on public‑private partnerships and tax‑credit schemes instead of direct public provision.

Over time, that created a self‑fulfilling prophecy. As we contracted out core functions, underfunded public agencies, and routed help through opaque tax expenditures and private intermediaries, government became less visible and less capable. For many ordinary people, the state stopped showing up in clear, positive ways in their daily lives. When it did appear, it was often as a bureaucratic hassle, a punitive presence, or a distant manager of crises created elsewhere. We told people for decades that government was the problem, and then we made sure that, in practice, it often would be.

Courts, Money, and Parties: Quietly Rewiring the System

Meanwhile, the referees and the rules of politics were being quietly rewired. Supreme Court decisions from Buckley v. Valeo through Citizens United loosened limits on money in politics and narrowed what counts as corruption, making it easier for corporations and billionaires to drown out everyone else. Both parties became increasingly dependent on large donors and corporate PACs. A dense conservative infrastructure—Heritage, the Federalist Society, the Koch network and allies—supplied anti‑regulatory blueprints, vetted judges committed to a cramped view of rights, and built media ecosystems to sell the message that markets are always good and government is always suspect.

From Gingrich to Trump: When Politics Became Total War

Inside Congress, Newt Gingrich introduced a new style in the 1990s: describe Democrats as “corrupt,” “sick,” “traitors,” shut down the government as a bargaining tactic, and treat politics as total war. At the same time for elections, nomination reforms moved us from party bosses in smoke‑filled rooms to primaries and caucuses driven by celebrity, grievance, and media attention. That sounded more democratic—and in some ways it was—but it also stripped parties of their ability to block dangerous demagogues. By the time Donald Trump came along, the system had all the wrong incentives: courts that empower money, parties reliant on billionaires, a media environment built on outrage, and a nomination process that can be gamed by someone with no commitment to democratic norms.

Too Big to Jail: Impunity at the Top

Layered on top of all this is a brutal pattern: at the top, the rules rarely seem to apply. Nixon resigned but was quickly pardoned. In 2008–2009, reckless lending and complex financial bets helped crash the global economy; the government stepped in to save the banking system, but almost no senior Wall Street executives went to prison, even as millions lost jobs, savings, and homes. Over time, Supreme Court decisions narrowed the legal definition of bribery and official corruption, turning forms of influence‑peddling that once looked like bribery into “legal access.”

The 2024 Supreme Court decision, Trump v. United States, fits squarely into this pattern of elite impunity. In that case, the Court’s conservative majority held that a president is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for “core” official acts—things done using the formal powers of the office—and presumptively immune for a much wider band of “official” conduct within the outer perimeter of presidential duties. Only clearly private or unofficial acts fall entirely outside this shield. In practice, that means attempts to use the machinery of government—including the Justice Department—to influence or overturn an election can now be argued to fall within a zone of immunity, making it far harder to hold presidents criminally accountable for abuses of power tied to their office. Civil‑liberties groups warned that this ruling “places presidents above the law” for a wide swath of conduct, and it is difficult to read it any other way.

High‑profile abuse cases like Jeffrey Epstein’s underscore the same lesson: if you are wealthy and well‑connected, you can do terrible things for a very long time and still slip through the cracks. It is no mystery, then, why trust in government has fallen from its mid‑20th‑century highs to historic lows, now lower than it was even in the wake of Watergate. Ordinary people see one system of justice for the powerful and another for everyone else. They see drained pools and closed school systems rather than integration. They see public universities and social programs attacked and hollowed out. They see elections awash in money and districts drawn to lock in minorities. They see a political class that is too old and too insulated to let go of power. And then they are told they must rally to defend this same system against authoritarianism.

We Don’t Need Restoration. We Need Re‑Founding.

So where does that leave us? One tempting answer is nostalgia: “We just need to get back to normal.” But if we are honest, “normal” was never a full democracy for many of our fellow citizens, and “normal” is what prepared the ground for this moment. The more radical—and more honest—answer is that we need something closer to a re‑founding: keeping what is worth keeping, throwing out what was never working, and building new institutions that make democracy real in daily life.

We might decide to keep the core principles: one person, one vote; equal dignity under law; freedom of speech and belief; the idea that no one is above the law. And we might decide to discard some powerful habits: bank‑first crisis management that treats mass foreclosures as collateral damage; a gerontocracy where a tiny, aging political class clings to office while younger generations are locked out; a Constitution treated as a fossil in amber rather than a living charter we are obligated to update.

What We Can Build Instead

In their place, we could build institutions that give ordinary people more direct, informed power: citizens’ assemblies where randomly selected neighbors deliberate on big issues and help shape policy; participatory budgeting where communities directly decide how to spend part of the budget; public options—broadband, childcare, healthcare, transit—that make government visible as a provider of shared goods. We could finally take money‑in‑politics seriously with public financing, small‑donor systems, and strict limits on dark money.

None of that is easy. But V‑Dem’s 2026 report is a loud external confirmation of what many people already feel in their bones: we are not just “in a rough patch.” We are sliding down a slope that other countries know all too well. Our house is flooded. That is a crisis. It is also an invitation, not to repaint the cabinets and the walls, but to decide together what kind of democracy we actually want to live in and then pick up a hammer.