They Called Them Alarmists
- Kal Inois
- 16 minutes ago
- 9 min read
In 2012, a small group of political scientists at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden set out to build the most rigorous global dataset on democracy ever constructed. They called it the Varieties of Democracy Institute, or V-Dem. At the time, global democracy was near its historic peak. Their colleagues called them alarmists. The data, they said, was exaggerating the risk. Democracy was fine.
The data was not exaggerating.
This week, the V-Dem Institute released its 2026 Democracy Report, and it arrives alongside a parallel report from Freedom House, the Washington-based democracy watchdog. Read them together and a single conclusion becomes unavoidable. The United States of America is no longer a liberal democracy. It is an autocratizing state. And the speed at which that transformation is occurring is, in the precise language of the researchers who study these things for a living, unprecedented in the modern history of this country.
These are not cable news commentators. These are not partisan operatives. These are the scientists who built the largest democracy dataset in human history, covering 202 countries and territories from 1789 to the present, using more than 32 million data points and the contributions of more than 4,000 researchers in 180 countries. When they say something is happening, it is happening.
What they are saying is happening is this: †rump is aiming for dictatorship.
Professor Staffan Lindberg, the founding director of the V-Dem Institute, does not use that word carelessly. He has spent his career measuring exactly this kind of transition, in exactly this kind of country. He has watched it happen in Hungary under Orbán, in Turkey under Erdoğan, in Serbia under Vučić, in India under Modi. He knows what the early stages look like. He knows what the accelerating stages look like. And he is now saying, in direct terms, that what he is seeing in the United States is the same process, moving faster.
One year.
The V-Dem report is built on 48 different metrics measuring democratic health across every dimension that matters: freedom of expression and the media, quality of elections, observance of the rule of law, constraints on executive power, independence of the judiciary, the health of civil society. Across these metrics, US democracy has fallen back to the level it occupied in 1965, the year civil rights laws first introduced genuine universal suffrage. Every democratic gain made in the six decades since has been erased. The report identifies legislative constraints on the executive as the worst-affected dimension, now at its lowest point in over 100 years.
One hundred years. Not since before women had the right to vote has Congress been this subordinate to the executive.
And Freedom House, releasing its own report this week, found that the United States recorded a freedom score of 81 out of 100, the lowest since the organization introduced its 100-point scale in 2002. Among countries still rated Free, the United States joined Bulgaria and Italy in registering the largest declines in political rights and civil liberties of any nation on earth last year. Freedom House has been doing this for more than half a century. The United States has never scored this low.
These two independent organizations, using different methodologies, measuring different indicators, arriving at the same conclusion. At the same time. About the same country.
The mechanism Lindberg and his colleagues describe is precise and recognizable. It is called executive aggrandizement. Democratically elected leaders such as Erdoğan, Modi, Orbán, Chávez, and Vučić all dismantled institutional checks on their power and utilized government resources to weaken their political opposition, eventually turning their countries into autocracies. The V-Dem researchers write that †rump has largely used similar strategies during his time in office. Unlike his foreign counterparts, they note, †rump operates openly and acts rapidly.
The openness is important. This is not being done in secret. The pardoning of 1,500 people convicted in the January 6th assault on the Capitol was done publicly, undermining the legitimacy of the courts in full view of the country. The firing of inspectors general across federal departments was announced. The installation of loyalists to replace career civil servants was celebrated. The signing of 225 executive orders in his first year, while the Republican-controlled Congress passed only 49 largely insignificant laws, was treated as efficiency rather than the erasure of the legislative branch as a co-equal institution of government.
"We no longer have a meaningful division between the legislative and executive branches," Lindberg says.
The Supreme Court has also, for the most part, abdicated. And when it does push back, the regime circumvents it. There are currently more than 600 ongoing judicial procedures against the †rump regime in the courts. Six hundred. That number itself is a measure of how far outside the boundaries of constitutional governance this regime is operating.
There is a response the †rump regime offers to all of this. The White House spokeswoman called V-Dem's analysis "a ridiculous claim made by an irrelevant, blatantly biased organization" and called †rump a champion for freedom and democracy.
This is the response Orbán gave. This is the response Erdoğan gave. This is the response every leader in the history of autocratization has given when confronted with the data showing what they are doing. They are always champions of freedom and democracy. The institutions they are dismantling are always the corrupt ones. The researchers documenting the decline are always the biased ones. This is not a coincidence. This is the script.
What makes V-Dem's methodology resistant to this kind of dismissal is precisely its structure. The institute works with 4,200 researchers in 180 countries, using universal standards while incorporating on-the-ground expertise. The data is not the opinion of a columnist or a think tank with a political agenda. It is a scientific measurement, subjected to peer review, built over more than a decade, and calibrated against every comparable autocratization episode in modern history. Lindberg spent years being called an alarmist. The data kept being right.
The data is right now.
The picture the reports paint extends well beyond the United States. The world has not seen this many countries autocratizing simultaneously in all of recorded history. For the first time in more than twenty years, autocracies outnumber democracies on this planet. 74% of the world's population, roughly 6 billion people, now live under autocratic rule. Just 7% of the global population, around 600 million people, live in liberal democracies.
Global democracy is back to 1989 levels. The year the Berlin Wall fell. We have erased 35 years of democratic progress in a period so short that people who were born when that wall came down are not yet middle-aged.
Freedom of expression is the hardest-hit dimension globally, worsening in 44 countries. Government censorship of media now affects 32 of the 44 autocratizing countries. Repression of civil society affects 30. And nearly half of all autocratizing countries are increasingly spreading disinformation as a tool of political control.
Washington is leading this global turn. The State Department under †rump has said it will only comment on foreign elections when the United States has a clear and compelling interest, abandoning decades of democratic solidarity with nations fighting for self-governance. "What we're losing is democratic solidarity globally," said Yana Gorokhovskaia, director for strategy and design at Freedom House. "We're no longer emphasizing a distinction between democracies and autocracies in the world."
When the oldest democracy in the world stops making that distinction, the distinction stops mattering to everyone who was watching for American leadership on it.
There is a single bright spot in the V-Dem assessment of the United States. Free and open elections are still being held, and the electoral system remains stable for now. For now. Lindberg is direct about what those two words carry.
"We've seen media reports that 40% of election and poll workers have quit since 2020," he said. "And †rump never accepted his defeat then. Why would he accept a defeat now? If we see a denial of the election results in 2026, then it is a complete democratic breakdown."
A complete democratic breakdown. Not backsliding. Not erosion. Breakdown.
The courts have pushed back on some of what the regime has attempted, and that matters. Political scientists at Dartmouth's Bright Line Watch project note that †rump has not fully captured the judiciary as a set of institutional referees. That is true and it is worth noting. It is not, however, reassurance. It is a description of how far the process has come and how much further it could go. The question of whether democratic institutions can hold is not the same as the answer that they are holding.
The people calling themselves alarmists now are the same people who spent a decade being called alarmists before. They were right then. The data they are producing today is more comprehensive, more rigorous, and more alarming than anything they published in those years when their colleagues told them to calm down.
They are not calm. They should not be calm.
Freedom House has tracked global freedom declining for 20 consecutive years. Twenty years. Two decades of steady erosion, documented annually, met with the political equivalent of a shoulder shrug by the governments that were supposed to be the last line of defense for democratic governance on this planet. And at the end of those twenty years, the country that was supposed to model democracy for the world elected, for a second time, a man whom the world's most credible democracy researchers are now comparing to Orbán, Erdoğan, and Vučić. And finding that comparison generous to †rump.
"The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid," Lindberg said. "It is the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world."
The founders wanted to avoid it. They wrote a Constitution specifically designed to prevent it. They built in checks and balances and separation of powers and an independent judiciary and a free press and the right to protest and a civilian-controlled military because they had read their history and they knew what unchecked executive power produced. They knew because they had lived under it. They designed the entire architecture of this government as a permanent answer to the question of what happens when one man decides the rules do not apply to him.
The answer they built is being dismantled. Metric by metric. Institution by institution. Inspector general by inspector general.
This is not the moment for exhaustion. This is not the moment to decide the news is too heavy and step away. This is the moment the researchers have been warning about for a decade, the moment that the data always pointed toward as the point of no return if the trends were not reversed.
The trends were not reversed. They accelerated.
What remains is the question of what people who understand what is happening choose to do with that understanding. The V-Dem report notes that autocratization can be halted and reversed, and that this is currently happening in ten countries, among them Brazil and Poland. It is not inevitable. The slide toward autocracy is not a law of physics. It is a political process, and political processes can be interrupted by people who refuse to accept that they cannot be.
But they have to refuse. They have to show up. They have to vote in 2026 as if the electoral system itself is on the ballot, because Lindberg has told us in plain language that it is. They have to support the institutions, the journalism, the civil society organizations, and the legal challenges that are functioning as the remaining friction against a process that feeds on the absence of resistance.
The researchers are not alarmists. They are scientists reading data that the rest of us have been watching unfold in real time and refusing to name for what it is.
It is autocratization. It is happening here. It is happening now. And it is moving faster than any comparable process in the modern history of this country.
Read the reports. Share them. Say the word. Then decide what you are going to do about it.