The only good news from these studies is that they point to clear steps to fighting authoritarianism that have worked around the world and might here, as well: judicial rulings, mass protests, and eventually, elections.
A cross-national comparison reinforced the report’s alarming message. The experts rated Israel’s democracy at 49 and Mexico’s at 60, somewhat similar to the United States. But other countries have much more robust democracies right now, such as Great Britain (83) and Canada (88), the nations that the United States usually compares itself to.
Bright Line’s dire but not catastrophic findings mirror those of Freedom House, a D.C.-based group that has assessed the state of democracies in countries throughout the world since 1972.
Freedom House highlighted “an escalation … in the executive branch’s unilateral authority,” “a multiyear rise in threats and reprisals for political speech,” and a new presidential administration that “disregarded conflicts of interest and weakened both anticorruption safeguards and enforcement practices.” So, “Trump is a corrupt dictatorial madman,” but in polite, scholarly terms.
Even though its report was negative, it was notable that Freedom House did not formally downgrade U.S. democracy. The group ranks countries as free, partly free, or not free. And so far, the U.S. remains in the free category, which includes countries that score 70 or better.
The V-Dem report was scathing, in my view more forthrightly stating the radicalism of the Trump administration in 2025 (even compared to 2017–2021) than the other two reports. (I suspect experts from outside the United States are willing to be more frank because they are not cowed by Republican claims that academics and other experts are biased against conservatives.) V-Dem argued that U.S. democracy has diminished to levels similar to its state in 1965. I repeat, 1965. Jim Crow was ending then. V-Dem said that according to its rankings, the U.S. dropped from the twentieth-most democratic of the 179 nations it measures to the fifty-first in Trump’s first year. By V-Dem’s formal scores, the U.S. declined from 0.75 under Biden to 0.57 under Trump, a 24 percent decline.
V-Dem’s list of Trump’s antidemocratic acts is similar to those of Freedom House and Bright Watch. V-Dem was just more willing to draw out the obvious conclusions—that this is the “most dramatic decline in American history” of its democracy, that Trump is executing a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency.”
Freedom House too emphasized that the U.S still has competitive elections. And Bright Line argues that things are already getting slightly better. While Freedom House and V-Dem assess democracy yearly, Bright Light does surveys a few times a year. In April 2025, when universities and law firms were capitulating to the president every day and Elon Musk was single-handedly dismantling government agencies, the scholars ranked U.S. democracy at a 53. The increase to 57 from Bright Line isn’t because Trump has become less radical. Instead, “experts see improvements in judicial checks on the executive and not using the military for political purposes, which may reflect the Supreme Court tariff decision, and the end of domestic deployments of the National Guard.”
So all is not lost. America can restore its democracy. But we should not downplay what these reports show. Bright Line shows months of democratic decline, V-Dem a year, Freedom House two decades. All are correct. Trump is the immediate cause of this decline, but we had to have voters and a political system that empowered him. Black people, women, and other groups had nowhere near full democratic rights in the United States in 1965. They do now. But Trump has destroyed so many other parts of our democracy that a serious organization can say American democracy is as weak as it was in the civil rights era. It’s ugly, and time is running out. If JD Vance succeeds Trump, we might be headed down one more rung to electoral autocracy.
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