The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute has officially downgraded the United States, declaring the nation has lost its “liberal democracy” classification due to the rapid dismantling of institutional checks on Donald Trump’s presidency.
Why It Matters Now
The findings from the Swedish-based observatory, headquartered at the University of Gothenburg, are not merely rhetorical—they are a historic metric of collapse. The U.S. is currently experiencing its most severe democratic erosion in 237 years. The pace of American autocratization has surpassed the models seen under Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, compressing into a single year a process that took nearly a decade in other nations.
The transformation of the West’s leading power into an “electoral autocracy” shifts the global geopolitical axis, validating authoritarian regimes worldwide and weakening democratic resistance in Europe and Latin America. Where Washington once championed institutional freedoms, it now signals that unchecked executive rule is a viable governance model.
The Collapse of Checks and Balances
V-Dem utilizes 48 distinct indicators to support the thesis that the U.S. Legislative branch has effectively abdicated its oversight role. In the first year of the current administration, the statistical disparity is stark: Trump signed 225 executive orders, while a Republican-controlled Congress passed only 49 laws—most of which were of marginal impact. In practice, government by decree has replaced parliamentary debate, hollowing out Congress as a counter-power.
“We are witnessing an extremely rapid concentration of power in the Executive,” says Staffan Lindberg, the institute’s founder. The strategy of purging career civil servants and inspectors general to replace them with personal loyalists has dismantled the technical meritocracy that served as the final internal barrier against presidential whim.
Accelerated Erosion of Civil Liberties
The study highlights that freedom of expression in the United States has hit its lowest point since the 1940s. Systematic attacks on electoral integrity—evidenced by the departure of 40% of election workers since 2020 due to threats and political pressure—fragilize the public’s trust in the most basic rite of democracy: the ballot.
Unlike gradual autocratic processes, the Trump model is described as an institutional “blitzkrieg.” While it took a decade for Aleksandar Vučić to corrode Serbia’s institutions, the current White House occupant achieved an equivalent level of structural degradation in a fraction of that time.
Contagion Effect in Europe and Latin America
This regression is not an isolated phenomenon; it is the engine of a global movement. V-Dem notes that the United Kingdom and Italy are following similar trajectories of weakening political freedoms. In Latin America, while Brazil showed improvement in 2023, Argentina and Peru are displaying signs of democratic reversal, aligning with the trend of “strongman” leaders who ignore constitutional limits.
The U.S. Supreme Court, historically the final bulwark of the Constitution, is also cited as increasingly ineffective. Even when the court invalidates executive actions, they are frequently bypassed by subsequent administrative maneuvers, illustrating a judiciary that has lost the capacity to impose real boundaries on the presidency.
The Silence of Traditional Conservatism
The report criticizes the alignment of traditional right-wing sectors with this autocratic movement. In Europe and the Americas, historic conservative parties have flirted with extremism, believing they can control authoritarian leaders once they are in power. The V-Dem record, however, shows that far-right movements, once in power, invariably prioritize destroying the very institutions that facilitated their election.
The occupation of strategic posts by political loyalists and the demonization of the free press complete the picture of a country heading toward a total collapse of the liberal order. The report serves as a temporary epitaph for the idea of the U.S. as a “beacon of democracy.”
The Future of the Liberal Order
The challenge posed by V-Dem is the survival of the democratic model against a technologically advanced and economically powerful autocracy. If the world’s largest economy consolidates absolute power in a leader who refuses to accept electoral results, the concept of an “international community of democracies” effectively ceases to exist.
The fundamental question remains: is there enough institutional strength left in American civil society to reverse an autocratization that is moving faster than history itself?
