roughly 62nd in the world, below every major Western European nation (and many others as well) and about even with Panama, Romania and South Korea. rating has dropped by 10 points in the last decade, to 83 points out of a possible 100. "has fallen below its traditional peers on key democratic indicators, including executive elections, freedom from improper political influence, and equal treatment of minority groups." According to Freedom House's ranking of democratic health and freedom, the U.S. It is now impossible to ignore the damage to democracy's foundations and reputation. But freely elected leaders from Brazil to India have also taken or threatened a variety of antidemocratic actions, and the resulting breakdown in shared values among democracies has led to a weakening of these values on the international stage.
This was arguably most visible last year in the United States, where rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6 as part of an organized attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election.
#Plutocracy countries 2020 free
Only about 20 percent now live in Free countries….Īt the same time, democracies are being harmed from within by illiberal forces, including unscrupulous politicians willing to corrupt and shatter the very institutions that brought them to power. As of today, some 38 percent of the global population live in Not Free countries, the highest proportion since 1997. A total of 60 countries suffered declines over the past year, while only 25 improved. The present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom. 6, 2021, America is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, its most significant internal challenge since the Civil War.īut the United States is by no means unique in this regard, as explained in " Freedom in the World 2022: The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule," the new report from the international democracy watchdog Freedom House: In the wake of Donald Trump's presidency and the coup attempt of Jan. One of America's two institutional political parties has been corrupted from within by a fascist movement that seeks to end multiracial democracy and replace it with a new form of Jim and Jane Crow American apartheid.
Instead of being a voice for the voiceless and the less powerful, in the best spirit of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, today's Supreme Court is largely an agent of right-wing authoritarianism. Supreme Court, and the judiciary system as a whole, are also not representative of the country's current demographics, values and beliefs, and has become increasingly driven by partisan division. Wyoming has three members, representing fewer than 600,000 people. Senate and the Electoral College, grant disproportionate political representation (and therefore disproportionate power and influence) to overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly rural "red states," as compared to the far more populous and more diverse "blue states." California has 55 members of Congress, representing nearly 40 million people. So-called democratic institutions, most notably the U.S. RELATED: Are we normalizing the "death of democracy" by talking about it so much? Definitely not is currently organized as a plutocracy, in which elected officials are highly responsive to the interests and demands of large corporations and the richest Americans while routinely ignoring the democratic will of the majority. Political scientists and other scholars have shown that the U.S. has consistently supported authoritarian and antidemocratic regimes around the world whenever that was deemed to serve the "national interest." While the American experiment in democracy is historically important, for most of its existence the United States was an overtly racist nation whose democracy was defined by exclusion: First and foremost the exclusion of Black people and women, but also the exclusion of Native Americans, many nonwhite immigrant groups and poor people in general.įurthermore while claiming to be an exceptional nation and the world's greatest democracy, the U.S. Those beliefs are delusional, sometimes to the extreme. The United States is no different, but our nation's myths and lies are more extravagant than most: America, we are told to believe, is an "exceptional" or "indispensable" nation, the world's greatest democracy, a shining city on a hill. Nations are built on myths and lies - mixed, of course, with bits of the truth.
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