Skip to content
“At no time in living memory has this country’s democratic system appeared more fragile. A question now is whether the values upon which that system was built are capable of repairing it.”
“We seem to be facing the destruction of the United States. I don’t see anyone articulating that this is an attack on what it means to be American, on the very idea of America, and it’s an emergency.”
— Yale professor Jason Stanley, an expert on fascism, quoted by the New York Times.
“We are living in a moment of extraordinary danger, and how we respond to this moment will not only impact our lives but it will affect the lives of our kids and future generations. We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of our country.”
— Sen. Bernie Sanders, quoted by the Washington Post.
“When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime. I don’t think this is hypothetical two years from now; we may be living in a very restricted democratic space in January.”
— Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), speaking to Greg Sargent on The Daily Blast.
47%
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance said its Global Report on the State of Democracy, which measures democratic performance in 158 countries from 1975 till today, found that 47% of countries have experienced a decline in key democratic indicators over the past five years, marking the eighth consecutive year of global democratic backsliding. One in three elections are being disputed in some way and the average percentage of the voting age population that actually cast ballots has declined from 65.2% in 2008 to 55.5% in 2023. Globally, in nearly 20% of elections between 2020 and 2024, one of the losing candidates or parties rejected the result, and elections were being decided by court appeals at the same rate.
“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year.”
— George Stephanopoulos, opening This Week on ABC News.
62%
A new AP-NORC poll finds that 62% of adults say democracy in the U.S. could be at risk depending on who wins next fall.Majorities of Democrats (72%) and Republicans (55%) feel the same way, but for different reasons.
“What happens next is a critical question for American democracy. What will become of the belief that the 2020 presidential election was in some way illegitimate? Will it melt away along with Mr. Trump’s prospects for winning, and vanish completely when Mr. Biden is inaugurated? Or will it fester, nursed by Republicans in power, and metastasize into something that could be a rallying cry for nationalists for years to come?”
“There are only two possible conclusions from listening to this folly: either the President actually believes what he is saying, in which case he is crazy, or he does not, in which case he is engaged in the most cynical attack on American democracy ever to come from the White House.”
12 years
A new Freedom House report finds “democracy is in retreat around the world” for the 12th year in a row. Most striking: “The United States retreated from its traditional role as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy amid an accelerating decline in American political rights and civil liberties… The United States experienced its sharpest one-year drop since we began doing the survey more than 40 years ago.”
