Donald Trump’s authoritarian drift in his second term places the country on a par with Hungary or Turkey, according to a ranking by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute
Democratic backsliding is advancing in the developed world. The annual report from Sweden’s V-Dem Institute leaves no room for doubt: almost a quarter of the world experienced democratic backsliding, or a shift towards autocratization, in 2025, and six of the 10 newly regressive countries identified in the research are located in Europe and North America, including G-7 powers such as Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
But the most unsettling conclusion reached by the Swedish institute is that the United States — once a proud beacon of the more or less free world — is no longer a liberal democracy and is now on a par with countries like Hungary or Turkey, thanks to President Donald Trump. Autocracy is also spreading throughout Europe, but its reach extends far beyond the Old Continent: 41% of the world’s population (3.4 billion people) now live in countries where democracy is eroding.
The institute, which belongs to the University of Gothenburg and uses 48 metrics in its evaluation, is one of the most reliable sources when it comes to rating the state of governments around the world, and the conclusion of its 2026 study confirms the worst fears about the authoritarian drift of the U.S. under Trump’s leadership.
Weird how everyone who was told they were overreacting are not being told that anymore.
Let’s be honest, the US was no shining beacon of democracy even before Trump. The system was rotten and everyone knew it. However, those with the power to change it have no incentive to do so. It was basically held up because the poeple in charge had some common decency. At that point it’s just a matter of time before someone came along that didn’t have this basic decency.
I think the people of the UK should take a long, hard look at how the situation has evolved in the US and decide if they want to change their system to avoid having only two parties dominate the political climate. Ironically, being a monarchy means they are probably more resistant to going down the same route, but I suspect the parties are going to get more radical as time goes on and the royals aren’t terribly popular these days.
(Opinion to be taken with a pinch of salt. I am no expert in these things and don’t live in either country; We’ve got our own radicalization and issues with our own democracy.)
I think the people of the UK should take a long, hard look at how the situation has evolved in the US and decide if they want to change their system to avoid having only two parties dominate the political climate.
There are currently 5 parties vying for position here, but your point is still generally true. Hopefully with the rise of smaller parties, we might start to see a move towards a more proportional system, but I’m not holding my breath.
There are currently 5 parties vying for position here
I know you’re not disagreeing, but I find it absolutely hilarious (in a bad way) that UK political parties will put out flyers of who is most likely to win, as a way to convince people to vote for them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zDLxgEquxA0
All while having rejected bringing in preferential voting at a referendum, not even that long ago.
As an Australian, may I say, you royally fucked up on that one. We have issues in our electoral system too, (mostly around lower house electorates being single-member, and not say 3-member to more accurately represent the electorate), but thank Christ we have preferential voting.
As an Australian, may I say, you royally fucked up on that one.
I take exception to that. The law which allowed for the referendum required Royal Assent, but that is the same law which would have allowed for the implementation of preferential voting. It was the statutory repealing of that law where things really went bad.
I would say we statutorily fucked it up.
I think the people of the UK should take a long, hard look at how the situation has evolved
LOL… the same people who voted Brexit. Sure.
the US was no shining beacon of democracy even before Trump
he didnt create that corrupt system, hes just taking advantage of it…
actually he and the other pedo billionaires did help to create the corrupt system who am I kidding?
WWII changed everything about the USA. Everywhere else in the world, manufacturing was bombed to oblivion, the populace unable to rebuild without a coordinated effort from governments and NGOs.
The US became a hub of manufacturing. We exported our culture, and our products, all over the world. Our currency and our language became the standard in business.
Everything since then has been a slow walk backwards, so that the ultrawealthy could exert more control and line their pockets. A return to the “real” American values of exploitation.
The US became a hub of manufacturing. We exported our culture, and our products, all over the world.
only because the rest of the world was bombed to shit. As soon as they rebuilt, they did everything better.
the poeple in charge had some common decency.
The people in charge were scared of the public a little bit. It was not their decency that was stopping them, it was the danger of losing next elections if they took it too far. Bush attacked Iraq and he didn’t lie about the WMDs out of decency. He lied to cover his ass. Lindsey Graham was the same guy he is now back then. He didn’t lose his decency along the way. He realized he can be himself and people will still vote for him.
I find this hard to believe. What is the reasoning for that?
Edit: I read the report. The reasoning seems believable, but the tiers seem to be too narrow. Also the title of the post is a clickbait.
Some may argue that it is imperialistic propaganda, because it doesn’t include concept of people’s democracy.
gestures broadly
He’s making moves like he’s expecting to be around another 50 years when he probably has 10 at the most. I’m way more afraid of who he might be paving the way for.
He could die tomorrow. Pandora’s Box is already open.
For the remainder of our lives we will see copycat politicians who strip more and more of our rights away when they gain power because they all watched and saw and know they can do what Trump did and more without suffering repercussions.
America put up a big sign letting them all know we are too weak to make them pay. They will take advantage. Why wouldn’t they?
No way he has 10 years in him. Motherfucker is mentally gone as is. Weekend at Bernie’s.
I don’t think he is going to last his whole term. He looks like absolute shit, and sounds even worse. Fuck, he makes Biden’s last years look energetic. And Biden was a fucking reanimated corpse.
The DNC made damn sure we wouldn’t have one minute at Bernie’s let alone an entire weekend.
Those red neck scars are an attempt to relieve his dementia with a blood flow stent.
It went from being four weapon manufacturing companies pretending to be a democracy to four weapon manufacturing companies pretending to be a dictatorship.
Here’s a press release from the source org about this:
Here is a link to the report: https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf
All right, everybody needs pitchforks and torches. And we need four horses with four long ropes
Why do you think almost the entire cabinet lives on military bases.
Or, instead of the horses, and hear me out, we just need some green saplings maybe 20 feet tall and some rope in a sort of circle around a spot…
Given that elections are the defining feature of a democracy, I think it would be prudent to wait until after the mid term elections to start proclaiming the demise of American democracy. Granted, the Republicans are trying their best with mass disenfranchisement, but it remains to be seen how effective they will be.
Giggle. We’ve been playing “wait and see” for a decade now.
Elections don’t solve this. We’ve seen that high-level Democrats are no different than high-level Republicans. Biden refused to investigate the Epstein files, he refused to prosecute Trump, and he refused to target gerrymandering/election interference.
There’s no version of this where the old America magically returns. That’s the same logic trap that ushered in this entire mess. There are plenty of MAGA who truly believe that they are shaking up the system and that just one more election will solve everything.
THIS. IS. THE. FUTURE.
We are living in it. The trajectory is set. We didn’t stop militarization of the police when they stepped on our rights. We didn’t stop data collection when we were warned. We didn’t stop gross financial mismanagement, corporate influence, gerrymandering and all the other things that make a democracy work.
We aren’t living in a fascist takeover. That happened years ago. We are living in its aftermath. We are frogs in a simmering pot, watching the bubbles float past us and wondering how to turn off the heat. It doesn’t matter now, the damage is done. The momentum takes control.
But there’s already such a long list of laws and rules he just ignores and seemingly gets away with. It’s madness.
They ALL get away with breaking a long list of laws and rules, that’s what makes the election of Trump possible!
Back in the 1970s, the FBI would bust reps for accepting cash bribes (Abscam). So, the reps made bribery legal with the help of the supreme court. Now Super PACs are the way. Highest bidder wins.
Let’s also not forget all the broken campaign finance election laws that preceded his win. No accountability followed because the winner keeps the spoils
And let’s not forget that THE LOSER of the election still gets a BILLION DOLLARS in their coffers (that we know of).
Imagine what the spoils are for the winner; we’ll never know the extent of it.
We don’t have actual “elections”
We have two private organizations (Ds and Rs) who have through law crushed all possible opposition.
So we get two candidates to chose from, both curated by the billionaire “donors” running each party. This is not a conspiracy, see Super PACs for more.
They won’t cancel the “elections”, there’s absolutely no need.
… Okay no really, who ever in their right mind considered us a “liberal democracy”?
Swedens V-Dem Institute, apparently.
Worldwide, democracy has regressed to its lowest levels since the mid-1970s
I’ve been saying over and over again here, that it’s generally been going backwards since the 70’s. This goes for democracy, respect for human rights and minorities, and the peace movement.
And many people here simply don’t believe it. (I’m guessing younger ones)
Let’s talk about what this really means, though. Why would that happen?
Could it be anything like:
- Because power is a fickle structure by nature and therefore democracy is an unstable system?
- Because technology advanced so fast that it yields control to whomever sits at its forefront?
- Because society chose not to make theoretical laws for technology that had yet been invented?
- Because (e.g., Russian) state propaganda was allowed to become so powerful that it actually destabilized global democracy?
- Because we were naïvely assuming we had a stable democracy, when in fact we never really did — it just hadn’t been under enough stress to show its flaws?
- Because institutional capitalism with monarch style governance is an economic system that necessarily leads to authoritarianism?
- Because the libertarian value tolerance of debate is an ill founded ideology, and we actually need more intolerance (e.g., limitations on free speech)?
- Because social media is not respected by the masses as the enormous medium of control that it wound up being in actuality?
- …
What’s the next big realization here for mankind?
You seem to miss the fact that we lost control of society with both political parties being captured by the oligarchy, unions being infected with the mob and beset by law enforcement, and all other parts of the long game of the business roundtable of 1971 to seize control.
Everything you mention is after the fact. We were disunited, and rallied around controlled opposition.
Yeah but even that doesn’t really get to the root of things. Did that happen because we had not accounted for its possibility when constructing the democracy? Was that always happening? Is oligarchy a naturally occurring problem and foe to democracy?
Why were they able to seize control at all, if we had a function democracy before then? Surely if it were a “functioning democracy,” then their seizure of control would have been democratically acquired — right? Obviously wrong, but why?
Americans doing regime changes, mostly
I mean, sure. But shouldn’t something be said about what that means for democracy? Would it be:
“Democracy only works if you don’t try regime changes in foreign states, otherwise it starts to experience a phenomenon where the democracy withers”
…?
I’m doubtful it’s that simple. If it is, then democracy seems rather unstable in its current form. All it takes is one bad leader to trigger a chain reaction toward failure? Again, I’m doubtful.
There’s got to be a bigger story here.
The rich people are in an exclusive club and collude without meeting because what’s good for one is good for the other. They’ve also been a big driving force for change in the world from consumer based economic models to “supplier” based models. IE themselves.
When you put it that way, it sounds like democracy requires a global effort to continuously thwart such collusion, such wealth, maybe such exclusively? Something… It sounds righteous to me, but also like something that can become equally oppressive in perhaps many different ways.
What you describe is something that I understand to have been the case for most of human history, if not all of it. How do you resolve that issue? And, if that’s really the issue, what do you make of modern democracies?
Democracy grew out of too much power to the rich, though since day one they’ve been thwarting it where they can.
I honestly don’t have real answers for this, I just know of the problem.
We need a second hippie revolution. And I don’t mean the half-assed underground “comebacks” from the late 90s and 2010s, a real movement that actually influences policy.
Hippies did fuck all and then ended up voting for Reagan.
Lol, the hippies didn’t do shit.
Hippies were a CIA OP to distract the left from organising and doing drugs instead.
It’s not just younger ones. I talk to a large group of boomers and they are all in the same boat of “everything is fine, we’ll just vote the next election. We’ve had presidents like this before.”
We’ve had presidents like this before.”
On that they are seriously mistaken, of course there have been bad presidents like Bush, but Trump is a whole new class of bad.
I hope they are right, and that all this can be solved by a simple election, but I’m not betting on it.Yeah I really don’t think so. The damage is already done to democracy. I can believe we used to have a shared common decency. But it’s been rotting for a while now.
Plus boomers aren’t known for actually fixing problems. The things I bring up to them, their responses are always like “well we will figure it out sometime” as they continue doing what they want. So uhhh… I don’t have a lot of confidence.
always has been
I can remember when lots of the reactionary centrists and not a few on the left, oh, and of course, the right wing blow-hards, were playing Tone Police for everyone in 2016, and 2020 and again in 2024: lecturing us all about how uncivil it all was to be talking about fascism in relation to conservatives.
I wonder where all the WELLACKTUALLY guys are now.
lecturing us
Also about not understanding the law system, that it takes time and Trump was done. Really condescending shit. I noticed just before I got permabanned from Reddit that they were disappearing or gone.
not a few on the left,
Nah, was a lot actually. I know a lot of people that were really upset after the election and after the first few months. Then it stopped being a problem. “You’re overreacting.” “Don’t think about it.” “We’ll be fine next election.”
We would have been if we could get rid of the controlled opposition. But you all still trust the establishment democrats somehow.
A lot of the predictions and fears did not come true during Trump‘s first presidency.
Not for lack of trying on the administration’s part.
Because the fascists didn’t think they would win in 2016 and were unprepared.
In 2025 they had a plan
The pedofile class doesn’t want democracy
As far as I’m concerned, everyone who is a billionaire has to prove they had nothing to do with Epstein or pedophilia in general.
I feel like that’s reasonable but billionaires should automatically be abolished also
Let them try to get by on $999,999,999.99
If they pinch their pennies, show some restraint on…what was it? Avocado toast, Netflix subscriptions, smart phones, and big screen TVs, they just might get by on a mere penny less than one billion…
Nah, that’s still too much money. I know you’re being sarcastic but realistically it’d be way under 100 million.
I dream of a world where anything above 10 million net worth need to be reinvested or donated. Like, you can gift your kids until you and them and worth ten mil each, and their kids and whatnot, but it would limit wealth accumulation even with a hundred family members. Something like that anyway.
That’s more reasonable, they still have a lot of money but cannot just buy politicians left and right.
The sooner everyone recognizes this, the better
