Today Freedom House delivered its report on 50 years of political rights and civil liberties around the world. The United States managed to avoid another year of decline, but has still fallen precipitously over the past decade:
Currently the United States is rated just above Poland and just below Mongolia.
At the risk of being a homer, this seems . . . not right to me. Have we really gone from 93 to 83 on the freedom scale in the past decade? Or, perhaps to put it more accurately, have we really gone from 7 to 17 on the autocracy scale? Our propensity for autocracy has more than doubled?
Maybe so! But even with all the crap going on these days in the Republican Party, Fox News, and the Supreme Court, I have my doubts about this.
Without a definition of "autocracy score", that is just babbling.
The link odesn't have the definition.
Yes it does have a definition. There are a number of criteria assigned numeric values and the overall rating is the sum. Of course the scores on the individual criteria can't be perfectly objective. To find out what happened to the US, look at these individual criteria to see when and how it lost points. I dived down a couple of layers without finding these scores, but someone more interested might find them.
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I went and looked at the report, and found the US score of 83 was 50 (civil liberties) + 33 (political rights). And there's a per-country report: https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-world/2023
If you read that report, it's clear that the places where the US got pointed deducted, are places where really do have problems. And frankly, anybody looking at our country from 2012 would be shocked that we came *this close* to becoming a dictatorship.
Yes, our country is fighting back. But it ain't over, and it wasn't supposed to be a fight -- these matters were supposed to have been settled.
I'm also reminded of Barbara F. Walter's book on civil wars, where points out that we're slowly becoming not-a-democracy.
This report seems pretty accurate.
KD: "have we really gone from 7 to 17 on the autocracy scale? Our propensity for autocracy has more than doubled?"
Can you even doubt this? Really? After we just spent 4yr ruled by TFG ? After Dobbs? And "don't say gay"? And the ginning up of trans panic? HALF our political elite are completely in the tank for dictatorship, my friend. Half of them.
Easily 40% of the country is in the tank for it. Easily.
Yeah: we've definitely more than doubled our autocracy score in the last 10yr.
Read Barbara Walter's book on civil wars. And marvel that her "terrifying scenario" (at the end of the book) is actually a best-case outcome. Read the book.
P.S. I'm not giving anything away by what I wrote about the end of her book. Seriously, it's worth reading, and her "chilling predictions for the future" .... if that's all we get, I'll count us lucky.
Kevin's blog is one day after another of data, data, data, data, with an assumption, sometimes stated, that he can't believe people aren't believing the data.
Then a study comes out that doesn't match his priors: "I have my doubts."
No better, no worse than the average guy.
I haven't looked at the study and don't know how reliable it is. How to quantify autocracy requires judgment, as most studies do, but at first glance the lower score seems about right to me. The loss of freedom over the past 10 years is undeniable.
I think its a little harsh on the USA. We are rated 83, around the same as Romania and Poland. Most of the usual democratic suspects are 90+, including Italy. Things HAVE gotten worse in the past decade, it's true, and I did not study their methodology, but this one fails the smell test to me.
You're also a cis white male. (So am I.)
The country is significantly less free for people who aren't cis white males than it was 10 years ago.
Not if you are a Democrat who gets gerrymandered into a deep red district. After the NC Supreme Court finally threw out the gerrymandered map and had a new map drawn up and now for the first time in three decades I have a Democrat as a representative. Unfortunately our Supreme Court is now dominated by Republicans and that is almost certainly going to change before the next Congressional election. And if you are a woman who can’t get an abortion it doen’s matter if you are white or heterosexual. Those of us in red states are deeply affected by the increasing authoritarianism in our country.
Yes, that's true too. The cis white male part is merely the most obvious example for why this number would "feel off" to KD in particular.
I know I've certainly felt less free/safe in general, particularly when I travel to Iowa or the boonies of West Virginia. I can "pass", especially since I'm driving my old truck in WV, but it's not a comfortable place to be with all the social cues.
Well, there was the Oberkfell decision in 2015 and the widespread acceptance of gay marriage by even most Republicans. And while they are not where they should be, there is more support for trans rights than ever before.
It is not exactly a uniformly bleak hellscape here...
I agree. I am wondering what rights the trans community actually had 10 years ago that it no longer has. Not getting 100% of what the most active advocates want in all states is not the same as backsliding into fascism. Yes there is a major reactionary movement afoot but they are mostly engaged in symbolic actions and grandstanding for the rubes.
The attempted coup in 2020 was really the only serious autocracy phenomenon I can think of. And yeah that was bad. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
Couldn't agree more.
"I am wondering what rights the trans community actually had 10 years ago that it no longer has."
They may not have any more rights (don't know either way), but they definitely have a lot more persecution and flat out criminalization of them as a group of people.
"The attempted coup in 2020 was really the only serious autocracy phenomenon I can think of. "
The Supreme Court getting rid of decades old precedent which eliminated rights for women. Attempts, and successes at limiting the voting of minorities including the gutting of the voting rights act. An entire political party that actively tires to govern as a dictatorship at all levels of government. The 2020 coup is the most blatant example, but it is far from the only one.
I disagree about mostly engaged in symbolic actions. In the states where the reactionaries have had a real impact, and they aren't few (especially when counted by total population - Florida and Texas are huge), it has a huge impact on lots of people who are more persecuted than they were before.
A right-wing theocracy rules not just the Supreme Court, but has basically total rule over a significant portion of the country's population (25%? 30%? 40%?).
Who is persecuted in Florida? As a Floridian, this is news to me.
Literally any business that doesn’t kowtow to the whims of DeSantis.
There's also a lot more hostility - at least openly.
I agree that statutorily/judicially there is that one exception. That's pretty much all I can think of though.
How so?
The Supreme Court alone puts us substantially higher. Few true democracies have an unelected, unvetoable super legislature. Plus all of the one-party mini-theocracies in the south? Surprising we’re not lower on the democracy scale.
Kevin’s such a Pollyanna on this issue. If he was a teenage girl in Tennessee he wouldn’t think this was a true democracy.
He lives in California so he isn’t experiencing the full force of what is happening in red states like mine.
I just read this piece on what's going on in Tennessee this week.
https://newrepublic.com/feeds/168326/ticker
TN, where I have family, seems pretty far down the road to autocracy.
I'm happy to be in California but that's no reason not to see what's happening in the country. We'll be lucky to escape the worst, but we are now so far from the country we grew up in, it's shocking.
Having looked at the areas where we lost points, it does seem about right.
The undemocratic nature of the Electoral College has had much more practical impact in recent years, and the lack of interest in fixing it is damning. Jan 6 was really a watershed moment, and while we survived it, the size of the faction that is OK with it is a warning sign.
In many states we've seen pretty significant gerrymandering and legislation that removes rights/appears unconstitutional. The refusal to let Obama put a justice on the Supreme court is a very worrying sign, as a are the very partisan rulings of lower courts.
Finally, right-wing news has only gotten worse in the last 10 years. Social media algorithms are better than they were in 2016, but it is still worse than 2012.
You told us that the threat to American Democracy was overstated and that we would revert back to the norm.
Have you changed your mind?
Kevin, you’re not working. You have to consider that the vast majority of Americans spend their time in a place on which they are economically dependent to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves and their families, but enjoy no substantive rights.