Do You Think The U.S. Is Still A Democracy? Believe Me, Not Everyone Does

How Ready Are You To Do Anything About It?

In March of 1930, Centrist Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s reliance on emergency decrees from President von Hindenburg to keep the government of the Weimar Republic functioning showed anyone watching that German democracy was already on life support. Brüning and his unpopular Austerity agenda lasted another 2 years. A month before he resigned, the SA and SS were briefly banned— and quickly reinstated, showing the state’s weakness in confronting the Nazis. Germany was sliding inexorably away from democracy when early in 1933 a major step towards dictatorship, the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties, leading to mass arrests of Hitler’s political opponents, particularly Communists and labor leaders. If anyone wanted to still hang onto the possibility that Germany might still a democracy, after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor at the end of January 1933, three months later it was all over with the passage of the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz), a law that effectively gave Hitler the power to rule by decree, bypassing the Reichstag and nullifying any remaining democratic constraints. It marked the legal death of Weimar democracy, allowing Hitler to dismantle the constitutional order under the guise of legality.

Looking for a date for when we lost our democracy? Too far-fetched? Yesterday, Robert Reich wrote “We are watching what we never thought possible— the apparent transformation of our democracy into a dictatorship (or, as Trump has promoted, a monarchy with him as king). The battle of our day is no longer about Democrats versus Republicans or left versus right. The choice right now is democracy or dictatorship. And we're sliding faster than I ever thought possible into the latter. Everyone must choose which side they're on.”

The Polity Project, an organization that ranks and categorizes governments worldwide, has reclassified the United States as a "non-democracy" as of February 2025, downgrading it from its previous status as a democracy. This assessment stems from a series of events that have raised concerns about the concentration of power within the executive branch. Notably, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on July 1, 2024, granted the presidency broad legal immunity, prompting the Polity Project to mark the U.S. as undergoing a regime transition. By January 20, 2025, the U.S. was coded with a Polity score of 0, indicating a shift away from democratic norms. The Polity Project characterizes this shift as an “executive coup,” where decision-making power becomes heavily centralized within the executive branch. This reclassification aligns with broader concerns about democratic backsliding in the U.S., as highlighted in discussions about the potential threats posed by certain political initiatives. 

Even before the 2024 Musk election, Zach Beauchamp warned that “We live in an era where democracies once considered ‘consolidated’— meaning so secure that they couldn’t collapse into authoritarianism— have started to buckle and even collapse. As recently as 2010, Hungary was considered one of the post-Communist world’s great democratic success stories; today, it is now understood to be the European Union’s only autocracy. Hungarian democracy did not die of natural causes. It was murdered by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who seized control of nearly every aspect of state power and twisted it into tools. Not just the obvious things, like Hungary’s public broadcaster and judiciary, but other areas— like its tax administration and the offices regulating higher education. Bit by bit, piece by piece, Orbán— whose support Trump regularly touts— subtly took a democracy and replaced it with something different. In this, he was a trailblazer, creating a blueprint of going from democracy to autocracy that has been followed, to varying degrees of success, by leaders in countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Israel, and Poland. The central question of this election is whether voters will grant former President Donald Trump the power to resume his efforts to place the United States on this list.” Whether they meant to or not, a narrow plurality of American voters did.

“Democratic collapse nowadays,” wrote Beauchamp, “isn’t a matter of abolishing elections and declaring oneself dictator, but rather stealthily hollowing out a democratic system so it’s harder and harder for the opposition to win. This strategy requires full control over the state and the bureaucracy: That means having the right staff in the right places who can use their power to erode democracy’s core functions. Trump and his team have plans to do just that. They have discussed everything from prosecuting local election administrators to using regulatory authority for “retribution against corporations that cross him— all steps that would depend, crucially, on replacing nonpartisan civil servants who would resist such orders with loyalists.”

3 months after the election, the Harvard Kennedy School was worrying about the reclassification by the Polity Project, democratic erosion and how to turn the tide against it. “Building on the project’s classification of the United States as a non-democracy, Steven Levitsky, Professor of Latin American Studies and professor of government at Harvard University, warned that aspects of the Trump administration reflect patterns of competitive authoritarianism, where freely elected officials consolidate power by stacking leadership positions with loyalists. ‘When competitive authoritarianism is executed in a systematic way, as we’ve begun to see in the last month, what it does is tilt the playing field against the opposition and in favor of the incumbent,’ explained Levitsky. Echoing concerns about the country’s trajectory, Cornell William Brooks, Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice at HKS, called this ‘an exceedingly dangerous moment in our republic.’ He added that efforts to erase the country’s unique identity as a multiracial democracy signaled further erosion. Taken together, these dynamics create what Marshall Ganz, Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at HKS, described as a ‘rock-bottom moment.’ He continued, ‘The thing about rock-bottom moments is that you realize that you cannot keep doing what you’ve been doing and expect an outcome that’s any different. Rock-bottom moments mean you must change; you must be open to change, and you must consider where we are.’”  STAT: Someone try explaining that to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.

To emerge from this rock-bottom moment, Ganz emphasized the necessity of coming together with a spirit of hope— without that, progress is impossible. He argued that before people power can be exercised, organizing must be grounded in a clearly defined cause and a set of shared values: “If you’re going to fight, you need to know what you’re fighting for…Those of us who share democratic values know that it’s challenging to bring people to the center of politics in a real way, but that’s what we have to do.” 

Building on Ganz’s assessment, Brooks expanded on the path forward. While Ganz highlighted the immaterial elements necessary for building a foundation for social mobilization, Brooks focused on the practical aspects of organizing, underscoring the need for a broad, diverse coalition of advocates. “In this moment, I want to suggest that we are going to need, more than we certainly have in recent memory, a kind of multivalent, multilingual, multigenerational form of advocacy,” he said. “Which is to say, we have to have advocacy at the grassroots.” 

Drawing on their expertise in nonviolent protest movements as a catalyst for democratic progress, [Kennedy School Dean Erica] Chenoweth situated the country’s fight against anti-democratic forces within the context of America’s deeply fragmented society. They explained that meaningful change will require uniting a diverse array of civic engagement groups under a common cause. Chenoweth described this as a “positive coalition”— one that not only rejects the status quo but also articulates a compelling vision of a future worth fighting for. 

“A positive coalition could hold together and consolidate power after victory by asserting a more positive story about where the country was headed and an ability to cooperate with one another in order to achieve that,” they said. 

Of course, this vision is not without its challenges. Levitsky cautioned that the inherent diversity within such a coalition could make it difficult for leaders to unite around a cohesive, future-oriented agenda. Ganz also pointed to a deeper structural challenge: the decline of civil society. He argued that a culture of individualism has eroded collective democratic engagement, leaving few spaces where people actively practice democracy in their daily lives. “The self-governing organizations are unions and maybe some churches; the vacuum has been filled by philanthropy and by the NGOs …” Ganz said. “When it comes to democracy, it’s not in people’s lived experience. When do they practice democracy?” 

Yet despite these concerns, Chenoweth closed with an uplifting reminder: “There is always hope. People always have agency, knowledge is power, and perhaps most importantly, people can do together what they can’t do alone.”  

Yesterday, we watched the stock markets crashing in real time, thanks in greta part because of Trump’s tariffs. But even more important was a complete loss of confidence in his economic policies, his foreign policy and his and the GOP’s overall leadership. Unfortunately, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are not offering any viable alternatives that rise to the occasion.

As history has shown us, the death of democracy is not a singular event but a process— one that is often overlooked until it is too late. The Weimar Republic didn’t collapse in a single day, and neither did Hungary’s democracy. Each erosion of democratic norms, each consolidation of power, was rationalized as a necessary step for stability, security or national greatness. The US, long considered immune to such backsliding, is proving that no democracy is too old, too established or too “exceptional” to fall into authoritarianism.

The warnings from scholars like Levitsky, Brooks, and Chenoweth offer a hope that there’s a path forward— one that requires mass mobilization, coalition-building and an unwavering commitment to democratic values. But that path is narrowing. As financial markets recoil from the chaos of Trump's governance and international allies lose faith in American leadership, the consequences of inaction grow more severe. If Jeffries, Schumer and other Democratic leaders cannot rise to meet this moment with the urgency it demands, they risk becoming footnotes in the obituary of American democracy. Sorry, my friends, but the question is no longer whether we’re sliding toward autocracy— it’s whether there remains the collective will to stop it.