Forget the democrats for a moment, what about people who love democracy?
Over to the guardian...
----
The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its
annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey.
“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.
Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in
Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”.
Advertisement
“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.
US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced
de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.
Sweden’s V-Dem Institute warns that the US is no longer a liberal democracy. And autocracy is creeping across Europe too, says writer Martin Gelin
www.theguardian.com