Indeed, the rate of democratic backsliding is considered to be fast, compared to other countries. Below I include some links and quotes. What I really wanted to say is that the resistance is too mild, and too slow. Also, you know that book “On Tyranny”? Very relevant under the circumstances.
We are sliding towards an illiberal democracy. The phrase, first popularized in the 1990s, took on new urgency in the United States as major figures in Donald Trump’s orbit came to view Viktor Orbán as a leadership role model. As Bill Kristol posted, “ABC’s settlement with Trump feels like it could be an inflection point in the Orbanization of our politics.” To be clear, the United States is not yet an illiberal democracy, but the movement towards it has accelerated in the weeks since the election. What is most disturbing is that Trump has not yet even taken power. https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/we-are-on-our-own/ (2024-12-22)
The scary thing is that I’ve watched a Trump/Musk style takeover of the government in my home country of Hungary a long time ago and it went great for them. Turns out the general population accepted every institution being gutted and stripped in obviously corrupt ways. They were simply distracted by a constant stream of culture war shit which normal people cared more about than institutional change, and those who did look thought “the boys are fixing the system” or “it was corrupt anyway”. https://mas.to/@Techaltar/113943270068786481 (2025-02-04)
In the last few days alone, Trump has smashed past several new milestones. He’s just called his predecessor’s pardons void and vacated. He gave a bitterly partisan speech at the Department of Justice, demanding the prosecution of the media and certain adversaries. He threatened numerous universities with sanctions. He invoked a 227-year-old war measures law during peacetime — for the first time ever — to deport accused gang members without due process. And, most importantly, when that deportation plan wound up in court, he may have — although it’s still in dispute — defied a court order, cracking the ultimate constitutional safeguard. It’s not just the scope of what Trump’s done that has Lindberg envisioning the once-unthinkable: removing the U.S. from the democratic list and shifting it to the second-lowest tier among five, to a so-called electoral autocracy. It’s also the speed. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-democracy-report-1.7486317 (2025-03-18)
By the time we left in late 2004, Moscow had been transformed. People who had happily talked with us at the start were now afraid to return our calls. “Now I have this fear all the time,” one told us at the time. There is a similar chill now in Washington. Every day someone who used to feel free to speak publicly against Mr. Trump says they will no longer let journalists quote them by name for fear of repercussions, both Democrats and Republicans. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/politics/trump-putin-russia.html (2025-02-26)
Yet another report out Thursday from Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based democracy think-tank, said that among free countries, the U.S. joined Bulgaria and Italy in registering the largest declines in political rights and civil liberties last year. “The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid,” said Staffan Lindberg, the V-Dem Institute’s founding director, who spent seven years in the U.S. “It’s the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world.” V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy. More than 4,000 scholars contributed data to the report, which is the largest of its kind. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/20/nx-s1-5754021/trump-democracy-autocracy-dictatorship-reports
And this complementary piece, for no reason whatsoever.
How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days - He used the constitution to shatter the constitution. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-germany-constitution-authoritarianism/681233/
I read this title 5 times before parsing it properly.