As the United States slides toward competitive authoritarianism, the economic and social costs mount—but history suggests democracy’s erosion is not inevitable
On a frigid January morning in 2025, Sarah Chen stood outside a shuttered community center in suburban Pennsylvania, watching workers remove voting machines through heavy doors. The center had served as her neighborhood’s polling place for two decades. Now, citing budget constraints, county officials had consolidated five precincts into one location—seven miles away, accessible only by car. “My neighbors who don’t drive? The elderly couple next door? They just lost their vote,” she told a local reporter, her breath forming clouds in the winter air.
Sarah’s story is one fragment of a larger mosaic: America’s quiet slide toward what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, where democratic institutions persist in form but hollow out in function. This isn’t a sudden coup or tanks in the streets. It’s the slow constriction of civic space, the gradual delegitimization of electoral integrity, the methodical concentration of executive power—death by a thousand procedural cuts.
The data tells a sobering story. The Century Foundation’s Democracy Meter recorded a precipitous 28% decline in American democratic health, dropping to 57 out of 100 in 2025. Freedom House’s latest assessment scored the United States at 84 out of 100, marking notable erosion in political rights and civil liberties. Meanwhile, the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) flagged America among nations experiencing autocratization after documenting 25 consecutive years of global democratic backsliding.
But here’s the paradox that should give us pause: democratic decline, while accelerating, is neither uniform nor irreversible. Understanding what drives authoritarianism’s price tag—and what can reverse it—requires looking beyond partisan scorekeeping to the structural forces reshaping American governance.
The Anatomy of Democratic Erosion
The pathway to competitive authoritarianism doesn’t require abolishing elections. It requires making them progressively less consequential while maintaining their theatrical legitimacy.
Executive overreach stands as the primary driver. Presidential power has metastasized across administrations of both parties, yet the Trump era marked a qualitative shift. Executive orders circumventing legislative processes, Cabinet appointments bypassing Senate confirmation through “acting” designations, emergency declarations untethered to genuine crises—these tactics normalized unilateral governance. Research from the Brookings Institution documents how executive aggrandizement accelerated between 2017 and 2025, with each boundary crossed becoming the new baseline rather than an aberration.
Institutional capture follows closely behind. When courts, electoral commissions, and oversight bodies become extensions of partisan power rather than neutral arbiters, democratic guardrails crumble. The systematic appointments of ideologically aligned judges, the politicization of the Justice Department, the targeting of inspectors general who investigate executive wrongdoing—these aren’t bugs in the system but features of competitive authoritarian governance.
Information warfare completes the triad. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey revealed widespread dissatisfaction with American democracy, but more troubling was the fragmentation of shared reality. When citizens cannot agree on basic facts—election outcomes, public health data, economic statistics—democratic deliberation becomes impossible. The proliferation of state-sponsored disinformation, the delegitimization of independent media, and the weaponization of “fake news” accusations create what scholars term “epistemic closure,” where evidence ceases to persuade.
Counting the Costs: Democracy’s Balance Sheet
The price of authoritarianism extends far beyond abstract principles. It exacts concrete economic and social tolls that ripple through society.
Economic Hemorrhaging
Competitive authoritarian systems breed corruption and cronyism, distorting markets and stifling innovation. The correlation between democratic backsliding and economic underperformance isn’t coincidental—it’s structural.
Corruption Tax: When political connections matter more than competitive advantage, resources flow to the connected rather than the productive. Research analyzing global patterns shows autocratizing nations experience GDP growth rates approximately 2-3 percentage points lower than stable democracies over ten-year periods, as rent-seeking displaces entrepreneurship.
Inequality Acceleration: Authoritarian drift concentrates wealth alongside power. Tax policies favoring elites, weakened labor protections, and reduced social spending compound existing disparities. The United States already leads developed nations in wealth inequality; democratic erosion widens this chasm further.
Capital Flight: Sophisticated investors recognize that property rights and contracts rest ultimately on rule of law. As democratic norms erode, so does confidence in long-term institutional stability. Foreign direct investment becomes conditional, innovation ecosystems fragment, and brain drain accelerates as talented individuals seek more stable polities.
| Democracy Indicator | 2020 Score | 2025 Score | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index (US) | 0.72 | 0.61 | -15.3% |
| Freedom House Score | 86/100 | 84/100 | -2.3% |
| Century Foundation Democracy Meter | 79/100 | 57/100 | -27.8% |
Sources: V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2025, Freedom House 2025, The Century Foundation
Social Fracturing
Democratic decline corrodes social capital—the networks of trust and reciprocity that enable collective action. When citizens view political opponents not as adversaries but as existential threats, the social fabric tears.
Polarization Spiral: Competitive authoritarianism thrives on division. By framing every issue as zero-sum tribal warfare, it makes compromise appear as betrayal rather than democratic necessity. Communities fragment, families splinter over politics, and the civic commons—spaces where citizens engage across difference—disappear.
Minority Vulnerability: Historically, authoritarianism’s first casualties are vulnerable minorities. Voting restrictions disproportionately affect communities of color, immigrant populations face heightened surveillance and deportation, LGBTQ+ rights become negotiable rather than fundamental. The Human Rights Watch World Report 2026 documents systematic assaults on civil liberties, particularly affecting marginalized groups.
Expatriate Exodus: Anecdotally, immigration attorneys report surging interest in second passports and foreign residency among Americans—not just the wealthy hedging bets, but families seeking stability. While comprehensive data remains elusive, the trend reflects eroding confidence in American exceptionalism and institutional durability.
What Reverses the Slide?
If the diagnosis is grim, the prognosis need not be fatalistic. Democratic backsliding, while serious, responds to intervention. History offers instructive precedents.
Electoral Accountability
Competitive authoritarian systems maintain elections precisely because elites believe they can manage outcomes. But elections remain potential inflection points—moments when mobilized citizens can impose accountability.
Turnout Matters: The 2018 midterms demonstrated how elevated civic participation constrains executive overreach. Record turnout flipped congressional control, enabling oversight and investigation. While authoritarians adapt by restricting ballot access, the fundamental math remains: broad-based mobilization overwhelms suppression attempts.
Down-Ballot Dynamics: Democracy doesn’t solely reside in presidential contests. State legislatures drawing district maps, secretaries of state overseeing elections, local judges interpreting voting rights—these positions determine whether democratic infrastructure survives. Focus on these races can rebuild guardrails from the ground up.
Civil Society Resistance
Between government and individual sits civil society—the constellation of independent organizations, professional associations, religious institutions, and advocacy groups that can check power.
Institutional Defense: When professional norms erode, professional associations matter. When journalists face intimidation, press freedom organizations mobilize. When scientists encounter political interference, scientific societies object. These intermediate institutions create friction that slows authoritarian momentum.
Grassroots Mobilization: Sustainable resistance requires more than episodic protests. It demands durable organizations capable of long-term strategic campaigns. The civil rights movement succeeded not through spontaneous anger but through disciplined organizing, legal strategizing, and coalition building. Contemporary movements must emulate this strategic patience.
Judicial Resilience
Even compromised courts can surprise. Judicial norms, while weakened, retain some independent force. Trump-appointed judges ruled against numerous election fraud claims in 2020, not from partisan defection but from professional commitments to evidence and procedure.
Litigation as Resistance: Strategic lawsuits slow authoritarian encroachment by imposing procedural costs and creating public records. While courts may ultimately defer to power, the litigation process generates discovery, expert testimony, and judicial reasoning that can embarrass executive overreach.
Norm Enforcement Through Jurisprudence: Each time a court invalidates an unconstitutional executive action, it reinforces the principle that law constrains power. These victories, however modest, prevent the normalization of illegality.
International Pressure
Democracies abroad have stakes in American democratic health. The United States anchors the liberal international order; its deterioration destabilizes global governance.
Diplomatic Consequences: European allies increasingly condition cooperation on democratic standards. When America lectures others about human rights while violating them domestically, credibility evaporates and geopolitical influence wanes. This reputational cost imposes real constraints on authoritarian drift.
Economic Conditionality: Trade agreements, security partnerships, and financial integration create leverage points. While crude sanctions prove counterproductive, calibrated responses—conditioning cooperation on democratic commitments—can alter cost-benefit calculations.
The Path Forward: Reason for Cautious Optimism
Standing in that Pennsylvania parking lot, Sarah Chen wasn’t naive about the challenges. But she wasn’t resigned either. “We’re organizing carpools,” she explained. “And we’re running someone for county commissioner who’ll reopen polling places.”
This is how democratic decline reverses: not through heroic individuals but through ordinary citizens making incremental choices to resist erosion. History suggests democracies die not from single catastrophic blows but from accumulated small surrenders—which means each small refusal to surrender matters.
The economic costs of American authoritarianism—corruption, inequality, capital flight—create constituencies for reform even among elites who initially benefited. When business leaders recognize that cronyism stifles innovation, when investors understand that rule of law underpins prosperity, when middle-class families feel economic precarity intensifying, the coalition for democratic renewal expands beyond ideological true believers.
The United States has weathered democratic crises before: the Civil War, Jim Crow apartheid, McCarthyism, Watergate. Each time, renewal required confronting ugly truths, mobilizing broad coalitions, and rebuilding damaged institutions. The current crisis is serious but not unprecedented.
What distinguishes successful democratic renewals from failures? Three factors recur: elite fragmentation (when ruling coalitions fracture, creating space for reform), sustained mobilization (maintaining pressure beyond initial enthusiasm), and institutional entrepreneurs (reformers who occupy positions enabling structural change).
All three exist in contemporary America. Republican officials openly criticize authoritarian tendencies, civil society organizations sustain resistance campaigns, and state-level officials implement democratic innovations like ranked-choice voting and automatic voter registration.
The question isn’t whether reversal is possible—it demonstrably is. The question is whether enough Americans recognize the stakes, sustain the effort, and make the necessary sacrifices. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport or a permanent inheritance. It’s a practice requiring constant renewal.
Sarah Chen understands this intuitively. As workers loaded the last voting machine onto the truck, she pulled out her phone and started texting neighbors. The polling place might be gone, but the democratic impulse—the stubborn insistence that citizens should choose their government rather than the reverse—endures.
That impulse, multiplied across millions of small acts of civic courage, is what reverses democratic decline. The price of authoritarianism is high, but the cost of surrender is higher still.
Democracy’s fate isn’t written in stars or algorithms—it’s written in the choices citizens make when institutions fail them. The American experiment faces its gravest test in generations, but experiments can still surprise us with their resilience.
