It’s been a bad few years for democracy around the world.
This is an excerpt from the newsletter for The Weeds. To sign up for a weekly dive into policy and its effects on people, click here. It’s been a bad few years for democracy around the world — so bad that Freedom House, which tracks the health of the world’s democracies, says that we’re in a “long democratic recession.” That recession deepened last year, Freedom House concluded in its 2021 report. While democracy improved in 28 countries, it declined in 73 — the biggest gap in democracy’s 15-year slide so far. And the world’s two biggest democracies, the US and India, were among those that declined. Some of the global slide was driven by governmental overreach in response to the pandemic. But that wasn’t the whole explanation. In the US, former President Donald Trump questioned legitimate election results, leading to an attempted coup at the Capitol. And in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies continued a crackdown on critics. “With India’s decline to Partly Free, less than 20 percent of the world’s population now lives in a Free country, the smallest proportion since 1995,” Freedom House found. (The US still qualifies as “free,” but less so than before.) Autocratic regimes, particularly powerful nations like China and Russia, are making things worse. These countries have built a network of sorts — what Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic dubbed “Autocracy Inc.” — that enables and supports further anti-democratic regression. Through this support group, these nations’ leaders can cement their power and wealth — at the expense of their own citizens — even as much of the world criticizes what they’re doing. Consider Turkey. Once a serious candidate for European Union membership, the country has in recent years moved in an authoritarian direction. In 2009, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, called China’s repression of Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group, a “genocide.
