US democratic backsliding spills over.

Aprolonged global democratic recession has, in recent years, morphed into something even more troubling: the “third reverse wave” of democratic breakdowns that the political scientist Samuel Huntington warned could follow the remarkable burst of “third wave” democratic progress in the 1980s and the 1990s. Every year for the past 15 years, according to Freedom House, significantly more countries have seen declines in political rights and civil liberties than have seen gains. But since 2015, that already ominous trend has turned sharply worse: 2015–19 was the first five-year period since the beginning of the third wave in 1974 when more countries abandoned democracy—twelve—than transitioned to it—seven. And the trend continues. Illiberal populist leaders are degrading democracy in countries including Brazil, India, Mexico, and Poland, and creeping authoritarianism has already moved Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and Venezuela out of the category of democracies altogether. In Georgia, the dominance of the Georgian Dream Party has led to the steady decline of electoral processes and a breakdown in the rule of law. In Myanmar, the military overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, ending an experiment in partial democracy. In El Salvador, president Nayib Bukele staged an executive coup by removing the attorney general and Supreme Court justices who were obstacles to his consolidation of power. In Peru, democracy hangs from a thread as the right-wing autocrat Keiko Fujimori advances vague claims of election fraud in a bid to overturn her narrow electoral defeat to left-wing opponent Pedro Castillo. What is especially striking about this last case is that Fujimori’s gambit bears a grim resemblance to the lie perpetuated by former U.S. President Donald Trump and his followers about the 2020 presidential election. This is no coincidence. As the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has observed, fictitious claims of fraud and “stop the steal” tactics are becoming a common means by which autocratic populists try to obstruct democracy. Such tactics have long been a source of instability in countries struggling to develop democracy. But the fact that the most recent iteration of the antidemocrat’s playbook draws heavily on precedents in the world’s most important and powerful democracy marks the start of a dangerous new era. Today, the United States confronts a growing antidemocratic movement, not just from the ranks of fringe extremists but also from a substantial group of officeholders—a movement that is challenging the very foundations of electoral democracy. Should this effort succeed, the United States could become the first ever advanced industrial democracy to fail—that is, to no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections as political scientists and other scholars of democracy define them. The failure of American democracy would be catastrophic not only for the United States; it would also have profound global consequences at a time when freedom and democracy are already under siege. As Huntington noted, the diffusion of democratic movements and ideas from one country to another has helped drive positive democratic change. Antidemocratic norms and practices can spread in a similar fashion—especially when they emanate from powerful countries. That is why the acceleration of a democratic recession into a democratic depression happened largely on Trump’s watch. And it is why no development would more gravely damage the global democratic cause than the democratic backsliding of its most important champion.