Our Focus

A daily survey of political scientists coming up with a score indicating the severity of the current threat to democracy.

230 organizations working together to defend democracy.

Humorous and well-informed analysis of US politics, updated with a surprising amount of material every day.

Dozens of items of political news every day, from a left-leaning perspective.

Sam Wang's analysis of gerrymandering.

An advocacy organization in Washington, focused primarily on research and legal challenges to anti-democratic initiatives.

The Polity Index is allegedly the index favored by the CIA to evaluate how close nations are to civil war, and probably not coincidentally, is located close to the CIA in Vienna, Virginia. Their 2020 report stated that the US has dropped below the "democracy threshold" and is now considered an "anocracy" (a flawed democracy) with a high risk of impending political instability. Their traditional funding from the US government was terminated by the Trump administration in Feb of 2020.

Perhaps the most widely known evaluation of world governments, this index put out by the Economist magazine notes that scores around the world declined in 2020 due to COVID. They place the US 22nd among the 38 OECD nations, characterizing it as a "flawed democracy."

The Democracy Matrix comes from the University of Wurzburg. They consider the US to be a "Deficient Democracy", ranking it 20th among the 38 OECD nations. Interestingly, they have ranked the world's countries according to their democratic processes all the way back to 1900.

Freedom House is largely funded by the US government, so it is especially notable that in their most recent report on "Global Freedom", they place the US at 31st among the 38 OECD nations -- the lowest of any major global evaluation.

They support democracy around the world, and their most recent report says "the world is becoming more authoritarian." Among the 38 nations in the OECD "rich nations club", they place the US at 26th

V-Dem is a consortium of 50 social scientists from around the world, coordinated at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. They currently rank the US at 29th among the OECD nations, and consider it a case of "significant and substantial autocratization."

Book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, B/D/W/Y 2018 - describes how the US is basically the poster child for demonstrating exactly how democracies die.

Daily substack emails that often include updates on the degrading of American democacy.

Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century, by Timothy Snyder. A very quick and terrifying reading!