https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/03/democracy-declining-freedom-house-report/
This year’s survey marked the 15th consecutive year of global democratic backsliding — “a long democratic recession,” in the organization’s words, that is “deepening.” 3/4 of the people on earth live in countries where freedom is declining. That’s one of the darker takeaways in an annual report, Freedom House grades individual countries on 25 indicators that evaluate the health of a given nation’s democracy, if there even is one.The cumulative score then enables the organization, which has been in operation since 1941, to rank a given country as “Free,” “Partly Free,” or “Not Free”. Of the 195 independent countries evaluated, 73 saw aggregate score declines and only 28 saw growth.
54 countries are now labeled “Not Free,” or about 38 percent of the world’s population, the highest share since 2005That margin is the widest of its kind in the past decade and a half.. Less than 20 percent of the world’s population lives in countries now classified as “Free.” The most dramatic decline in the Freedom House rankings belonged to the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan, where an electoral fiasco in October led to mass protests, the annulment of parliament and the de facto takeover of the country by populist nationalist Sadyr Japarov, who is now directing the former Soviet republic in the authoritarian direction of its neighbors. Freedom House judged Kyrgyzstan to be “Not Free.”
As in previous years, major pro-democracy protests rocked various parts of the world. But from places like Algeria to Belarus to Hong Kong, “regimes that protests had taken by surprise … regained their footing, arresting and prosecuting demonstrators, passing newly restrictive laws, and in some cases resorting to brutal crackdowns, for which they faced few international repercussions.” Of the 39 countries and territories that experienced pro-democracy protests in 2019, 23 saw their scores in decline the following year.
If this results in America no longer declaring itself as the “leader of the free world” again, something will have been achieved. No universal health care, child care, lousy minimum wage. In all fairness, it’s not a situation that you can blame on one person or one side in politics. There’s a lot of blame and complicity to go around and it’s hard to look at one’s own team and say that they can do a lot better. How long until the United States is considered only “partly free?” With the way the trend is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was relatively soon.