Democratic Backsliding

Previous posts have discussed authoritarian moves by the executive branch.

V-Dem  Institute:

Democratic backsliding is now happening in well-established democracies. Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed, and media and journalists are increasingly targeted across the world. This, and more, is reported in the latest Democracy Report from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg.

Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg.

“The fact that many populous and economically powerful countries are autocratizing is especially worrying. Several of these countries have the economic and political weight to reshape international organizations, norms, and trade, effectively reshaping the global order. I think we are already seeing the effect of that,” says Staffan I Lindberg.
Three major trends in democratic backsliding

The report finds three clear patterns in the current trend of democratic backsliding. The first one is the democratic backsliding in some traditionally stable democracies; the second is significant reversals and often breakdown of democracy in countries that successfully democratized during the late 20th and early 21st centuries; and thirdly, the deepening of autocracy in already autocratic states.

Freedom of Expression, a core aspect of democracy, shows the most drastic global decline, and is the most common target among autocratizing leaders over the past 25 years.

“The second most common target are the liberal aspects of democracy, like rule of law, and checks and balances that prevent the abuse of powers, which are deteriorating in a worrying number of countries. For example, rule of law is deteriorating in 22 countries, including the USA,” says Staffan I Lindberg.
Democracy in the USA deteriorating at unprecedented scale and speed

The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times. Within only one year, the USA’s score on the V-Dem Liberal Democracy index has declined by 24 percent, while its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.

The liberal aspects of democracy show the largest decline in the U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term can be summarized as a rapid concentration of powers in the presidency, according to the report.

“The current U.S. administration has been undercutting institutionalized checks and balances, politicizing civil service and oversight bodies, and intimidating the judiciary, alongside attacks on the press, academia, civil liberties, and dissenting voices ”says Staffan I Lindberg.

Since election specific indicators are only evaluated during national election years, there has not been a change in those indicators in 2025 for the U.S.

“The 2026 American midterm elections will be a critical test for the quality of elections, and democracy, in the United States. If election indicators also decline, the U.S. will fall even further,” says Staffan I Lindberg.
The democratizers

On a more positive note, the report shows that 18 nations worldwide (10 percent) are currently democratizing, with large countries such as Brazil and Poland continuing their democratization processes. In the majority of these countries, media freedom is improved. Botswana, Guatemala, and Mauritius are the three new democratizing countries identified in the 2025 data.



Download the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026: “Unraveling the Democratic Era?”

Contact Lead author: Professor Staffan I. Lindberg, sil@v-dem.net.

Troubled Public Service

 Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

From the Partnership for Public Service:

In 2025, the Trump administration took direct aim at our nation’s professional civil servants through numerous legally contested workforce reductions, haphazard agency restructuring efforts, the unilateral cancellation of government funding without approval from Congress and the weaponization of some federal agencies. This assault on federal civil servants and our national government has resulted in a demoralized and less engaged workforce that has made our country less safe, unhealthier and less prosperous. And when employee engagement suffers, as it has during this past year, our government’s ability to provide essential services to the public declines.

Last August, the Office of Personnel Management canceled the administration of its annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, an instrument that has measured organizational performance across four administrations, including the first term of President Donald Trump, and fulfilled a legal requirement that agencies survey their workforces and make the data public. Consequently, government leaders have been lacking an essential tool that ensures they are effectively managing their workforce to meet the needs of the public.

As a result of this decision, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service administered its proprietary Public Service Viewpoint Survey to capture the impact of the administration’s actions on government performance and to continue our tradition of holding leaders accountable for improving their workplaces through programming like the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government®.

Unfortunately, the data is clear: The Trump administration has received a failing grade on its management of our government from those who serve our country—the federal workforce.

Our survey data and accompanying anonymous focus groups with federal employees provide stories and experiences of a workforce that has been systemically harassed as well as impeded from providing essential services to the public during the first year of the second Trump administration.

While the results of this survey are not directly comparable with the Office of Personnel Management’s annual FEVS, it contains similar questions and presents the best data source available about the state of federal employee engagement and the impact that it has on essential services for the public. The survey results represent the perspectives of 11,083 employees from across government. To ensure the results are valid and as representative as possible of the opinions of the workforce, we modeled our eligibility requirements and approach to response weighting based on the methodology of the 2024 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

RFK Stacks Vaccine Panel: Judge Smacks Him Down

Judge Brian E. Murphy: ORDER entered. MEMORANDUM AND ORDER on Plaintiffs' Motion for Preliminary Injunction. Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief is GRANTED in part.(i) The Court STAYS the January 2026 Memo revising the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 705. (ii) The Court STAYS the appointments of the thirteen ACIP members appointed on June 11, 2025, September 11, 2025, and January 13, 2026. (iii) The Court further STAYS all votes taken by the now-stayed ACIP.(MBM) (Entered: 03/16/2026)

Federal District Judge Brian Murphy:

“Science,” like law, “is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge.”  Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 29 (1997).  History is littered with once-universal truths that have since come under scrutiny.  Nevertheless, science is still “the best we have.”  Id.1   

“Procedure is to law what scientific method is to science.”  In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 21 (1967) (cleaned up).  Although sometimes seemingly tedious, “the procedural rules which have been fashioned from the generality of due process are our best instruments for the distillation and evaluation of essential facts from the conflicting welter of data that life and our adversary methods present.”  Id. 

For our public health, Congress and the Executive have built—over decades—an apparatus that marries the rigors of science with the execution and force of the United States government. One extraordinary product of that apparatus has been the eradication and reduction of certain communicable diseases through the development and use of vaccines.  In the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), “[v]accines are one of the greatest achievements of biomedical science and public health.”2  Since the rise of vaccine development and usage in the early- to mid-1900s, “[t]he United States of America [has been] one of the pioneering nations to conceptualize and implement a robust immunization system that helped the nation tackle major epidemics.”3 

Since its founding in 1964, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (“ACIP”) has aided this endeavor by providing expert guidance on the clinical use of vaccines.4  The Department of Health and Humans Services (“HHS”), which indirectly oversees ACIP, formalized ACIP’s non-partisan, science-backed nature through ACIP’s governance documents.5  And Congress has, in turn, recognized the importance and value of having such independent experts involved in setting our national public health agenda by cementing ACIP’s role in the CDC’s issuance of immunization schedules, which—among other things—determines which vaccines are available to patients through insurers and government healthcare programs.6  This is all to say that there is a method to how these decisions historically have been made—a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements. 

Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.  First, the Government bypassed ACIP to change the immunization schedules, which is both a technical, procedural failure itself and a strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.  Second, the Government removed all duly appointed members of ACIP and summarily replaced them without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades. Again, this procedural failure highlights the very reasons why procedures exist and raises a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law. 

Today, faced with Plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary relief, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the reconstitution of ACIP and the January 2026 changes to the childhood immunization schedule violate the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”).  For the reasons stated below, the Court will grant Plaintiffs’ motion in part.  

Leftward Trend in Social Science Research?

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Manzi, J. The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024. Theor Soc 55, 25 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-026-09690-2

This study analyzes approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 to estimate the long-run ideological orientation of disciplinary research output. Large language models (LLMs) were applied to each abstract using a fixed 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum, enabling consistent coding across six decades. Five key findings emerged. First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024. Third, policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not. Fourth, disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity Fifth, sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time. Robustness checks using a wide assortment of alternative datasets and analytical methodologies indicated that these findings were unlikely to be artifacts of idiosyncratic assumptions. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the capacity of LLM-based text classification to deliver reliable, large-scale ideological measurement over time, a task previously impractical with human coding alone. Taken together, the analysis provides the first systematic, cross-disciplinary evidence of the long-run political orientation of anglophone social science scholarship, revealing both the persistence and the intensification of its leftward tendencies, particularly in sociocultural domains.

Huge caveat, from the article:In this study, ideology was operationalized as the relative positioning of a given text along a left–right spectrum of U.S. political thought. This includes economic and sociocultural dimensions, each characterized by their association with recognizable ideological actors and institutions. To ensure interpretive consistency over a 65-year period (1960 to 2024), political stance was evaluated against a fixed 2025 reference frame, derived from contemporary U.S. political categories.

This approach involved trade-offs. Using a static ideological scale, anchored to notions such as the 2025 political positions of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, or the Heritage Foundation, ensured that the LLM’s judgments were grounded in stable, well-defined anchor points. It avoided the problem of ideological drift, in which the meaning of ‘left’ or ‘right’ might evolve over time due to shifting partisan alignments or cultural contexts. However, this came at the cost of temporal anachronism. Texts written in earlier decades may have been judged by standards they would not have recognized.

There is no doubt that the academy leans left, and has done so for a long time.  But the core problem with Manzi's analysis is that the entire US political spectrum has moved to the left, especially on cultural issues.  On abortion, civil rights, marriage, gender equality and a range of other issues, positions that were once radical left (e.g., support for same-sex marriage) are now mainstream.  Judge Glock at National Affairs:

The interaction of politics, policy, and public opinion should change how we look at polarization. In one sense, some conservative Republicans have indeed moved away from what we now consider the center. But the center itself has also changed, and veered emphatically to the left. Both parties, to varying degrees, have followed this shift over time. The changing context helps explain why each party can see the other as "radical" relative to what it considers the center, and why the argument that the right has moved rightward more than the left has moved leftward is unpersuasive.

 

Fallen Idol: Cesar Chavez

Many posts have discussed Hispanic Americans.

Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes at NYT:

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser.

Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.

Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas, both of whom are now 66, were the daughters of longtime organizers who had marched in rallies alongside Mr. Chavez. He used the privacy of his California office to frequently molest Ms. Murguia, she said. He had known her since she was 8 years old. She became so traumatized that she attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15.

Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, groping her breasts in the same office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said, and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was not old enough to consent. (Ms. Murguia said Mr. Chavez molested her but never had intercourse with her.)

The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.

 

New:
Dolores Huerta writes lengthy statement following @nytimes investigation into Cesar Chavez.

Huerta says she had sexual encounters with Chavez resulting in 2 children.

“I have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farm worker movement…” pic.twitter.com/hdL5KnhSi9

— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) March 18, 2026

Polarized Views of Foreign Policy

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization.

From Gallup: 

US and Israel

Many posts have discussed relations between the US and Israel

Ben Kamisar at NBC:

American voters’ feelings on Israel and the Palestinian territories have shifted dramatically in recent years, in a sea change that is transforming the Democratic Party and shaping its primaries.

A new NBC News poll underscores the depths of the shift. More registered voters view Israel negatively than positively, a change from a few years ago. The change has been especially pronounced among independents and Democrats, fueling divided congressional primaries in 2026 and potentially shaping the party’s 2028 presidential contest.

 Ron Brownstein at Bloomberg:

Some conflict was inevitable between a US Democratic Party (and an American Jewish community) grounded in the left and an Israeli electorate that has mostly moved right since the 1990s. But Netanyahu has systematically widened that divide by consistently and almost exclusively cultivating the American right. “Netanyahu decided 20 years ago that evangelical Christians, conservative Jews and the Republicans were his natural constituency, and he’s given up. He doesn’t care about the rest,” says Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former top State Department adviser on the Middle East.

To win his first election as prime minister in 1996, Netanyahu recruited Arthur Finkelstein, a legendary strategist among the Republican far right. Once in office, Netanyahu commissioned a study by a group of US neoconservatives that urged both “a clean break” from the Palestinian peace process and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Netanyahu clashed so vehemently with Democratic President Bill Clinton over his push for a two-state peace agreement that Clinton famously left his first meeting with the Israeli leader angrily declaring “who’s the f---ing superpower here?”