Flawed

Fortune reports we’ve been downgraded, we who are Yanks.

While U.S. citizens could once claim to be part of the 9% of people in the world governed by a “full democracy,” they are now part of the near 45% who live in a “flawed democracy.”

That’s according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, which downgraded the U.S. in their 2016 Democracy Index published Wednesday. The move puts the U.S. in the same category as Poland, Mongolia, and Italy.

The “full democracy” period must have been quite brief, since before the Voting Rights Act we definitely were not one.

What besides Trump makes us not one?

  • the electoral college
  • gerrymandering
  • voter suppression (made possible by the Shelby ruling)
  • money in political campaigns (made much worse by the Citizens United ruling)

All that preceded Trump.

To arrive at this conclusion, the paper analyzed over 200 countries and considered factors like political culture and political participation.

“Popular trust in government, elected representatives and political parties has fallen to extremely low levels in the U.S.,” the paper’s authors wrote. “This has been a long-term trend and one that preceded the election of [Donald] Trump as U.S. president in November 2016.”

And then he pushed it off a cliff.

13 Responses to “Flawed”