Show of hands: Who wants the United States to be a dictatorship?
Ah, no one? Well, almost no one. We see your hand, Mr. Trump.
The opposite of a dictatorship is a democracy, of course, but it’s really more of a continuum from absolute dictatorship to healthy democracy that guarantees and guards everyone’s rights regardless of gender, race, sexual identity or ancestry.
About our democracy, a few documented facts:
Argentina, Croatia, Greece, Belize, Mongolia, Uruguay, all the Scandinavian countries, Costa Rica, Germany, the Baltic nations, and many other countries (59 in total) rank by Freedom House as more free than the U.S. (and, by the way, none mention any right to bear arms in their constitutions). A primary funder of this annual report is the National Endowment for Democracy, created under the aegis of Ronald Reagan, so this is no pinko lefty group. We are sliding downward on that continuum.
If we travel back in time to pre-Trump, our freedom ranking was much higher. We were in the top few percentage rankings.
We are still far above the worst — Syria, Tibet, South Sudan, North Korea — and still far more democratic than places like Russia, Cuba, or China. In other words, we are trending downward but we still have a great deal worth saving.
So why have we continued to slip, even though we elected Biden, clearly a pro-democracy president, and we elected slim majorities in the House and Senate?