For the past six years, Americans have lived in a “flawed democracy,” one dragged down by high levels of polarization and events like the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, according to an annual study of global democracy.
The latest edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index ranks the United States 26th of 167 countries, sandwiched between Chile and Estonia, when measuring electoral process, government functionality, political participation, political culture and civil liberties.
On a 10-point scale, the U.S. earned 7.85 points — slightly down from last year’ 7.92 and the nation’s lowest score since the EIU created the index in 2006. The United States also dropped one spot in the rankings over the past year.
The researchers pinned the United States’ low score on two factors, both of which are tied to polarization: functioning of government and political culture.
“Pluralism and competing alternatives are essential for a functioning democracy, but differences of opinion in the US have hardened into political sectarianism and institutional gridlock,” they wrote, explaining why the U.S. score for government functionality had hit a new low point.
The narrowly divided Congress “has further crippled the legislative process, particularly as Democrats contend with widening divisions between their moderate and hard-line members. Obstruction will worsen ahead of the November 2022 mid-term elections — which could flip the majorities in both houses of Congress — as neither party will want to appear to be ceding ground to the other,” they wrote.
Even though the United States reached a new low in that category, the nation scored even worse in “political culture” as election disputes and debates over the pandemic response have riven the population.
“Social cohesion has collapsed and consensus has evaporated on fundamental issues, such as election outcomes and public health practices,” according to the report, which notes that only 55 percent of Americans believe President Biden won a legitimate election despite the absence of widespread voter fraud.
But the insurrection and other attempts to change the outcome of the 2020 election were just that: attempts. The system’s resilience boosted the American score.
“The run-up to the change of administrations in late January 2021 was uncharacteristically tumultuous, marked by a riot at the US Capitol and attempts by the outgoing president, Donald Trump, and several Republican lawmakers to overturn the election results,” the report reads. “However, the inauguration of the new president, Joe Biden, a Democrat, proceeded smoothly, and the first year of his presidency has not faced significant disruptions.”
Two other factors helped keep the United States from ranking lower: participation and civil liberties.
American turned out to vote at a record rate in 2020, with 66 percent of the voting-eligible population casting a ballot. The EIU report also factored in the unprecedented participation in Georgia’s two Senate runoff elections in January 2021.
While the civil liberties score was high, EIU researchers caution that partisan gerrymandering and state-level efforts to change voting laws could result in a lower score in the future.
"That the United States continues to rank lower than many of our peers, and is considered a flawed democracy, should surprise no one that has observed our political system in recent years," said Mike Murphy, director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget's FixUS program. "Our polarizing division and government dysfunction have led to an increasing level of distrust in our democracy, and only a comprehensive approach that attacks the root causes of this challenge will help turn this around. We can do so by tapping into the frustration of the majority of Americans who are fed up with the status quo, and rally them behind solutions they can advance in their communities which among them include political and electoral reforms to change governing incentives, revitalizing civic education, and promoting norms and engagement models that support bridge building and deliberation."
The highest rated democracies, according to the EIU, are Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and Denmark. In January, Transparency International ranked 180 countries in its Corruption Perceptions Index. Denmark, Finland and New Zealand tied with the best score, followed by Norway, Singapore and Sweden.
The United States ranked 27th in that index.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.