Democratic backsliding has been identified as a trend in the United States at the state and national levels in various indices and analyses, primarily during the Jim Crow era and in the 21st century under Donald Trump. It is "a process of regime change towards autocracy that makes the exercise of political power more arbitrary and repressive, and that restricts the space for public contestation and political participation in the process of government selection."
The Jim Crow era is among the most-cited historical examples of democratic backsliding, with Black Americans in particular seeing their rights eroded dramatically, especially in the Southern United States. Backsliding in the 21st century has been discussed as largely a Republican-led phenomenon, with particular emphasis placed on the administrations of Donald Trump.
Drivers include decisions made by the Supreme Court under John Roberts (especially those regarding money in politics and gerrymandering), attempts at election subversion, and the concentration of political power among the ultra-wealthy (plutocracy). Other tendencies include a growing interest in political violence, Christian nationalism, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and white identity politics. The second Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again initiative has also promoted medical pseudoscience involving opposition to vaccination, transgender healthcare misinformation, fad diets, and alternative medicine.
A paper published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science said, "Trump undermined faith in elections, encouraged political violence, vilified the mainstream media, [and] positioned himself as a law-and-order strongman challenging immigrants and suppressing protests." These developments have resulted in a number of indices and experts ceasing to classify the country as a democracy. The Polity data series classified the United States as an "anocracy" following the attempted self-coup by Trump in the January 6 United States Capitol attack of 2021; in 2024 and 2025, it was further downgraded and, by October 2025, described as "no longer considered a democracy" and lying "at the cusp of autocracy."
Bright Line Watch made similar statements in September 2025, describing expert ratings of the country as "closer to those of a mixed or illiberal democracy than a full democracy."
Jim Crow era
Lead-up to Jim Crow The first Reconstruction era started with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, the federal government of the United States initially took an active role in reducing racial discrimination. Between 1865 and 1870, three Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution were passed to address racial inequality in the South: the Thirteenth (which abolished most forms of slavery), the Fourteenth (which addressed citizenship rights and equal protection under the law), and the Fifteenth (which made it illegal to deny the right to vote on the basis of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude"). With this, the number of African American men who could vote went from 0.5% in 1866 to 70% in 1872. These amendments would have offered more sweeping protections, but some Republican lawmakers wanted to limit their impact so that they would not apply to immigrants or poorer people in their districts.
By the late 1870s, however, white backlash against the social, economic, and political gains of Black people (exemplified by the violence and persecution they faced from terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan) contributed to the Compromise of 1877, wherein the Democratic Party (then dominated by Southern white supremacists) agreed to let Republicans win the 1876 presidential election, in exchange for removing federal troops from the South and, in the words of historian James M. McPherson, "the abandonment of the Black man to his fate." Former supporters of Reconstruction-era policies began to argue that the government had made "too many changes too fast," and a White conservative movement within the Republican Party also started to gain influence.
Jim Crow era In November 1898, white supremacist Democrats in North Carolina orchestrated a coup in Wilmington, deploying armed paramilitary groups to burn the Daily Record newspaper office, as it was Black-owned. They also terrorised Black neighbourhoods and forced the resignation at gunpoint of the elected biracial city government, which they successfully replaced with their own appointees. In the months that followed, they entrenched their victory through a new state constitutional amendment imposing various measures, such as poll taxes and literacy tests. These disenfranchised almost all African Americans and many poor whites for nearly seventy years, ushering in a region‑wide Jim Crow order of racial segregation and white‑supremacist authoritarian rule.
The Jim Crow era saw an erosion of political and civil rights that would span decades; between the 1890s and 1910s, Southern governments passed Jim Crow laws, which instituted poll taxes, literacy tests, and other discriminatory systems, barring many Black and impoverished White Americans from voting. By 1913, this disenfranchisement extended into the federal government, as the Wilson administration introduced segregation there as well. Jim Crow policies have been described as a democratic breakdown (or backsliding).
21st century
The 21st century saw the erosion of voting rights and the rise of partisan gerrymandering by state legislatures. The first presidency of Donald Trump accelerated the undermining of democratic norms. A paper published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science said, "Trump undermined faith in elections, encouraged political violence, vilified the mainstream media, [and] positioned himself as a law-and-order strongman challenging immigrants and suppressing protests."
In 2013, former president Jimmy Carter stated that the United States "does not at the moment have a functioning democracy" in response to the Snowden disclosures about mass surveillance in the United States.Jimmy Carter: US “has no functioning democracy”
In 2019, political scientists Robert R. Kaufman and Stephan Haggard saw "striking parallels in terms of democratic dysfunction, polarization, the nature of autocratic appeals, and the processes through which autocratic incumbents sought to exploit elected office" in the United States under Trump compared to other backsliding countries (Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary). They argued that a transition to competitive authoritarianism is possible but unlikely. In 2020, Kurt Weyland presented a qualitative model for assessing democratic continuity and reversal using historical data from the experience of other countries. His study concluded that the United States is immune to democratic reversal. In 2021, political scientists Matias López and Juan Pablo Luna criticized his methodology and selection of parameters and argued that both democratic continuity and reversal are possible. With regard to the state of scholarly research on the subject, they wrote that "the probability of observing democratic backsliding in the United States remains an open and important question." According to some Canadian security experts, Canada may reevaluate historically close Canada–United States relations in response to democratic backsliding in the U.S., which could bring instability to the region and compromise Canada's greatest source of intelligence, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has openly said that U.S.–Canadian relations have entered a new chapter wherein the United States will no longer be seen as a trustworthy partner.
Quickly after resuming office for his second term in 2025, Trump became increasingly criticized by political scientists, scholars, and other significant figures for the threat he poses to American democracy. Early on, many cited the expansion of executive power and the reduction of agency workforces and regulations by the Department of Government Efficiency as an example of such threats. Freedom House described the pardon of January 6 United States Capitol attack defendants as an attempt to "excuse a violent assault on a key element of democracy." Steven Levitsky found the first two months of the second Trump administration to be the most aggressively and openly authoritarian case of democratic backsliding that he has seen, expressing particular concern about attacks on the courts. In September 2025, Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, warned that the United States was heading towards 1930s-style authoritarian policies.
Origins
Emma Sky and Karen J. Greenberg have linked the war on terror and the Iraq War, started during the presidency of George W. Bush, as enabling later democratic backsliding under the first Trump administration. Sky argues that the Bush administration's mismanagement of the Iraq War involving false allegations of WMDs, failure to establish a stable democracy, and tolerance of torture at Abu Gharib led to a lack of trust in mainstream politics and a desire to seek unconventional leaders without extensive political experience such as Trump.
Although UN Sustainable Development Goals promote the existence of universal healthcare, the United States remains the only developed country without a system of universal healthcare, with 8% of its population remaining uninsured. Prices of health insurance have consistently increased, and a 2025 study found that half of Americans struggle to afford necessary healthcare. The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity has identified the growing costs of healthcare as a serious cause of friction and social inequality within the United States; it has argued that these cost issues invalidate claims of the American healthcare system offering more choice.
Authors such as Cass Sunstein and Maria Ressa have linked the resurgence of authoritarianism and white identity politics to the rise of far-right online forums such as 8chan and Kiwi Farms, along with social media algorithms that prioritize more sensational content. QAnon was promoted through these online forums. The changing media landscape has also resulted in a loss of accredited full-time journalists, with various authors promoting local journalism as a partial solution for political polarization.
War on terror
Inequality and the role of money in politics
Political scientists including Wendy Brown and H.A. Giroux argued that the United States has been de-democratizing since the 1980s because of neoconservatism and neoliberalism. Aziz Huq and Behrouz Alikhani cited the growing political influence of the wealthiest classes and global corporations, related to the loosening of campaign finance laws, especially the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that reaffirmed corporate personhood.
Undemocratic institutions
Huq also cited the inadequate democratization of national institutions since 1787. Levitsky and Ziblatt agree, finding 2016–2021 to be a period of democratic backsliding due largely to the inability to reform minoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and Senate that enabled reactionary xenophobic candidates to win office much more easily than in other democracies that had successfully reformed their institutions in the 20th century to be more representative. Tom Ginsburg and Bridgette Baldwin made similar arguments, citing the Supreme Court's role in shifting political power enough to enable authoritarianism. The Economist argues that the American constitution is more vulnerable to backsliding than parliamentary democracies, pointing to examples throughout history of backsliding in countries that copied the American model.