Jon Ward
·Senior Political Correspondent
The past year was a terrible year for democracy — not only in the United States but around the world — according to a report released Wednesday by a leading advocate for political freedoms and human rights.
“The long democratic recession is deepening,” said the report from Freedom House, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization that is primarily supported by funding from the federal government.
Freedom House has conducted its “Freedom in the World” report since 1973, and it has now tracked 15 consecutive years of “decline in global freedom.”
In 2020, there were 73 countries that declined in freedoms and only 28 that improved, Sarah Repucci, the lead author of the report, told Yahoo News. That’s the worst trend line out of the entire 15-year period during which freedoms have been diminishing.
Trump supporters clash with police and security forces at the Capitol on Jan. 6. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
In the U.S., the report said, then-President Donald Trump had already placed great stress on the democratic system prior to waging a campaign of falsehoods about the election that critics say led to the assault on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6.
“The politically distorted health recommendations [during the COVID-19 pandemic], partisan infighting, shockingly high and racially disparate coronavirus death rates, and police violence against protesters advocating for racial justice over the summer all underscored the United States’ systemic dysfunctions and made American democracy appear fundamentally unstable,” the report said.
“Even before 2020, Trump had presided over an accelerating decline in U.S. freedom scores, driven in part by corruption and conflicts of interest in the administration, resistance to transparency efforts, and harsh and haphazard policies on immigration and asylum that made the country an outlier among its Group of Seven peers.” The Group of Seven, or G-7, consists of the world’s most advanced and influential democracies, including the U.S., Canada, France, the United Kingdom and Japan.
As for the Jan. 6 insurrection, the report issued a withering assessment.
“After four years of condoning and indeed pardoning official malfeasance, ducking accountability for his own transgressions, and encouraging racist and right-wing extremists, the outgoing president openly strove to illegally overturn his loss at the polls, culminating in his incitement of an armed mob to disrupt Congress’s certification of the results,” it stated.
“Trump’s actions went unchecked by most lawmakers from his own party, with a stunning silence that undermined basic democratic tenets. Only a serious and sustained reform effort can repair the damage done during the Trump era to the perception and reality of basic rights and freedoms in the United States.”
The U.S. score has fallen significantly over the last decade. In 2009 it had a total score of 94, based on a rating system created by Freedom House. But it was down to 86 in 2019 and fell three more points in 2020. The U.S. now ranks behind countries like Argentina and Mongolia in terms of total freedom, and is tied with Panama.
Meanwhile, authoritarian regimes — with China at the forefront — are winning the global competition over which system of government is better able to deliver results for citizens, Repucci said. “The evidence is against that, but they've been winning the propaganda war,” she said of China. “People are losing faith in democracy.”
The report said that China’s “malign influence … was especially profound in 2020.”
“Beijing ramped up its global disinformation and censorship campaign to counter the fallout from its cover-up of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which severely hampered a rapid global response in the pandemic’s early days,” the report said. It also mentioned China’s interference in “the domestic political discourse of foreign democracies” and the “demolition of Hong Kong’s liberties and legal autonomy.”
The report also stated that China now has more influence over international bodies like the United Nations Human Rights Council, which the U.S. left in 2018.
Repucci said China has filled a vacuum on the world stage left by the self-diminishment of the United States. As it does so, it is increasingly assertive in a way that has caught much of the world by surprise, she said. “Until very recently, China was very subtly engaged in an ideological battle that democracies weren’t even really fighting,” she said.
The Freedom House report argued for democracy and for a U.S. leadership role on the world stage, in terms of global self-interest. “Everyone benefits when the United States serves as a positive model, and the country itself reaps ample returns from a more democratic world,” it said, arguing that a U.S.-led democracy movement guarantees more economic prosperity for more people, less military conflict and fewer refugees and asylum seekers.
The degradation of U.S. democracy has given authoritarian states “new fodder” to claim their systems are better and less hypocritical.
“After the Capitol riot, a spokesperson from the Russian foreign ministry stated, ‘The events in Washington show that the U.S. electoral process is archaic, does not meet modern standards, and is prone to violations,’” the report noted.
The report recommended a number of reforms to strengthen democracy in the U.S.: getting rid of gerrymandered congressional districts, expanding access to voting by establishing same-day registration or universal automatic registration, allowing early and no-excuse absentee voting, creating more places to vote and restoring voting rights to felons once they have served their time and been released.
These are all elements that are included in the “For the People Act,” which the House of Representatives is set to vote on Wednesday.
But much of the Republican Party has doubled down on Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and is using them to justify attempts at making voting harder in several states where it controls the legislature. State Republican parties are trying to limit, roll back or restrict early voting and absentee voting; oppose felon voting rights in many states; and have shown no interest in automatic voter registration, which is one of the most important steps states can take to increase the integrity and security of their voting rolls.
Yet Repucci said Freedom House believes it is essential that election and democracy reform proposals get passed with bipartisan support.
“Politicizing democracy itself is one of the most damaging things we can do,” she said.
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