The Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem), an academic outfit in Göteborg, Sweden (a city diminished by mass migration, albeit not as bad as Malmö), prides itself on defining democracy in a “layered and nuanced” way. By its lights, at its most basic level, a country qualifies as a democracy if it meets the standards of electoral democracy: leaders are chosen through free, fair, and competitive elections; most adults have the right to vote; and core freedoms such as association and expression are protected. This minimal threshold establishes whether citizens can meaningfully choose their leaders.
Using these criteria, V-Dem’s recent assessment that the United States under Trump is moving toward autocracy—Unraveling The Democratic Era?—seems questionable. Its leaders are still chosen through free, fair, and competitive elections, and most adults retain their voting rights. Moreover, core freedoms such as association and expression are arguably more robust today than they were a decade ago. Recall the widespread socialization of speech codes in public institutions and the government’s public health measures during the pandemic—both instances of repression that, despite appeals to justice and the necessity of containing a virus, elites and moral panic could not for long obscure.
Despite overthrowing these and other threats to democracy, and despite America coming through a free and fair election (unlike four years earlier), V-Dem contends that the US has since been moving away from democracy. Paradoxically, V-Dem judges a freer society as less free. I shouldn’t have to note that V-Dem is one of many voices portraying the United States under President Donald Trump as sinking into autocracy; the voices are loud and persistent. V-Dem’s academic veneer provides anti-American propagandists with the pretense of scholarly legitimacy.
What explains such inversions of reality? I explained this in yesterday’s essay, The Administered Life and Its Discontents. Today, I will use that explanation to show why V-Dem gets it wrong and why so many people believe it’s right. (You might consider reading that essay first.)
Those in legacy and social media who use outfits like V-Dem to fuel alarm over the Trump presidency, if they bother looking at the criteria they use to judge such matters, will note that the measures expand the concept of democracy to broader dimensions that capture how well a system functions, not just whether the electoral piece is robust. True enough. The indices include the liberal dimension (checks on executive power, individual rights, and rule of law), the participatory dimension (active citizen engagement beyond voting), the deliberative dimension (decision-making based on reasoned debate rather than coercion or propaganda), and the egalitarian dimension (equal access to political power across social groups). In this framework, liberal democracy is a standard combining free elections with strong institutional safeguards and rights protections.
But the problem with such criteria is not what they include in the definition of liberal democracy, but what they leave out. More than this, the epistemological frame they deploy is what C. Wright Mills, in The Sociological Imagination, criticizes as “abstracted empiricism,” a style of social science that prioritizes large-scale data collection, surveys, and technical methods while neglecting meaningful theoretical insight and substantive social questions. Mills argues that this approach reduces social studies to bureaucratic research routines—producing mountains of data but little understanding—because it fragments social reality into isolated variables without connecting them to broader historical structures or the human experience.
Before critiquing V-Dem’s ideological work on these grounds, I want to note a few cross-national and historical comparison points V-Dem makes or would likely make to illustrate the problem with this organization’s approach. The first is V-Dem’s comparison of the United States and the United Kingdom. The second is what one might expect from V-Dem if it were to compare the United States today to the republic of yesterday.
According to V-Dem, both the US and the UK have experienced democratic decline in recent years, though to different degrees. As already discussed, the United States is assessed as having undergone a more pronounced episode of “democratic backsliding” or “autocratization.” V-Dem no longer classifies America as a full liberal democracy. The United States is now in the category of an electoral democracy, due to alleged weakening institutional checks and protections for rights. The UK, by contrast, despite the signs of erosion in democratic quality, remains a liberal democracy.
This assessment may strike readers familiar with the UK scene as a rather odd one. The UK enforces far stricter controls over speech through censorship, deplatforming, and imprisonment for unapproved opinion. Subjects are thrown in jail for social media posts that cause offense. The English are not allowed to display the flag of their people, a population indigenous to that island. The reality is that the United States remains considerably freer than the UK along several dimensions and has become freer over the last few years under Trump.
How would V-Dem assess the young American Republic? The United States during George Washington’s presidency would not meet V-Dem’s standards for a full democracy. It may even fall short of a robust electoral democracy. On the positive side, the V-Dem would likely agree that there were regular elections, competition among elites, and a constitutional system with separation of powers and checks and balances. In those terms, elements of the liberal dimension—such as constraints on executive authority and an independent judiciary—were relatively strong for the era. At the same time, it would note that voting rights were highly restricted—generally limited to white male property owners—and large segments of the population were excluded, including enslaved people, free black individuals in many states, American Indians, and women.
One need not depend on V-Dem’s criteria to understand that restricting the franchise in early America to a narrow segment of society violates the requirement of broad suffrage. Moreover, the presence of slavery represents a profound failure on the egalitarian dimension, as a significant portion of the population had little or no civil or political rights. Consequently, V-Dem’s likely classification of the early United States as closer to an electoral oligarchy or a very limited form of electoral rule rather than a “true” democracy would be persuasive. The system scores unevenly across dimensions: relatively strong on liberal institutional checks (albeit not universalized), but weak on egalitarian and participatory measures.
Defenders of the republican order over which Washington presided will counter that the United States at its founding was not intended to be a democracy in the classical sense—and certainly not in the progressive, technocratic sense critiqued in yesterday’s essay on this platform. This is true. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton feared the dangers of direct democracy—majoritarianism, political instability, and failure of discernment in decision-making. Drawing on Montesquieu, the Founders designed a constitutional republic with checks and balances, separation of powers, and indirect mechanisms like the Electoral College and (at the time) appointed senators.
The constitutional design they left to us did not negate popular will; the popular will was discerned through institutions guided by reason and virtue. Elections remained central but were structured to balance responsiveness with stability. In modern terms, the system created by the framers aligns with what scholars—including V-Dem—would, if charitable, call an early form of representative or electoral system, albeit one with very limited participation by today’s standards. Given the emphasis on property rights, participation in American democracy was limited to its stakeholders. It is reasonable for those without property to find this limitation objectionable. However, from the perspective of property rights, such an arrangement is not unreasonable.
The evolution of the system has since yielded most elements V-Dem regards as constituting robust democracy, while remaining faithful to the original design except in these respects: the constitutional order has been eroded by the administrative state, corporate power, and the rise of the judiocracy. No criterion in V-Dem’s metric captures the presence of the first two developments, and it rationalizes the judicial tyranny. Could V-Dem’s assessment of democratic backsliding reflect the rise of the administrative state? Lawfare, rule by decree, the corporate-state censorship regime—are all these not indicators of autocratization? The corporate state that progressives portray as, or mistake for, democracy was something the Founding Fathers sought to prevent through constitutional design. Does V-Dem take that fact into account?
Predictably, V-Dem presents itself as nonpartisan and academic, insisting its research is rigorous and neutral. Yet, as many others and I have shown, academic work can obscure ideological projects under the guise of “objectivity.” Obscuring the corruption of science depends on what Sandra Harding called the “neutrality ideal.” In a 1997 American Journal of Sociology paper, Immanuel Wallerstein mocked the hopes of the positivists who thought “they could be modern philosopher-kings.” They assert “that their role [is] merely to do the research, and that it [is] up to others—the political persons—to draw from this research the conclusions that seem[] to derive from this research.” Wallerstein puts the matter eloquently: “the neutrality of the scholar became the fig leaf of their shame in having eaten the apple of knowledge.”
What the language of neutrality masks is a left-wing bias. V-Dem’s confusion of progressivism and social democracy with liberal democracy is not just a failure of proper conceptualization. It is an ideological result. Ideology determines what is included (and excluded) in the conceptualizations and induces researchers to tick boxes in a particular way. This is what lies behind the narrow epistemological frames deployed by the positivists. To return to Mills, abstracted empiricism reflects an overemphasis on method at the expense of imagination, discouraging scholars from asking big, important questions about power, inequality, and social change (Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy advanced a similar critique in the preface of Monopoly Capitalism). Mills contends that sociology should instead integrate empirical research with theory and historical context, enabling researchers to link individual experiences to larger social forces and thereby fulfill the discipline’s critical and intellectual purpose. V-Dem’s confusion is a failure of imagination. Ideology prepares imagination to fail.
This essay has proceeded long enough without having defined “autocracy.” Let’s use V-Dem’s definition: autocracy is a system that fails to meet even minimal electoral standards. We see that autocracy is a negative definition, that is, a concept defined by what it’s not. The key distinction between autocracy and liberal democracy is whether elections are genuinely free, fair, and consequential. V-Dem usefully distinguishes between electoral autocracies, where elections exist but are manipulated, and closed autocracies, where meaningful elections do not occur.
Using this definition, we see the blinkered character of V-Dem’s conceptualization of the phenomena under examination. For decades, the US has traveled down the path to electoral autocracy. Democratic Party resistance to the SAVE Act, currently debated in the US Senate, legislation seeking to strengthen elections, indicates the desire for administrative dominance among certain political factions. Without robust voter integrity laws, elections fail the test of fairness. In several states, elections remain vulnerable to manipulation. Elections indeed have consequences, but, as witnessed with the installation of Joe Biden as president for four long years, for the wrong reason if democracy is the end sought. Furthermore, years of lawfare against Trump, his associates, and his supporters indicate another element of autocracy that V-Dem misses.
It is not that V-Dem’s criteria are necessarily wrong, but that an assessment using its expanded measure of democracy is warped by the narrowing aperture of the administered world I discussed in my last essay. Ideological narrowing pushes perception of reality in the opposite direction; the V-Dem measure appears expansive, but it walls off assessment of the administrative rule and corporate state power. To be sure, the United States, originally founded as a constitutional republic with limited government and broad principles of individual liberty, has expanded democracy in the ways V-Dem values, yet it has also evolved into a society dominated by bureaucratic rationalization, technocratic control, and commodified culture.
As discussed in the previous essay, thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin illustrate how bureaucratic administration, corporate media, and mass culture shape public consciousness, suppress genuine autonomy, and channel human spontaneity into pseudo-activities reinforcing existing power structures. Again, V-Dem has no criterion to assess these threats to democracy. Thus, V-Dem’s report is promoted in a world where many Americans equate the comforts and security of the administered state with democracy, generating fear and resistance toward restoring a more limited, constitutionally grounded government. V-Dem’s methodology is corrupted by the same irrationality. Its effect is to confirm a false perception.
Freud, Fromm, and others clarify why contemporary political behavior—cultural anxieties, protests, and opposition to efforts to restore constitutional order—must be understood as social-psychological responses rooted in the desire for government-provided security and avoidance of the responsibilities of true freedom. Essentially, what is perceived as defending democracy, or opposing authoritarianism, reflects long-term cultural, institutional, and psychological conditioning. Recognizing that the United States under Trump is moving away from the autocracy V-Dem does not positively conceptualize, and therefore cannot fully capture, requires stepping outside the ideological framework that conflates administrative control with democratic health.
At the outset, I said that V-Dem’s conclusion that the US is less democratic today is questionable. I was being charitable. It is nonsensical from the standpoint of reason. Making sense of this requires acknowledging the distortions of the administered world and understanding how academic and popular interpretations of democracy are refracted through that lens. Once one grasps this, the reason V-Dem’s analysis is widely cited in media and memes becomes obvious: its usefulness as a tool to portray Trump and America First as authoritarian threats to halt the restoration of the Republic in its tracks and return the transnational project to its pre-Trump trajectory. Trump is indeed a threat to something, but not to democracy in its republican sense—the sense that guided the Framers in crafting the US Constitution.
V-Dem’s framework offers a rigorous, multi-dimensional measure of democracy, but applying it uncritically to contemporary US politics, given its ideological blind spots, yields misleading conclusions. The United States remains an electoral democracy with robust freedoms for those who choose to exercise them. The problem is that too many people seek to escape the burden of freedom. What V-Dem interprets as “backsliding” is confrontation with the contradiction between constitutional republicanism and the administrative, technocratic state that has grown over time. V-Dem has chosen a side, and it is not the side of democratic republicanism and liberal freedoms.
What is portrayed as something frightening is actually something hopeful. Democracy, in the American constitutional sense, is alive. The fact of a Trump presidency signals that the corporate state project is not yet complete, since they could not prevent him from winning two national elections (really, three). The system left open a door to the restoration of democratic republicanism and genuine liberal freedoms, and Trump and America First walked through it. It should be noted that the openness of the Republican Party played a major role in creating that opportunity. As we saw with the Bernie Sanders fiasco, the Democratic Party does not permit outsiders to get inside the political house.
As for V-Dem, its analysis and who is promoting it tells us more about the lens of modern scholarship than about the state of the American Republic. It is also troubling that a research organization operating at the epicenter of the migrant crisis and an osentible democratic culture that tolerates—indeed invites—colonization would fail to grasp the actual ground of authoritarianism. But then, that’s what makes V-Dem’s report so useful for valorizing the practice of managed democracy. Frankly, I am disappointed by how many of my fellow academics are using the report to push an anti-American narrative. I hasten to add that I can explain—and have explained—why they do that. But I can still be disappointed.
freedom and reason 