A Big Announcement Is Coming This
Week. Americans Should Be Nervous.
A respected annual report on freedom
around the world could deliver a shocking rating to the United States.
Something
is happening this Thursday that, during normal times, Americans wouldn’t need
to pay a lick of attention to. Freedom House, the esteemed Washington,
D.C.-based research institute that has existed since 1941, is scheduled to
release its annual report on the state of freedom in the world. You may have
seen one of these at some point or another. There’s the written report—last year’s ran to 30
pages—that describes broad trends. And then there’s the ever-popular clickable map, which gives
every country in the world a global freedom score based on a number of assessments pertaining to
political rights and civil liberties. The nations of the world are
divided into three categories: free (a score between 70 and 100); partly free
(a score between 40 and 69), and not free (0 to 39).
Freedom
House has been issuing this report since 1972, and the United States of America
has, of course, always been rated free. In the report released in 2025, which
actually covered the calendar year 2024, America scored an 84. Not up there
with Sweden (99) or Canada (97) or the U.K. (92), but not bad. We finished
fifty-fourth. (It’s worth noting that a lot of the countries that had better
scores are very tiny—Palau, Tuvalu, San Marino.) The U.S. score has been
declining in recent years; in 2006, the first year Freedom House used the
current 100-point scale, we got a 93.
Well.
I think you know where I’m headed. This week’s report covers events from the
year 2025. You may have noticed that a few things changed in this country from
2024 to 2025. A masked federal police force started rounding up law-abiding
people and shipping them off to hellish prisons in countries to which they had
no connection. The Justice Department became a transparent arm of the chief
executive. Said chief executive has enriched himself on a scale the tinpot
dictators of the 1950s and 1960s could never have imagined, making him arguably
among the most corrupt chiefs of state in modern world history. And much, much
more.
Will
the great and mighty United States of America, the oldest democracy in the
world, celebrating its 250th birthday this July, be demoted to “partly free”? I
don’t know. But the mere fact that we even have to ask this question is
chilling.
For
a hint as to where the U.S. might land in the 2026 report, let’s take a
selective little tour of the 2025 report. Here’s Freedom House’s capsule overview of
our country from last year’s report:
The United States is a federal
republic whose people benefit from a vibrant political system, a strong
rule-of-law tradition, robust freedoms of expression and religious belief, and
a wide array of other civil liberties. However, in recent years its democratic
institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in rising political
polarization and extremism, partisan pressure on the electoral process,
mistreatment and dysfunction in the criminal justice and immigration systems,
and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity, and political
influence.
It’s
pretty obvious that the vibrant political system, the strong rule-of-law
tradition, and most of those robust freedoms suffered pretty serious injuries
in 2025. But the more interesting reading in last year’s report is found in the
overviews of some of the countries that just missed the “free” cutoff—that
scored in the mid- to high-60s and were designated “partly free.”
Here,
for example, is the description of the Dominican Republic (68): “The Dominican
Republic holds regular elections that are relatively free. Pervasive corruption
undermines state institutions and the use of excessive force by police is a
problem. Discrimination against Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian
migrants, as well as against LGBT+ people, remain serious problems.” Relatively
free; pervasive corruption; discrimination against minorities. Sound familiar?
Bolivia
(65): “Child labor and violence against women are persistent problems,
independent and investigative journalists face harassment, and the judiciary is
highly politicized and hampered by corruption.” OK, child labor not so much
(although Project 2025 called for relaxing rules
to allow teens to work in hazardous jobs), but the other factors sure seem to
apply.
Hungary
(65): “Since taking power in the 2010 elections, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s
Alliance of Young Democrats–Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz) party pushed through
constitutional and legal changes that have allowed it to consolidate control
over the country’s independent institutions.” Trump and the Republicans haven’t
managed to change the Constitution, which is very hard to do in this country,
but as for independent institutions, well, just ask the universities he’s come
after.
Serbia
(a bit further down the scale at 56): “Serbia is a parliamentary democracy with
competitive multiparty elections, but in recent years the ruling Serbian
Progressive Party (SNS) has steadily eroded political rights and civil
liberties, putting pressure on independent media, the political opposition, and
civil society organizations.”
I
could go on, but you get the point. And I’m not cherry-picking. Go read for
yourself the overviews of the “partly free” countries scoring in the 50s and
60s, and you’ll see that almost all of them describe conditions that often now
apply to the United States under Donald Trump.
I
have no idea what Freedom House’s report will reveal on Thursday. I could see
us holding onto a “free” rating with a score dipping into the 70s (it’s next to
impossible to imagine the score not dropping). For example, here are the first
two questions listed under methodology: “Was the current head of government or
other chief national authority elected through free and fair elections?” “Were
the current national legislative representatives elected through free and fair
elections?”
The
answer to both is yes, as far as we know.
Certain
other questions, however, wouldn’t seem to bode well. “Are safeguards against
official corruption strong and effective?” “Does the government operate with
openness and transparency?” “Is there protection from the illegitimate use of
physical force and freedom from war and insurgencies?” “Do laws, policies, and
practices guarantee equal treatment of various segments of the population?”
One
other such ranking was already released this year. The Century
Foundation’s “Democracy Meter” gave
the U.S. a 79 out of 100 for the year 2024. The report on 2025, released in
January, dropped the score down to 57. In a year.
We’ll
see. But whether the score is 77 or 71 or 63, we know what our eyes have been
seeing these last 15 months. Our democracy is being suffocated. And Trump and
his people and the oligarchs who helped put him in office are just getting
started. Fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers used to say, with hope in their hearts,
wait till next year. Fans of American democracy now use the phrase with dread.
