Democracy is in grave peril, worldwide. [ Liberal democracy is under threat: these books show why abandoning it would be a mistakeOpens in new window ]Most important, this has also been happening in the US. V-Dem’s aggregate index of the health of US democracy is back to 1965 levels, just after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet this time we see a classic example of an attempt by an executive to overthrow a liberal democracy from within. If a similar decline in V-Dem’s index of liberal democracy occurred in 2026, the US would be where Hungary was in 2018 and would have got there far faster.

Source: The Irish Times March 25, 2026 16:34 UTC