Why should we worry that the U.S. could become an anocracy again? Because of the threat of civil war

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/24/why-should-we-worry-that-us-could-become-an-anocracy-again-because-threat-civil-war/

snip

Anocracies are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic; their citizens enjoy some elements of democratic rule (e.g., elections), while other rights (e.g., due process or freedom of the press) suffer. In the last weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the respected Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) calculated that, for the first time in more than two centuries, the United States no longer qualified as a democracy. It had, over the preceding five years, become an anocracy. That rating improved to “democracy” just this month, but to put it in perspective, the current U.S. score is the same as Brazil’s 2018 rating (the most recent available for that country), which was two points below Switzerland’s.

This might come as a shock to many Americans. While we were going about our daily lives, our executive branch continued its decades-long accumulation of power to the point where a sitting president refused to accept an election result. Democratic backsliding had happened incrementally, like the erosion of a shoreline. The process is especially difficult for Americans to recognize because exceptionalism is baked into our founding myth: We are a city on a hill. We are different.

Or not. The CSP ranking, called the “Polity Score” — well regarded partly because of its historical and geographic scope — uses various criteria to place governments on a scale ranging from -10 (most autocratic) to +10 (most democratic). Anocracies are in the middle, between -5 and +5. The United States’ Polity Score dropped from +10 in 2015 to +5 — an anocracy — for 2020.

Our political tailspin began in 2016, when the CSP cited international observers’ conclusion that the election was not entirely fair: Election rules had been changed to serve partisan inter­ests, voting rights were infringed, and a foreign country (Russia) interfered on behalf of a candidate (Trump). The score dropped again in 2019, after the president refused to cooperate with Con­gress and again at the end of Trump’s term, when he sowed distrust in the election and attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power.

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[DarthDem]

1. Anocracy

. . . is an unusually apt term for what some people are trying to do to our system of government.

[onecaliberal]

2. We're already there.

[dem4decades]

3. Yep, just have to figure out how to deal with it.