My Take | US faces likely trajectory from anocracy to civil war

The United States has long prided itself as the world’s longest continuous democracy. There is, of course, the long-standing debate over whether the absence of universal suffrage in the country’s past (slavery, Jim Crow laws, systemic exclusion of minorities and ethnic groups from voting etc.) can still qualify its history, until quite recently, as democratic in the contemporary sense of the word.

But even if we overlook all that, an often cited global data series called Polity and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency – to quantitatively measure other countries on a scale of full autocracy to full democracy – has dethroned the US from that time-honoured designation.

Since last year, the world’s oldest continuous democracy is Switzerland (172 years), followed by New Zealand (143) and the United Kingdom (140). However, the real consequence of democratic decay in the US is not only the loss of international prestige and influence, but also that it opens up the very real possibility of a civil war, or at last persistent political violence and instability.

The US is now an anocracy, sometimes also called an illiberal democracy or a hybrid regime (part democratic, part autocratic), according to a recent analysis of the Polity data series by the Centre for Systemic Peace. Quantitatively, an anocracy lies in the middle of a numerical scale of full autocracy on one side and full democracy on the other.

Its 2021 study concludes: “The USA has dropped below the ‘democracy threshold’ (+6) on the Polity scale in 2020 and is now considered an anocracy (+5). It has also lost its designation as the world’s oldest, continuous democracy … Further degradation of democratic authority in the USA will trigger an Adverse Regime Change event.”