(C) Freedom House
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Democracy in the United States: What We’ll Be Watching in 2025 [1]
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Date: 2024-12
With the United States facing closely contested general elections, Freedom House has been highlighting potential democratic risks surrounding the process—from harassment of poll workers, to postelection efforts to impede certification of the vote, to political violence—and promoting important ways to mitigate those risks.
But as an organization that has been assessing political rights and civil liberties in more than 200 countries and territories for over a half century, we’re also looking beyond the elections and at the larger story of America’s democratic decline. Over the last 13 years, the United States has fallen by 11 points in our 100-point Freedom in the World index, now placing far behind long-standing democratic nations that had previously been our peers. The signs of erosion are many: worsening congressional gridlock, declining trust in democratic institutions, and the assault on our democracy on January 6, 2021, among them. The causes are complex and systemic, and include deepening political polarization, persistent inequality, and a rapidly changing media environment.
Regardless of the coming elections’ results, Freedom House will continue to assess the United States along with the rest of the world, and advocate for protecting rights and safeguarding and renewing our democracy. We have done so as part of our fierce commitment to the nonpartisan defense of freedom and democracy globally for more than 80 years, including denouncing the excesses of McCarthyism at home while combatting communism abroad, and condemning Jim Crow–era racial segregation, Watergate-era abuses of power, and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. We will continue to do so, without fear or favor.
Challenges to US democracy that we’ll be monitoring include the following.
Fewer constraints on executive power
The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States established a broad new regime of presidential immunity from criminal liability. As we noted after the decision, the new immunity rules go well beyond the typical protections for leaders in other democracies by providing absolute immunity for a potentially broad range of presidential actions. In doing so, they undermine a key deterrent against a range of criminal abuses of office—such as corruption and fraud—that every other public office holder rightly faces.
The decision could also lead to the broader degradation of congressional and judicial checks on presidential power, given the court’s expansive reading of presidential “core powers” that cannot be constrained by the other two branches of government. It is not clear, for example, whether Congress is now more constrained than before in using its legislative and oversight powers to ensure accountability at federal agencies like the Departments of Justice or Defense.
Further, the decision appears to have removed a key deterrent against a president’s influencing, or even directing, individual Justice Department investigations and prosecutions. This could enable future presidents to more easily target their perceived political opponents with criminal scrutiny—just as former president Trump attempted to do at least a dozen times, and has pledged to do again if elected.
Encroachment on civic space
While the United States has among the world’s strongest protections for freedom of expression, association, and assembly, Freedom House is watching with concern an array of recent developments that could erode those rights in practice. At the federal level, politically disfavored nonprofit groups have recently been facing disruptive congressional investigations on questionable grounds. Meanwhile, there are a handful of pending bills and overly broad existing laws that could allow the government to politically target the nonprofit status of organizations, demand sensitive information about their grantees, or even require them to register as foreign agents.
At the state level, 21 states have enacted restrictive antiprotest laws in recent years, including measures that impose extreme penalties for protest-related crimes and that could facilitate vigilante action against protesters. And in many states—Florida and California, for example—governments have targeted corporate actors with costly policy changes apparently in response to company leadership’s views on public issues.
Waning trust in the courts
The United States has a strong rule-of-law tradition and an independent judiciary. But in recent years, increasingly partisan federal judicial appointment and confirmation processes, a series of ideologically split Supreme Court decisions, and public concern about perceived conflicts of interest within the high court have contributed to a significant decline in public confidence in both the judiciary generally and the Supreme Court specifically. In many states, judges are chosen through elections, and a rise in campaign fundraising and party involvement in these elections over the last two decades has increased the threat of bias and favoritism in state courts.
The downward trend in public confidence in the courts may contribute further to reduced public trust in democratic institutions and the rule of law.
Rising political violence and antidemocratic behavior
Acts of political violence have surged in the United States in the past decade. In the last few months alone, former president Trump has been the target of two assassination attempts. While the attackers’ motives remain hazy, broader political-violence trends show that ideologically motivated attacks associated with both the far left and far right have increased since 2016— although a significantly greater number has come from the far right.
Over the same period, the nation saw an unprecedented attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, which was also marked by political violence, and continued attempts by Trump and some of his political allies to excuse that violence, refuse to accept the election’s results, and spread false and misleading claims about the risks of widespread fraud in US elections.
These challenges of rising political violence and antidemocratic behavior are linked by the outsized role that political leaders play in shaping public rejection—or acceptance—of such behavior. This makes it particularly important for leaders to denounce violations that come from their own party.
The underlying challenge of polarization
Many of these risks have roots in the United States’ deepening political polarization, which is increasingly characterized by Americans’ mutual dislike and distrust of members of the other political party. This so-called “affective” polarization has dangerous implications for democracy. Surveys show that Americans across the political spectrum are increasingly likely to scale back their own commitment to democratic values and behavior if it means advancing “their side.”
We will be watching promising efforts to tackle America’s polarization problem, including state-level experiments with electoral reform that could reduce incentives for zero-sum politics, and efforts to increase investments in civic and media literacy education, national service opportunities, and local and independent media.
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[1] Url:
https://freedomhouse.org/article/democracy-united-states-what-well-be-watching-2025
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