Democracy,Backsliding,and Catholicism

Post-Conciliar Catholicism and Democracy

Huntington cited one final factor as a key driver in third-wave democracy: the influence of Catholicism. He observed that it “was overwhelmingly a Catholic wave. It swept through six South American and three Central American countries, moved on to the Philippines, doubled back to Mexico and Chile, and then burst through in the two Catholic countries of Eastern Europe, Poland and Hungary. Roughly three-quarters of the countries that transited to democracy between 1974 and 1989 were predominantly Catholic.” ⁵ Huntington attributed this Catholic influence to the shifts in teaching and pastoral activity initiated by the Second Vatican Council. ⁶

It was just six years after the council, in his letter commemorating the eightieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, that Paul VI provided a reading of the signs of the times highlighting the twin aspirations of the time: equality and participation, which “persistently make themselves felt” and which “grow stronger to the extent the person becomes better informed and better educated.” ⁷ The pope maintained “the two aspirations, to equality and to participation, seek to promote a democratic type of society” and “the Christian has the duty to take part” in the search for the proper model of democracy “and in the organization and life of political society.” ⁸

Paul’s successors expressed similar sentiments. John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, ⁹ Benedict XVI in a speech at Westminster Hall, ¹⁰ and Francis in Fratelli Tutti ¹¹ all supported the centrality of democracy in promoting human development. Both democratic institutions and a democratic ethos are vital goods. Fostering an appropriate political culture in support of democracy has become a major motif in Catholic social teaching of the post-conciliar era. As the Compendium expresses:

An authentic democracy is not merely the result of a formal observation of a set of rules but is the fruit of a convinced acceptance of the values that inspire democratic procedures: the dignity of every human person, the respect of human rights, commitment to the common good as the purpose and guiding criterion for political life. If there is no general consensus on these values, the deepest meaning of democracy is lost and its stability is compromised. ¹²

The brief overview above illustrates that, despite varying judgments in the past, modern Catholic social teaching has aligned itself with those who support democracy as the political form of governance most congenial to the values of the Catholic social tradition. ¹³

Democratic Measurement and Backsliding

Since Huntington published his thesis about waves of democracy, there has been a significant decline in the number and quality of democratic regimes. Nearly a third of all the democracies that existed during the third-wave era have eroded or even dissolved. Larry Diamond, former co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, observed that much of the 2000s has seen a democratic recession that could become a depression. This recession or decline has encompassed a weakening of democratic institutions and practices like free and fair elections, peaceful transitions of power, independent media, and individual rights of free expression and association.

The number of democratic nations “peaked in 2006 at 57 percent and has steadily declined since, dropping below a majority (to 48 percent) in 2019 for the first time since 1993.” ¹⁴ Huntington foresaw such a reversal in his original thesis, noting that across history, waves of democratization are followed by the failure of some new democracies and backsliding even among established democracies. ¹⁵

The data commonly used by social scientists studying global democracy come from a few sources. Freedom House, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization founded in the US in 1941, has a record of reputable research on the state of democracy in 208 countries and the protection of human rights. Its annual Freedom in the World report provides numerical rankings for the political rights and civil liberties in each country. ¹⁶ Another main source of data about the state of democracy around the globe is provided by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg. ¹⁷ Both institutions report a clear trend of declining democracy around the world. Particularly alarming is the decline among long-established democracies.

While it is not to be assumed that the same political system or set of institutions is applicable in all situations, there should be some consensus about the meaning of the word “democracy.” Robert Dahl, a noted Yale political scientist who made democracy a focus of his research for decades, suggested five criteria for assessing how democratic a political process is: (1) effective participation (all members have effective and equal opportunities to make their views known); (2) voting equality (all members have equal and effective opportunity to vote and votes are counted as equal); (3) informed understanding (all members have equal and effective opportunities to learn about proposed alternatives); (4) control of the agenda (all members have the opportunity to choose if or how matters get on the agenda); and (5) inclusion of adults (all or most of the adult population has full rights regarding the first four criteria). Various political regimes approximated the ideals enshrined in these criteria, and while no country satisfied Dahl’s criteria fully, they did provide a scale of democracy. ¹⁸

In its Democracy Report 2025, the V-Dem Institute maintains that “electoral democracy is a necessary core for any type of democracy at the national level.” Electoral democracy is deemed to exist “when elections are free, fair, and recurring; elected officials wield political power de facto; suffrage is universal; political parties and candidates can form freely and compete; and the environment around elections make for a reasonably level playing field with speech, media, and civil society freedom.” ¹⁹ The V-Dem report also uses a liberal democracy index in conjunction with the democratic criteria. That index includes “constraints on the executive by the legislature and the judiciary, and the rule of law ensuring respect for civil liberties.” ²⁰

Larry Diamond relies heavily on the research of Freedom House in his work and cites a population’s ability to choose leaders in free and fair elections—what V-Dem calls electoral democracy—as crucial for determining a democracy.

Elections are free when diverse parties and candidates can contest and campaign, when people and groups can organize to support their candidates and are able to criticize incumbents, and when there is a secret ballot as well as low political violence. Elections are fair when they are administered by impartial officials and courts, when there is a reasonably level playing field to access the media and other resources, and when there is universal adult suffrage and independent monitoring of the voting and the count. ²¹

The descriptions of democratic politics from Dahl, Diamond, Freedom House, and the V-Dem Institute all have sufficient overlap to permit transnational assessments of the degree to which nations may be considered democracies, even liberal democracies.

Terminology of Backsliding

Despite broad agreement in the literature that we are in an era of democratic decline, there is no consensus on what to name the process of backsliding. A variety of terms are used to underscore certain features of the decline. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way propose the expression “competitive authoritarianism” to describe a process that has been going on for more than a decade. They note that Freedom House has downgraded the United States’ global freedom index score from 92 out of 100 in 2014, when it was tied with France, to 83, alongside Panama and Romania. They blame most of the decline on the impact of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Levitsky and Way suggest that “the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed.” Rather, “what lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.” Though multiparty elections and the formal observance of democratic campaigning remain, “the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game.” They observe this is how things have already evolved in Venezuela, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. ²²

In the global erosion of democracy, Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein see the rise of a new phenomenon that is not captured by the concept of authoritarianism. They note that “the great divide between democracy and authoritarianism draws our attention to the question of who rules and the conditions under which leaders ascend to power, but it tells us little about how rule is carried out.” ²³ They utilize a distinction made by Max Weber between bureaucracy and patrimonialism, which has to do with the motivation to obey a political leader. Weber maintained that a government’s officials accepted a leader’s commands for one of two reasons: “because of their sense of duty to the person of the leader or because of their sense of duty to law and abstract rules.” The first motive, the patrimonial one, “was emotional, one of respect, friendship, and devotion, embodied in the beloved monarch. . . . In its purest form ‘patrimonialism’ amounts to rule by the friends and family of the leader.” For Hanson and Kopstein, “a patrimonial regime is a form of legitimate domination in which the ruler and his staff fuse administration with personal authority, considering the state itself to be a ‘family business’ of sorts.” ²⁴ The authors argue that the “patrimonial wave emerged in postcommunist Russia” as a direct assault on Western liberalism. Patrimonial leaders may be democratically elected and may lead state bureaucracies, but they seek patrimonial legitimacy. Family and friends often criticize “deep states” to promote the leader’s rule. ²⁵ Hanson and Kopstein cite Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Boris Johnson in Great Britain, and Donald Trump in the US as examples of patrimonial governance.

Two other political scientists argue that US democracy is effectively dominated by economic elites. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page authored a widely cited 2014 study analyzing almost eighteen hundred policy issues that arose in Congress over two decades. The study indicated that the viewpoints of wealthy individuals and business groups heavily informed the eventual outcome of an issue, while the views of the middle class mattered little, and the opinions of the poor mattered not at all. Gilens and Page observed that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” ²⁶ Average Americans may occasionally get policies that they want, but that is because their wishes overlap with those of the truly influential economic elites, which the authors call “democracy by coincidence.” Democratic majorities seeking a policy change not supported by economic elites are successful less than 20 percent of the time. The authors concluded that in American democracy, “the majority does not rule.” ²⁷ Gilens and Page argue that democracy in the United States has effectively become an economic oligarchy.

Besides the various assessments of democracy offered by academics, there is another influential viewpoint that has been espoused by a practicing politician. Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, has led a movement he calls “illiberal democracy.” That term was initially used by the political journalist Fareed Zakaria to disparage countries that had moved away from authoritarian governance and adopted free elections without also creating liberal institutions to secure individual rights. ²⁸ He saw this as a flaw in some of the third-wave democracies that transitioned to free elections without establishing the concomitant political culture of liberalism.

While Orbán initially objected to the charge, over time he embraced it. In a 2014 speech, he declared that “a democracy does not necessarily have to be liberal. Just because a state is not liberal, it can still be a democracy.” He went on to explicitly acknowledge that “the new state we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.” Four years later, in another speech, Orbán argued for “an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called Christian democracy.” He then clarified what he meant by this latter term: “Let us confidently declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal; it is, if you like, illiberal.” ²⁹

Of course, Orbán’s idea of Christian democracy is quite different from the version endorsed by the Christian Democrat political parties that played major roles in establishing liberal democracies in Europe after World War II. For Orbán, Christian democracy differs from liberal democracy on three key issues: multiculturalism, immigration, and family life. He seeks to equate liberal democracy with cultural pluralism, open borders, and issues like gay marriage and transgenderism. He wants “to convince Europeans who find themselves on the conservative side of these social issues that they are being ill-treated and disrespected in contemporary liberal democracies.” ³⁰

Orbán effectively uses “liberal democracy” the same way US political discourse uses “liberal” to designate the left side of the spectrum, to mean progressive in opposition to conservative. He “seeks to use the dissatisfaction of conservatives with ‘liberal’ social and cultural positions to pry them away from their fundamental commitment to liberal democracy.” ³¹ Orbán and members of his Fidesz party in Hungary have sought to forge a coalition with various center-right groups in the European People’s Party, the largest political bloc in the European Parliament. He aims to blend social conservatism with various authoritarian policies, thereby undercutting support for liberal democracy among center-right political groups and promoting Hungary as a model for the rest of Europe.

Cause of Backsliding: Unresponsiveness, Fear, Populism

What caused democracy to backslide after the third wave? The forces at work vary between regions. In Europe, many point to the poor governance of centrist parties like the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, which failed to address two crises: the economic recession of 2008 and the refugee surge of 2015. There is some consensus that these failures led to the rise of populist leaders and movements that have weakened liberal democracy.

The center-left parties largely followed the neoliberal consensus that emerged after the collapse of communism. For example, Tony Blair in England and Gerhard Schröder in Germany turned “away from representing worker interests and defending the welfare state” to embrace neoliberal economics. Consequently, “largely ignored were the traditional trade-union and labor constituencies of the center-left. Instead, an elite consensus on the desirability of international economic integration came to shape the terms of the debate, with far less attention paid to those left behind.” ³²

Those on the center-right who were already enthusiastic supporters of Thatcherite policies simply continued in that vein. They supported free trade, minimal state regulation, reduced social welfare, and less taxation. Under the banner of TINA (“there is no alternative”), Thatcher’s Tory party argued that free market capitalism is the only viable economic system, and that viewpoint became the prevailing outlook among mainstream European politicians.

Coupled with the processes of globalization, the neoliberal program of trade and investment meant that many Western economies shifted to technology and finance, leaving behind those with skills suited to the manufacturing, agriculture, and extraction industries. The last four decades have seen rising wealth inequality, with “spectacular income growth accrued not only to the top 1% but to minuscule numbers of spectacularly wealthy individuals.” ³³ The skewed distribution of wealth in this period created wider economic disparities across societies. ³⁴ The center-left failure to meaningfully contrast with the center-right fed the perception that mainstream politics was unresponsive to the needs of blue-collar workers and others affected by globalization, free trade, and the shifts to tech and financial services in Western economies. Inadequate government assistance often left workers to manage the cost of adjusting to these changes on their own. That left an opening for populist parties to criticize centrist parties as indifferent to workers and to present alternative policies.

Then came the 2008 recession. Incited by bad subprime mortgage investments on the part of US banks, it was the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The recession burst the bubble of neoliberalism, leading to further disillusionment with centrist democratic politics, and enabling populist parties to make additional inroads among those who felt left behind economically. As Larry Diamond notes, “Inequality was dramatically increasing, and a gulf was opening up in advanced industrial democracies between the younger, more educated, cosmopolitan, and technologically sophisticated populations of the cities and the older, less ‘globalized’ populations of rural and small-town areas.” ³⁵

At this time, US prestige and the idea of promoting democracy had already been tarnished by the Iraq War in 2003. The failed efforts of the Bush and Obama administrations to establish political stability in Afghanistan added to the sense that liberal democracy and free market capitalism were not the inevitable future.

Just as some of the worst of the economic crisis was easing, another shockwave hit Europe: the 2015 refugee issue. While earlier failures in economic and foreign policy fed populism in general, the refugee topic overwhelmingly fed right-wing populism. Concern about curtailing immigration, especially from the Middle East and Africa, came to the fore in European policy debates, just as concern about Mexican, Central American, and South American refugees and migrants loomed large in US politics. ³⁶ As a result, “European politics was transformed in at least four ways: 1) The political salience of immigration grew; 2) far-right parties surged at the polls; 3) mainstream parties shifted to the right; and 4) Viktor Orbán emerged as a key player in European politics.” ³⁷

Populists make two major claims: First, political elites are self-serving and indifferent to the needs of ordinary people; and second, populist movements represent the “people” rather than specific interest groups catered to by mainstream political parties. ³⁸ Consequently, populism “considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and . . . argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” ³⁹ The result is a desire for direct democracy and popular sovereignty rather than institutions and practices that mediate popular will and limit the power of the majority.

European populists benefited from the failure of mainstream parties to offer economic alternatives to the neoliberal consensus, and elections shifted to focus on cultural issues since the major centrist parties were largely indistinguishable on economics. ⁴⁰ The alienated working class and the poor, along with others experiencing economic anxiety due to high job competition and low wages, turned to right-wing populists who infused this anxiety with concern about immigration and cultural dilution (e.g., loss of language, ethnic customs, and religious tradition). The populist campaign branded immigration as an issue the government had failed to control. Immigrants and refugees constituted a “crisis.” ⁴¹ Populists are nationalists, not internationalists. They are “protectionist in the broad sense of the term, serving as bulwarks against foreign goods, foreign immigrants, and foreign ideas.” Contemporary populists often “join forces with cultural conservatives against what they regard as progressives’ attack on traditional morality.” ⁴²

It is important to note, however, that the relationship between immigration and populism is complex. Populists “won votes in countries where immigration soared (Germany) and where it is almost entirely absent (the Czech Republic) . . . it is not simply the presence of immigrants that leads voters to support populists, but the active exploitation or even creation by politicians of popular fear and anxieties.” ⁴³ Two factors are particularly notable in this regard. First is the demographic element. Studies show that in Europe, populism appeals to older males who are less educated, uphold traditional values, believe society is in decline, support national identity over the EU, and worry about the impact of “outsiders.” ⁴⁴ Indeed, “the single most powerful correlate of populist voting both in the United States and in Europe is low population density.” ⁴⁵ Second is the role of social media. Regardless of any positive impact, it is clear to many political observers that social media has “contributed to polarization and a coarsening of public discourse” on the domestic front; abroad, it has “facilitated foreign disinformation campaigns and other forms of external interference in the political life of [European] democracies.” ⁴⁶

Social rifts lead to sharp political divides and undercut an electorate’s ability to resist the appeal of a strong leader who promises to cut through any political impasse to get things done. The skill of populist leaders is found in “their ability to draw political battle lines along social cleavages that were only simmering when these leaders were first elected.” ⁴⁷

Because many liberal democratic regimes intentionally divide power between multiple institutions to slow decision-making and encourage compromise, and because all liberal democracies prevent the majority from riding roughshod over the rights of individuals and minorities, populist movements can experience frustration with the pace of change, raising the temptation to back more decisive policies that move toward authoritarian leadership. ⁴⁸

However, in today’s democratic recession, it is neither military coups nor violent rebellions that bring autocrats to power. Rather, they attain power through a slow executive takeover whereby another branch of government, usually the legislative, becomes complicit with authoritarian measures. Often, the center-right party attempts to accommodate the populist right but winds up losing votes and power to the populists. The executive has been legally elected and, through a variety of measures, arguably licit, assumes enough power to convert a liberal democratic government into a competitive authoritarian state. Hungary under Viktor Orbán provides a useful case study of democratic backsliding.

The Demise of a Democracy

Orbán has sought to “embrace democracy and at the same time to jettison liberalism,” establishing a new path that others might follow. ⁴⁹ His illiberal democracy has gained attention with the rise of populism, which, “after all, is an outlook that emphatically claims to be democratic and that relies for its legitimacy on elections as expressions of the popular will. Yet when populists come to power, they tend to infringe upon the rule of law, the independence of the courts and the media, and the rights of individuals and minorities, as has been the case in Hungary.” ⁵⁰

Orbán has succeeded at drawing “political battle lines across social cleavages.” ⁵¹ When such social divides are deep, they “undercut the public’s ability to curb the illiberal inclinations of elected politicians.” ⁵² In Hungary’s polarized society, voters became pro- or anti-Orbán first, and democrats second. In such societies, “even voters who value democracy will be willing to sacrifice democratic competition for the sake of electing politicians who champion their interests.” ⁵³ It is not that voters do not support democracy, but their support is tenuous. The warning goes as far back as the 1950s, when Seymour Martin Lipset recognized that profound group polarization presented a danger to democracy. Robert Dahl, Giovanni Sartori, Juan Linz, and Alfred Stepan in the 1970s, as well as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in the 2000s, have all argued the same point. ⁵⁴

The topics of economic anxiety and immigration blend fears about job “competition and lowered wages together with fears of cultural dilution in a politically explosive mix.” ⁵⁵ Due to the aging population in Europe, many countries were already worried about the security of the social welfare policies put in place by Christian Democrats and other centrist parties in the postwar era. Populists like Orbán successfully portrayed immigration as a threat to these social services. Many voters saw “this safety net as already fraying, and they fear it will be strained to the breaking point by waves of new potential claimants to education, training, health services, housing, and welfare benefits.” ⁵⁶

However, neither immigration nor economic inequality is powerful enough to singlehandedly motivate a populist surge. Two additional factors are key to the present democratic demise. First is the political void created when mainstream center-right and center-left parties fail to address voter concerns about economic and cultural matters, which populists occupy to seize influence and gain new adherents. Second is the skillful manipulation, one might even say manufacture, of fears and anxieties by leaders like Orbán in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and Chávez in Venezuela, among others.

In almost all situations where populists were elected to power in recent decades, “they begin to undermine the liberal elements of the political system.” First, populist leaders “attack the rights of critical individuals or unpopular minorities.” As they push their claim to embody the will of the people, “populist leaders become implacable enemies of the rule of law and the separation of powers.” ⁵⁷ This proclivity is why they are called “illiberal democrats.”

During the 1990s and 2000s, Hungary had multiple elections in which the government changed hands between center-right and center-left parties, and “as recently as 2010, Hungary was widely regarded as a consolidated democracy with strong institutions, a competitive party system, a vibrant civil society, and free and diverse media.” ⁵⁸ After one of those electoral defeats in 2002, Orbán altered his strategy to appeal to Hungarian nationalism and religious conservatism. His “anti-elite appeals tapped into hitherto dormant resentments, particularly among rural voters.” He also began violating certain social taboos by using antisemitic and anti-Roma rhetoric that appealed to the far-right. After the 2008 economic crisis, his party, Fidesz, returned to power in 2010 with a parliamentary supermajority. ⁵⁹

Over time, Orbán “replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic, he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since.” ⁶⁰ This was done with the complicity of various loyalists in the business community who endorsed Orbán’s political agenda in return for economic favors. These oligarchs are sometimes called NER, or NER-people, or NERistan—nicknames derived from the Hungarian-language acronym for “System of National Corporation,” Orbán’s term for his political system. ⁶¹ “NERistan amounts to about 20 percent of the Hungarian economy,” which means one-fifth of Hungary’s companies operate “not on market principles, not on merit-based principles, but basically on loyalty.” ⁶² The Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Heritage Foundation, ranks Hungary lowest in the European Union for government integrity.

All this was done without deploying tanks in the streets of Budapest or using dramatically illegal tactics. Rather, Orbán used so-called “soft” forms of repression: threats or actual “lawsuits, tax audits, or criminal investigations” that raise the price of opposing his government. ⁶³ His treatment of the media is an example of such soft repression. His government did not close newspapers or arrest journalists. Rather, he politicized state media outlets, enacted various tax and regulatory changes that drove international media groups out of Hungary, and helped loyal NER-people obtain loans from banks to facilitate the purchase of a leading opposition news website. He also directed government advertising toward favored news sources and let it be known to private businesses that he monitored their advertising expenses. “Market forces” gradually led to many news sources closing down, but Orbán’s fingerprints were not on the weapons that killed them. ⁶⁴ In the past fifteen years, Orbán and his Fidesz party have achieved “near-total control of the mass media while grotesquely gerrymandering electoral districts and intensely politicizing the civil service, the judiciary, and other regulatory bodies. What Orbán is running is not an illiberal democracy; it is a very clever autocracy.” ⁶⁵

Democracy in the USA

Democracy in the United States has been backsliding for more than a decade, according to Freedom House’s annual global freedom index. ⁶⁶ Like Freedom House, the V-Dem Report notes that it only covers events through the elections of 2024 around the world. For the United States, this means that “recent and extremely worrying developments are not captured by the V-Dem data yet. They will be reflected in the V-Dem data only next year.” ⁶⁷

Similarities between the second Trump administration and other autocratic governments are regularly pointed out in public media. Attacking higher education, threatening legal action to intimidate institutions and firms, ⁶⁸ using the presidency to enrich himself and his family, ⁶⁹ violating longstanding cultural and legal norms that limit executive power, ⁷⁰ openly treating select corporations and businesses with political favoritism ⁷¹ —all this has been evident in the first year of Trump’s second term. His style of governance shares many features with “patrimonial” leadership. ⁷² However, his identification with populist politics must not be overlooked.

Jan-Werner Müller is a German historian of political ideas and professor of politics at Princeton whose work is widely cited in literature on populism. Müller argues that a central feature of populism is that it is basically anti-pluralist. It has already been noted that Cas Mudde described populism as a society divided into the people and a corrupt elite. Mudde also maintained that populist politics seek to express the general will of the people, bypassing institutions that limit the power of the majority. ⁷³ Müller advances this insight by proposing that populism is only possible in systems of representative government. ⁷⁴ After all, populist leaders claim to be the absolute and unique representatives of the people, rejecting the pluralism of democratic society and invoking a fictitious common will. Dissenters are characterized as corrupt or brainwashed agents of the elite—the “them” in the “us versus them” populist narrative.

What populism offers is not so much a coherent political platform but a vision of crisis in which the system is rigged, societal order is unraveling, chaos is looming on the horizon, and those presently in charge are either unwilling or unable to remedy the situation. The message of the second Trump campaign and administration has been a narrative, divorced from fact, of an invasion of immigrants; of urban crime run rampant; of other nations, including allies, taking advantage of the US; of cultural elites scorning traditional family values and religious morality; and of a demonized opposition who have persecuted him and abandoned the true patriots who see the American Dream evaporating before their eyes.

Müller believes that, despite the prevalence of democratic language in populism, populist movements contain a dangerous antidemocratic impulse. He fears that when a populist leader comes to power, all those who are not included among “the people” will be denied legitimacy and risk punishment. While agreeing with his concern, I would see the populist challenge not as anti-democratic but as anti-liberal democracy. This is the common ground among Trump in the US, Orbán in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, Berlusconi in Italy, Le Pen in France, and Chávez in Venezuela.

Larry Diamond believes the damage to US democratic institutions is not yet lasting, but the harm to democratic culture has been significant. He observes that polarization has continued to grow and civil liberties have been constrained, sometimes by preemptive compliance, and sometimes due to external pressure (as seen with certain law firms and universities). Deportations have raised challenges to the rule of law and due process while creating a climate of fear among many immigrants. However, he believes the US is “definitely still an electoral democracy in the sense that there is no evidence that we can’t still choose and replace our leaders in free and fair elections . . . so far the damage has principally been to the liberal aspect of democracy.” ⁷⁵

According to Diamond, the difference between a liberal democracy and a merely electoral democracy is threefold: “first, strong protections for civil liberties; second, a fiercely independent judiciary committed to protecting those freedoms and due process of law; and third the neutrality of key institutions of accountability and governance to constrain the arbitrary functioning of executive power even if it is duly elected.” ⁷⁶ The neutral institutions of constraint Diamond alludes to include agencies like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the offices of inspectors general and Government Accountability Office, as well as the civil service. Many of these agencies and their personnel have come under fire from the Trump administration.

The British parliamentarian and jurist Jonathan Sumption has an equally dark reading of the state of American democracy. He argues that “what we are witnessing in the United States is the cultural collapse—not the institutional collapse—the cultural collapse of the democratic spirit. . . . Democracy requires for its survival not just a robust institutional framework, a sound constitution and so on. It requires a cultural attitude which values the political process.” ⁷⁷

Sumption makes clear the distinction between institutional and cultural, describing democracy as “a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government and a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable.” However, “a democratic culture depends on something more than institutions. . . . It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow citizens with whom they disagree—and not as enemies to be smashed.” ⁷⁸ Without using Hanson and Kopstein’s language of patrimonialism to describe Trump, Sumption sees in the US president three traits that simulate it: He is a charismatic leader surrounded by a personal cult; he identifies the state with himself; and he rejects the legitimacy of opposition or dissent. ⁷⁹

Recall that some political scientists view the decline of liberal democracy as a step on the path to competitive authoritarianism. The strategy of Orbán and other autocrats is difficult to recognize as authoritarianism because some external democratic processes may still be present (i.e., competitive elections), though the playing field is tilted to ensure the desired outcome. Public institutions are used for political advantage—“using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines.” ⁸⁰ Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt suggest “a simple metric” for recognizing the onset of competitive authoritarianism: the cost of opposing the government. Legitimate opposition is a fundamental element of liberal democracy. Do people feel safe opposing those in power? Can they safely protest? Can people publish criticism of the government? Or does expressing a dissenting viewpoint lead to punishment either by the government or by the government’s supporters? The authors argue that if “politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civil institutions may lose essential funding or tax exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters,” then the government has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. ⁸¹ Trump’s critics may not be jailed or sent into exile, but “the heightened cost of public opposition will lead many of them to retreat to the political sidelines . . . [M]any people who would normally oppose the government may conclude that it simply is not worth the risk or effort.” ⁸²

As Diamond, Sumption, and others maintain, when the culture of a democracy is in peril, the question of civic duties becomes more sharply put. How to be a citizen of a democracy when voting is not enough? When criticism of the government is not risk-free, what is the obligation incurred by those who believe in the duty to defend democracy? As Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt observe: “Autocrats rarely entrench themselves in power through force alone; they are enabled by the accommodation and inaction of those who might have resisted.” ⁸³ What, then, is the individual’s role in resisting the decline of democracy? And what role should a collective body, such as the Catholic Church, take to witness to its social teaching?