American Democracy at Risk:: Ninety-One Threats We Face Today

Democracy is at risk in America today. The Founders strove to create a republic based on representative democracy principles, distributing power across three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. However, since the presidency of Franklin D. Rosevelt, the executive branch has gradually become disproportionately more powerful than the other two branches, thus drifting slowly toward autocracy. In prior periods—such as the Civil War era, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights era—our democracy has nearly fractured. We have managed to overcome those perils, but this time may be di erent. In recent years, we have seen other democracies slide into autocracy—Hungary, Turkey, and India, for example. In 2025, we observed the second Trump administration entering with concrete plans to replace our democracy with an autocratic regime. Unfortunately, many of those plans have already been realized. To pull back from this slide, it is urgent that we recognize the factors that are pushing us towards autocratic rule so that we can work together to reverse this trend. We undertook a systematic analysis of exactly where gaps exist between our current reality and what is needed for a stable and productive American government. We identi ed ninety-one such gaps; then we classi ed each gap as a legal or societal threat and clustered them into ve categories: i.e., facets. For example: Facet #1: Electoral Gerrymandering and manipulation of elections Foreign election interference Facet #2: Egalitarian Growing economic inequality White supremacy and misogyny are resurgent Facet #3: Civil Liberties Abuses of emergency/war/prosecution powers Congress and Supreme Court no longer protect our rights Facet #4: Communal Con ation of money/speech and bribery/gifts Corporate takeover of free press and social media Facet #5: Existential Unitary executive theory concentrates power in presidents’ hands Anti-democratic ideologies and religious movements