Findings
The United States is experiencing a set of interconnected democratic challenges that have been building for decades and have now converged into an acute crisis. In the language of the DRG Assessment Framework, the United States faces long-standing and worsening problems of inclusion, political competition, and accountability that have triggered a consensus crisis threatening the foundations of our government and society. For our purposes, a “consensus crisis” in the United States means that common agreement on the role of government, the constitutional rules of the game, and our national identity are breaking down.
The core findings of this assessment — that the U.S. is a backsliding democracy whose democratic institutions are under severe stress and increasingly unable to meaningfully mediate political disputes — are consistent with the conclusions of established global democracy indices. Freedom House, the Polity project, International IDEA, and the V-Dem Institute have each downgraded the United States in recent years, with several classifying it as a partial democracy and/or placing it at meaningful risk of democratic erosion.
Key Highlights
The executive branch has accumulated power with few effective checks
The executive branch has accumulated power at a pace and scale that has strained the traditional system of checks and balances among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.
Since 2025, Congress has provided limited resistance to this aggrandization of executive authority.
The courts have offered more meaningful oversight, though their practical ability to enforce rulings against a recalcitrant executive has proven limited. Ultimately, the courts have not halted or meaningfully slowed democratic decline in the U.S.
The White House is also moving to weaken civil society, the media, and universities, who have historically been an important way to hold the government accountable.
Polarization increasingly reflects identity, not only policy disagreement
American political polarization is not simply a matter of policy disagreement. It reflects a deeper sorting of social identities — by geography, educational attainment, religion, race, and cultural values — that has progressively aligned with party affiliation. This alignment makes political conflict feel existential rather than ordinary, because voters increasingly experience their political identity as inseparable from their broader sense of who they are.
The MAGA coalition has become the dominant force in Republican politics
The political coalition that has formed around these grievances — organized under the banner of Make America Great Again — draws on economic populism, cultural conservatism, elements of white Christian nationalism, and anti-elite sentiment. It has displaced the traditional business-oriented wing of the Republican Party as the dominant force in GOP politics and has organized millions of voters who had previously been less engaged or had voted Democratic.
Neither party is addressing the root causes of this crisis
At the same time, the root causes of this crisis — structural inequities, economic dislocation, the politics of demographic change, and the collapse of a shared information environment — remain inadequately addressed by either major political party.
Both political parties share blame for failing to address the root causes of our current political crisis, but are not equally culpable.
Today’s most influential republican ideologues often explicitly reject the traditional American notions of inclusive democracy and are trying to leverage the formal and informal power of the presidency to create an executive branch that is all-powerful and not subject to the rule of law.
Only 36 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, according to the June 2026 Real Clear Politics polling average, trailing the GOP by approximately 2 percentage points. The Democratic Party is perceived as being elitist, out of touch with working-class voters' needs, and overly focused on cultural issues rather than economic anxieties.
State and local governments are both partisan battlegrounds and possible sites of renewal
Today, 38 states are controlled by a single party across both the governorship and the state legislature — a striking concentration that reflects the depth of partisan sorting at the subnational level. As a result, state and local governments have become increasingly drawn into national partisan conflicts. At the same time, because state and local governments retain higher levels of public trust than federal institutions, efforts to rebuild democratic consensus around shared local concerns about economic opportunity, public safety, and community wellbeing may gain traction more readily at the subnational level than in Washington.
Why This Assessment Matters
DRG saw a gap in the analysis of the state of US democracy and wanted to use a well tested framework to broadly understand the challenges our democracy faces. As global democracy and peace building experts who have used this framework in dozens of countries, we are uniquely positioned to assess the situation through an apolitical lens with a goal toward identifying ways to reverse our democratic decline. In order to collectively tackle our problems and make our democracy work better for all we must start with the evidence and shape our response from it.
Who Should Use This Assessment
Addressing the immediate crisis while also confronting its deeper structural roots will require a coordinated, long-term strategy across civil society, government, and the private sector. This assessment is intended as a shared diagnostic to inform those efforts. This assessment can be used by activists, the media, think tanks, candidates and office holders to help inform their efforts to support, defend, and deepen democracy in the United States.