How is democracy doing?

A new tool from Protect Democracy offers a speedometer on democratic backsliding

Authoritarians often thrive on chaos. Since first taking office in 2017, Donald Trump has defined almost every news cycle, and he’s often created so much news that it can be hard to distinguish signal from noise.

The chaos is the strategy.

Even for those of us whose work involves following government and democracy, it can be difficult to keep up with every development. When people can’t keep track of what’s happening and what it means for the things they care about, they’re more likely to throw up their hands in defeat. Modern authoritarians don’t want us to be able to understand the entirety of what’s happening to our democracy. That’s why they disguise their assaults in a flurry of actions, scandals, and outrages.

That misdirection is part of a larger effort. Authoritarianism works through a cycle of fear and acquiescence. One by one, would-be dictators convince everyone who would stand in their way to voluntarily surrender. To obey in advance.

In this effort, autocrats take advantage of a fundamental aspect of human psychology: When we feel uncertain, we feel afraid. When we feel overwhelmed, we’re more likely to retreat — to back away and try to protect ourselves from dangers unseen or unknown. By flooding the zone, Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to break down our rational faculties and scare us into a sense of panic and confusion.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve seen this pattern play out across law firms, universities, media companies, and more. When the attacks feel overwhelming, targets are much more likely to simply crumple.

That’s where our new tool comes in.

Because no matter how bad things may be, objectively, clarity is always better than confusion. Understanding the specific contours of threats makes it much easier to get our heads around what needs to be done. And to steel ourselves against coming attacks.

The Authoritarian Action Watch is designed with the explicit goal of helping every American better understand what recent news developments mean for American democracy. In that clarity, they can find their own sense of resolve.

A new tool for discerning signal from noise

The Authoritarian Action Watch is designed to answer one question: How are we doing, as a democracy? To do that, it offers users an overall snapshot that works a little like a weather report. It’s not based on an absolute scale (the temperature can always get hotter), but a directional one that tells you how much worse or better things have gotten over the past few weeks.

To generate that snapshot, we rely on the Authoritarian Playbook, which describes the seven tactics authoritarians rely on all over the world to consolidate and hold power. For each of these tactics, Protect Democracy’s experts analyze events in the news, and determine what they mean for the trajectory of American democracy.

Is this good news, bad news, or, as is often the case, a mix of both?

This tool is designed to illustrate the way our democracy is moving at a given moment, but it also seeks to explain why the Trump administration is making some of the moves it’s making. You might learn, for example, that deployments of ICE and CBP agents to cities across the country are not only about immigration enforcement. Instead, they’re part of a larger strategy aimed at quashing dissent, stoking violence, and ultimately making Americans feel less free to exercise their rights, including their right to choose their leaders.

Even as we analyze the actions of the Trump administration and what they mean for our democracy, we also want the Authoritarian Action Watch to offer signals about all the ways the democracy movement is pushing back. Over the first year of Trump’s second term in office, it often felt like authoritarianism was ascendant, and there was very little standing in its way. What we saw over the course of that first year, though, was that regular Americans are ready to take a stand to protect the ideals this country has always stood for, albeit imperfectly.

So even as we track domestic deployments, acts of executive entrenchment, and attempts to capture the media, the Authoritarian Action Watch will also highlight the actions of people with far less power than the president and his administration who are nonetheless standing up to defend democracy. This tool will capture the parents who are part of school drop-off caravans in Minneapolis, the state legislators who are bucking their own party on crucial votes, and the grand juries who are standing in the way of weaponized indictments. These are crucial reminders that this fight is not already lost.

We believe the Authoritarian Action Watch can be a useful tool for helping you understand what all of us are living through. The coming months and years will be some of the most trying for our democracy in decades. This tool should help us understand every twist and turn, and then, help us do something about it.