The 2024 election is not just Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump. It’s democracy vs autocracy.

“Do you feel better about your life and about your country today than you did four years ago?”

This primary question has become a mainstay of candidates for elective office in the United States, especially those who desire to unseat opposing incumbent candidates.

Related:

Newsflash Donald Trump: Every day in America is Christian Visibility Day

The separation of church and state has always been a lie, yet Christians still claim they are the persecuted ones.

Gallup’s 2024 World Happiness Report shows that those in the United States feel less good about their lives.

Dive deeper every day

Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues

Daily

Weekly

Good News

The study was released this month to highlight the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness. Of the 143 countries analyzed, the U.S. fell out of the top 20 for the first time, dropping to 23. While U.S. residents over the age of 60 ranked the U.S. relatively high, young people under the age of 30 placed their country at 62.

Criteria analyzed included people’s sense of their country’s overall gross domestic product, social support, health, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity (benevolence to others), perception of corruption. A dystopian society in which to compare one’s country was used as a benchmark.

The rankings began as follows:

1.     Finland

2.     Denmark

3.     Iceland

4.     Sweden

5.     Israel

6.     Netherlands

7.     Norway

8.     Luxembourg

9.     Switzerland

10. Australia

11. New Zealand

12. Costa Rica

13. Kuwait

14. Austria

15. Canada

16. Belgium

17. Ireland

18. Czeck Republic

19. Lithuania

20. U.K.

21. Slovenia

22. U.A.E.

23. U.S.

24. Germany

143. Afghanistan

In a 2022 NBC News poll, a plurality of registered voters marked “Threats to Democracy” as the number one most important issue facing the country, followed by “Cost of Living” and “Jobs and the Economy.”

These results came on the heels of a survey conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center with Tulchin Research indicating that 53% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats believe that the U.S. “seems headed” toward another civil war.

In her new book How Civil Wars Start, Barbara F. Walter warns, “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe… No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline or headed toward war,” but, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America… you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency: 1. The “pre-insurgency” phase, and 2. The “incipient conflict” phase. The final “open insurgency” phase began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. Only time will tell whether this final phase is fully activated.

Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set – the one the CIA task force has found to be most reliable in predicting instability and violence – Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.

U.S. democracy has received the Polity Index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone.

By the end of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800.

“We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”

Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war. “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter states.

“A country standing on this threshold – as America is now, at +5 – can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”

Others have reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the United States on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a November 2021 report.

The report said, “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself.”

And a survey by the academic consortium Bright Line Watch found that 17% of those who identify strongly as Republicans support the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39% favor doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing effectively.

We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, they risk “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare including assassinations and ambushes.”

We cannot say or hear it enough that in this year’s election, we have a choice between democracy and autocracy. Remember, 1932 became the last democratically held election in Germany until after World War II. Let’s not make the same mistake.