by The Editorial Board of the New York Times Oct 31 2025

Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.

Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.

The clearest sign that a democracy has died is that a leader and his party make it impossible for their opponents to win an election and hold power. Once that stage is reached, however, the change is extremely difficult to reverse. And aspiring authoritarians use other excesses, like a cowed legislature and judiciary, to lock in their power.

The United States is not an autocracy today. It still has a mostly free press and independent judiciary, and millions of Americans recently attended the “No Kings” protests. But it has started down an anti-democratic path, and many Americans — including people in positions of power — remain far too complacent about the threat.

The 12 benchmarks in this editorial offer a way to understand and measure how much further Mr. Trump goes in the months and years ahead. We plan to update this index in 2026.

Methodology: In the scales above, the points on the left indicate roughly where the United States, flawed though it was, had been before Mr. Trump took office. Moving even one notch toward autocracy on these scales is a worrisome sign.

Video and images: Damon Winter/The New York Times (2); Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times; Kevin Lamarque/Reuters; Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters; Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock; Ioulex for The New York Times; Sophie Park for The New York Times; Mark Peterson for The New York Times; Doug Mills/The New York Times; Rebecca Noble/Getty Images.

Published Oct. 31, 2025