If you’re worried about American democracy after Jan. 6, you’re one of the optimists

Now that the nationwide hail of Fourth of July fireworks and gunfire has abated — if only for the moment in the latter case — it’s reasonable to ask what exactly we just finished celebrating. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, one of several raters of global democratic bona fides, what we were feting is a “flawed democracy.”

Seems a little ... generous, doesn’t it?

The latest edition of the research group’s Democracy Index did find America slipping deeper into the quasi-democratic ranks of the world’s nations, to 26th. That happened to have the embarrassing effect of putting us well behind the United Kingdom — you know, the people we broke away from 246 years ago in a fit of pro-democratic pique.

“The run-up to the change of administrations in late January 2021 was uncharacteristically tumultuous, marked by a riot at the U.S. Capitol and attempts by the outgoing president ... and several Republican lawmakers to overturn the election results,” the index allowed dryly in February. But the analysts seemed cheered by the fact that Joe Biden’s inauguration “proceeded smoothly” — at least once all that rioting was done.

Still, the shadow of Jan. 6 only seems to have grown darker as a House committee details the extent to which that day’s violent coup was plotted by a former president and his allies, to whom one of our two major political parties is in thrall. Nothing tempers one’s star-spangled democratic confidence like the recent memory of a U.S. Capitol overrun by rioters toting Confederate, Trump, and other flags, many of them doubling as weapons, in the worst breach of the building not carried out by our future democratic betters, the Brits — who, by the way, just got rid of their dissembling, discredited chief executive without even having to hold an election.

But an election apparently isn’t enough to get rid of ours. Trump isn’t just threatening to re-seize control of our semi-democracy; he’s still engaged in undoing it through his eternal emissaries on the Supreme Court, which just wrapped up a series of decisions methodically dismantling individual constitutional rights and environmental protections in clear contravention of the public interest and will.

It’s no wonder, really: Made up of judges appointed to lifetime terms with vast powers and no ethical constraints, the court is a caricature of an antidemocratic institution, and it’s acting like it.

Another antidemocratic institution, the Electoral College, ensured the unpopular election of two presidents who appointed a majority of the justices — and most of the conservatives responsible for the recent run of reactionary decisions. The only check on their choices is a legislative body, the Senate, that overrepresents a disproportionately conservative, white, rural minority of the country, effectively depriving tens of millions of voters in California and other states of equal representation.

Besides its fresh efforts at canceling women’s bodily autonomy, unfettering police excesses and enabling the establishment of Christianity as an official religion, the court’s tolerance of runaway partisan gerrymandering helps keep democracy at bay in the other half of Congress, the House, as well as the state legislatures. The justices are threatening to go further by granting plenary power over elections to those gerrymandered legislatures, which would be nothing less than a direct attack on what’s left of our democracy.

So it must have been with intentional irony that Justice Samuel Alito, in his opinion overturning abortion rights, urged Americans who disagree with him to avail themselves of their democratic privileges.

“Women are not without electoral or political power,” Alito wrote. No thanks to him!

Democracy is so out of vogue with Alito’s party that it’s become fashionable within to insist that the United States has never been one. Utah Sen. Mike Lee flatly declared as much on Twitter in October 2020, a few months before he engaged in suspect communications with Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and California lawyer John Eastman about how the presidential election might be overturned. Judging by his rocky reelection campaign, he might soon want to overturn his own.

Unluckily for Lee and company, however, the Economist group figured that “U.S. democratic institutions remain resilient (for now).”

Despite the ominous parenthetical, that was more sanguine than most. The latest edition of the University of Würzburg’s Democracy Matrix is a little more, well, German about it, rating America a “deficient democracy” at No. 36 worldwide, or 10 places lower than the Economist’s analysis.

The Washington-based advocacy group Freedom House still considers the United States a “free” country, but its most recent “Freedom in the World” report judged nearly 60 countries and territories freer. Noting America’s precipitous decline over the past decade, from the ranks of established democracies such as Australia and France to a score more akin to those of “newer democracies like Romania, Croatia and Panama,” the group found that “the erosion of U.S. democracy is remarkable, especially for a country that has long aspired to serve as a beacon of freedom for the world.”

A still more alarming assessment came from the Virginia-based Center for Systemic Peace, which studies global political instability and violence — a pertinent problem given our authoritarian faction’s penchant for ensuring that its supporters are thoroughly armed. By 2020, having noted a “high risk of impending political instability,” dwindling checks on executive power, undermined trust in the electoral process and finally an “attempted coup,” the center’s long-running Polity Project found that the United States had fallen below the “democracy threshold.”

Though the nation’s score recovered last year to the point of rejoining the world’s democracies, the project found that America had at least temporarily descended into “anocracy,” a sort of political science purgatory between autocracy and democracy.

The analysis suggested that to fret about the flaws of America’s democracy is to assume the optimistic position that it is one.