“Democracy dies in darkness” is the slogan of The Washington Post, which the paper adopted in 2017 after being used by its lionized reporter Bob Woodward for years in reference to Richard Nixon. But democracy doesn’t just die in darkness. Today, democracies also die in daylight — under studio lights, on cable news panels and at press conferences — not in secrecy, but with everyone watching and no one acting.
Across the world, traditional democracies are crumbling in plain sight. In Latin America, prominent among them are Mexico, Colombia and Peru, with the latter providing the most pronounced recent example. It has had seven presidents come and go in seven years. The most recent, Dina Boluarte, left office with an astonishingly low approval rating of just 3%. Power has leaked into the hands of corruption networks and organized crime, what analysts call poderes paralelos, or “parallel powers,” operating in plain view. The state still functions on paper, but not in practice.
The same hollowing-out is visible even in the European Union, where Hungary still holds elections but has gutted the institutions that make them meaningful. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a favorite of the current U.S. administration, has turned public media into a government propaganda network and reshaped the courts to serve his party’s interests. The fact that Hungary remains a nominal democracy and full member of the EU is proof that democratic collapse can happen without any open confrontation or suspension of elections. Nor is the trend limited to the continent.
In Britain, the far-right politician Nigel Farage is gliding toward power, buoyed by his Reform U.K. movement, an outgrowth of the Brexit Party. Farage’s nativism has helped steer the country toward a politics of resentment dressed in populist rhetoric, perhaps best captured by the “Stop the Boats” slogan, first popularized by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and now adopted by Farage as a rallying cry. Populists have mastered the same trick: you do not have to remove the niceties of democracy to rule without constraint.
Even with the cold comfort of this month’s off-year election results, we would be wrong to think the United States is any different. Our democracy is not being toppled; it is wasting away. Congress has become less a chamber of deliberation than a performance stage, a place where outrage substitutes for lawmaking.
The 119th Congress, which has passed less than 1% of introduced legislation, is on track to become the least productive in modern history, surpassing even the 118th, which managed just 3%. By contrast, nearly 10% of bills were passed in the 1960s, when compromise was still considered a virtue.
Over the decades since, behind the rhetoric of compromise from figures like Ronald Reagan, hyperpartisanship hardened, and the habit of governing withered. After years of treating government as the problem and tax cuts as the only acceptable use of power, the Republican Party has turned paralysis into ideology — elevating obstruction into a political principle. Government shutdowns are no longer political crises, but political strategies; debt-ceiling standoffs and filibuster threats are used to “prove” that the government cannot function.
Democrats, when they briefly control the machinery, manage short bursts of reform such as the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. But those moments feel more like interruptions than renewal. The deeper trend is fatigue: a political class that no longer leads so much as presides over decline. As the legislative body’s capacity to solve problems withers, frustration turns to resentment while performance replaces policy, waiting for the void to be filled.
Into that vacuum has stepped the executive branch. President Donald Trump did not invent this decay; he simply recognized and exploited it. He has treated the presidency like a mob family business, using it to promote properties, merchandise and cryptocurrency, pardon allies and donors and punish enemies. His children have blurred the line between public duty and private enrichment. What he built is not simply corruption, it is kleptocracy openly endorsed by his allies and supporters.
Those allies have also been helping the Trump administration implement key pieces of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint from The Heritage Foundation that seeks to centralize power in the presidency. Hundreds of agencies are already aligning with its agenda, including mass federal job cuts and the dismantling of regulatory safeguards. In addition, Trump has even floated the possibility of a third term — constitutionally barred by the 22nd Amendment, but discussed openly by him and his advisers.
Meanwhile, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has continued its evolution into a national police force. Under the renewed Trump administration and its Project 2025 agenda, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the country’s largest federal law enforcement agency with a budget that surpasses the combined funding of the FBI, DEA and U.S. Marshals Service. And its authority has expanded far beyond immigration enforcement.
The agency now operates with minimal external oversight and runs nationwide data-sharing programs with local law enforcement. Its tactical units are conducting raids in cities hundreds of miles from the border. These units have refused access even to members of Congress, who have oversight authority, and expanded surveillance through private-sector contracts. When a democracy builds an internal secret police and justifies them as “law enforcement,” it crosses a line history remembers.
The Washington Post says democracy dies in darkness. But what if the greater danger is that it dies in the light while being televised, analyzed and monetized? Our institutions are still standing, our elections continue and our courts still meet. But each day, more of their substance is drained away.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
