Stephen Eichler, Director, Greater Aventura Democratic Club
I have recently read an excellent editorial published Oct. 14, 2025
by Zack Beauchamp, senior columnist at Vox.com
It is entitled “Can America Recover from Trump”
In his analysis, Beauchamp explains the seemingly contrary positions of social scientists who study democratic and autocratic countries around the world. They discovered that historically 90% of these opposite structured governments both make reverse U turns within an average 5-6 years time line that either restores freedoms enjoyed in protected in democratic nations …or make Uturns from protected freedoms to autocratic dictatorships.
After considering this must read piece, I realized what was missed in this well researched analysis. I have commented on why it is now critical that Democratic leadership communicate how this historical trend specifically will seriously hurt the majority of American citizens for a minimum of five years.
The foregoing work and Beauchamp’s analysis will be viewed in italics font. My analysis and comments will be in the font you are now viewing. To begin:
Can America Recover from Trump?
The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.
Can any democracy come back from this?
Earlier this year, two teams of researchers published papers trying to answer this exact question — and came to seemingly opposite conclusions.
Both papers focused on what they call “democratic U-turns:” where a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers. The first team’s conclusions were optimistic: They identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.” The second team focused on 21 recent cases and inverted the findings — concluding that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were short-lived mirages.
The scholarly research on U-turns draws from a database called V-Dem, widely considered the gold standard for quantitative research on global democracy. V-Dem works by getting a broad group of experts on individual countries to give numerical assessments of different aspects of that country’s democracy (e.g., how free the press is, or whether elections are administered impartially). These judgments are turned into composite scores that assess how democratic a country is as a whole.
The first team of researchers, the more optimistic ones, are based at the institute that compiles and publishes the V-Dem database. Looking over their own data, authors , (named in Beauchamp's editorial) found that U-turns — defined as a country’s democracy score starting to increase after a recent decline — are very common. Over half of all countries that experience a slide toward autocracy also end up experiencing a U-turn. And those U-turns are typically very successful, hence the top-line finding that 90 percent of U-turns saw a country returning to its previous level of democracy or even improving on it.
Both scholars agree that modern autocratization is different from the historical pattern. Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule.
Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.
Because democratic backsliding happens through law and political maneuvering, rather than at the point of a gun, its opponents have more avenues (such as litigation, legislative resistance, and elections) for disrupting it. This might be why the first team found that attempts at authoritarianism were actually more likely to end in a U-turn in the post-1994 period (73 percent of cases) than in the full historical sample (52 percent).
Eichler’s Comments follow:
After reading this V-Dem research summarized so well by Zack Beauchamp, I realized what was missing in their analysis. It is essential to shine a spot light day and night on what Dems, independents, NDAs and moderate sane Republicans must hammer home to what at least 65% of eligible voting Americans listen to on social media. We must include radio, TV, and internet in the languages of America’s significant population groups.
My epiphany recognizes that today the pace of change is that autocratically controlled countries and increasing numbers of democratic countries are functionally becoming a fully controlled one branch federal Government headed by a dictator. Today, with Republicans controlling all three branches of our Federal government, America is functionally controlled by one autocratic leader and his billionaire supporters including the largest richest corporations and their top executives in Pharmaceutical, Energy, Agricultural, Communications, Commodities and Manufacturing industries.
So what did these researchers miss in their quantitative analysis?
What needs to be our focus to make a U-turn back to our Constitutional democracy and rule of law is to fully consider the historical five to six years it takes for autocracies to recover democracy and freedom for all Americans.
What is surely NOT the focus is liberal media constantly arguing the illegality of each law or Constitutional right that is being overturned or terminated by executive orders or Supreme Court’s outrageous disregard for legal precedent often prior supported by the same Republican senators and Congressional representatives
who supported these rights and laws during the prior presidency.
Who is telling the majority voters in our country what rights, freedom, and basic requirements for safe and healthy existence will be lost over the coming 5-6 years.
Who is telling Americans what it will mean to see health insurance soar in cost and least affordable by those millions of our citizens of all ages who need access to health care the most?
Who is telling Americans that ear marked Medicare as well as Medicaid accounts necessary for the majority of American retirees and our older citizens will be borrowed against with reduced coverages, increased work requirements
and huge increases in our national debt to repay these multi generational accounts in order to keep an autocratic government in power and control.
Who is telling the majority of Americans what long term joblessness means for a family’s members with its known physical and mental health consequences and broken marriages?
Who is telling them what losing the safe and Constitutionally mandated opportunity to vote means as the only option remaining to overturn a dictator?
Who is telling the majority Americans that grossly increasing debt and inflation is not being spent on their needs and rights but on the top 1% of our richest population in addition to the gross misuse of our military armed services personnel?
Who is telling them that $billions will be spent on frivolous lawsuits against perceived enemies of our chief Executive; I.e. particularly by appellate judges in blue states and in blue precincts in red states?
Who is telling them that in an American autocracy, separate but equal education enshrined in the Civil rights Act is a lie because today, educational assets will flow to white Christians
and not proportionally equal to the poor and lower middle class populations? Not even remotely close!
Who will tell families with children that safety net agencies have been gutted through firings and layoffs and early retirements by those who choose not to work in an autocratic environment pledging loyalty to an autocratic POTUS?
The lunatic head of the currently nonfunctioning CDC will be causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children not getting measles vaccines, or polio vaccines or other proven efficacious vaccines to provide immunity against deadly or dangerously debilitating illnesses In our pediatric populations?
And, Who will tell Americans eligible to vote that in 2023, CDC and other researchers estimated that 15 million children from birth through age 18 will suffer from food insecurity or malnourishment? Today, the number is likely significantly higher due to dramatic increase in cost of food thanks to our Administration’s irresponsible tariffs against imports from many countries and global climate impact on crops.( I researched the number of countries in Europe, a predominately first world continent, with populations fewer than 15 million souls. There are 14 countries in Europe with total populations fewer than 15 million!)
The above impact issues caused by our slow but increasingly faster pace slide into centralized executive power is far from an exhaustive list but
I am one of hopefully many Democrat activists, as well as liberal media analysts, who strongly believe that we have now at the tipping point of having a Republican congress and a totally politicized Supreme Court doing PLOTUS’s bidding to make it impossible for Dems to win elections based on free and open access to vote by every eligible American citizen.
It is critical to reach the majority that voting in any 4th quarter local 2025 and the national 2026 election to drive home the enormous hurt they are going to personally experience due to the consequences of the questions I and others are asking regarding the issues listed above. If this imperative communication is not accomplished now, the America so many of us cherish and sacrificed for during the past 250 years will be lost for no fewer than five years with specific perils not fully eliminated for a generation or more.
Vote! It is no longer optional. Your vote can save our nation and promised freedoms and rights for all of us.