Democracy is in retreat. Here’s why that should alarm us all

Three powerful and interconnected dynamics are accelerating democratic retreat worldwide. Here’s what we focused on during the first day of Trust Conference 2026.

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Wherever you look, the erosion of fundamental rights and freedom is spreading. For the first time in more than half a century, the United States is no longer classified as a full liberal democracy. Downgraded by V-Dem to an “electoral democracy,” it now sits at its lowest-ever point on Freedom House’s global ranking. Of every country still labelled “free,” it is the one that has fallen furthest, fastest.

Just a few years ago, this would have been unthinkable. But America’s democratic decline is not happening in isolation. It is part of a global retreat that has been accelerating for two decades. According to Freedom House, global freedom has declined for 20 consecutive years. Last year alone, 54 countries saw their freedoms diminish. Today, only 1 in 5 people live somewhere rated fully free. Twenty years ago, that ratio was 1 in 2.

We have, in effect, wiped out 50 years of democratic progress. The third wave of democratisation that political scientist Samuel Huntington described – the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, the democratic transitions across Latin America and Asia – has been reversed. We are back to where the world stood in 1978.

Three forces driving the shift

This is not simply a story of democratic backsliding. It is driven by three powerful and interconnected dynamics.

The first is the collapse of American soft power. The country that for decades presided over the rules-based international order – that projected global stability and championed democracy as a vehicle of influence – is turning inward. Earlier this year, the United States announced it was withdrawing from 66 international bodies and treaties. Its foreign assistance contribution has collapsed by more than half. And as America retreats, others are moving into the space it leaves behind.

The second force is the weaponisation of information. Every day, large disinformation networks and bot farms disguise fiction as fact, with the precise intent to sow dissent and weaken democracy. But this is no longer simply disinformation at scale. It has evolved into something more sophisticated: cognitive manipulation. Malign actors are now spreading targeted disinformation designed to exploit the cognitive biases of specific communities. They amplify fringe ideas to make them appear mainstream, creating fake “doppelganger” clones of reputable news outlets, and crafting emotional triggers designed to provoke outrage, fear and doubt – ideas such as “Our country is broken”, “Democracy is not delivering”, “Your leaders don’t have your best interests at heart.”

This is cognitive manipulation at scale, increasingly facilitated by artificial intelligence. According to a European Union report, 27% of attempts by foreign powers to manipulate information last year involved AI – a threefold increase in just 12 months.

The third force is technology itself. It has become the fundamental infrastructure of our societies: how we receive information, access justice, organise, and vote. But it is also, in the wrong hands, how we are controlled and manipulated. The same tools that help human rights defenders document abuses can help authoritarian governments identify, track and silence them. The same tools that help a newsroom verify evidence can flood the public sphere with synthetic lies.

The crisis of insularity

When people no longer trust institutions – or the information available to them – they turn inward. They retreat to personal networks and echo chambers. This year’s Edelman Trust Barometer has a name for it: a crisis of insularity. 70% of people are now unwilling to trust someone whose values, facts or background differ from their own.

That level of insularity makes citizens far easier to divide and manipulate. Anxiety and fear breed distrust, and distrust is where polarisation and violence take root. The World Economic Forum now ranks societal polarisation as the third most severe emerging global risk – a direct driver of misinformation, inequality and political violence across more than 200 countries.

Why this is a matter of national security

There is a temptation to frame press freedom as a noble cause – important, yes, but somehow separate from the harder questions of security and economic stability. That framing is wrong, and increasingly dangerous.

Protecting the integrity of information – maintaining a shared and factual reality – is no longer simply a matter of protecting a public good. It is a matter of national sovereignty, national security, and economic resilience. These are the very issues that authoritarian leaders hijack to gain power. And they are the issues that a free, independent and trusted press exists to defend.

What this means for your sector