The Consensus Crisis Threatening America’s Foundations

The Findings of the Democracy Assessment of the United States

By Josh Kaufman

As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, the United States is experiencing a set of interconnected democratic challenges that have been building for decades and have now converged into an acute crisis. In the face of these challenges, life in America in 2026 can seem discouraging, if not downright disorienting. Applying a proven, rigorous, and nonpartisan analytical framework can help to build a common understanding of the root causes of today’s democracy crisis and inform efforts to support, defend, and deepen our democracy.

Last week in this space, Danielle Reiff introduced the Democracy, Human Rights and Governance Assessment of the United States, which took an analytical framework used for decades to assess democracies around the world and applied it to our own country. This article will outline the findings of the assessment and the implications for the future of our democracy.

“The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long”

Twenty years ago, when I led a team of experts in applying the USAID democracy assessment framework, we would occasionally ask ourselves: What would a democracy assessment of the United States look like? The answer we kept coming up with around 20 years ago went something like this:

When the United States was founded, it was a highly exclusionary democracy, and most political rights and civil liberties were reserved for white males who owned property. However, our founding documents spoke of universal, inalienable rights, and over the first 230 years of our democracy, the promise of those documents was realized for more and more Americans, despite periods of powerful, even violent, backlash. So by the 2000s, one could believe that, while much work remained to perfect our democracy, progress would continue to expand its benefits to all Americans. It did not feel like we were only 20 years away from what we see today: a profound, troubling, and humbling crisis in our democracy.

A Crisis of Consensus

What happened over the last 20 years? There are three deeply interconnected things that we did not fully anticipate:

• There was a period of rapid social change — for example, marriage equality, the election of the country’s first African-American president, the first women of color to become vice president, and the fact that women now earn nearly 60 percent of all college degrees. The backlash to all of this change has been unusually strong.

• Globalization, despite all of its macro-economic benefits, hollowed out rural and rust-belt economies, whose inhabitants were also hit hard by public health crises such as COVID, opioids and obesity. This has led to historic levels of inequality.

• While rising levels of political polarization were visible 20 years ago, rapid cultural and economic change supercharged it, like adding fuel to a fire. The fact that only six years passed between the creation of the Tea Party movement (an outsider political insurgency) in 2009 and the creation of the MAGA movement (a powerful governing coalition) in 2015 is breathtaking.

It is vitally important to understand the causes of this crisis in much more depth. To do that, we decided to use the USAID DRG Assessment Framework to hold our democracy up to a mirror.The findings of the assessment are sobering: The United States is experiencing a set of interconnected democratic challenges that have been building for decades and have now converged into an acute crisis.

Economic inequality, dueling perceptions of cultural exclusion, and political polarization driven by social media have led to widespread support for a powerful political movement that is attempting to rapidly weaken democratic norms and institutions, alter the consensus around American identity, and deepen the partisan divides to advance a vision of American that until a few years ago conventional wisdom told us was only embraced by a fringe movement. In the language of the DRG Assessment Framework, the United States faces long-standing and worsening problems of inclusion and political competition and accountability that have triggered a consensus crisis threatening the foundations of our government and society. For our purposes, a “consensus crisis” in the United States means that common agreement on the role of government, the constitutional rules of the game, and our national identity is breaking down.

The core findings of this assessment — that the U.S. is a backsliding democracy whose democratic institutions are under severe stress and increasingly unable to meaningfully mediate political disputes — are consistent with the conclusions of established global democracy indices. Freedom House, the Polity project, International IDEA, and the V-Dem Institute have each downgraded the United States in recent years, with several classifying it as a partial democracy and/or placing it at meaningful risk of democratic erosion.

Some specific findings of our assessment include:

• Traditional checks and balances are struggling to keep up. The executive branch has accumulated power at a pace and scale that has strained the traditional system of checks and balances among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.

  • Since 2025, Congress has provided limited resistance to this enlargement of executive authority.

  • The courts have offered more meaningful oversight, though their practical ability to enforce rulings against a recalcitrant executive has proven limited. Ultimately, the courts have not halted or meaningfully slowed democratic decline in the U.S.

  • The White House is also moving to weaken civil society, the media, and universities, which have historically been important institutions to hold the government accountable.

• American political polarization is not simply a matter of policy disagreement. It reflects a deeper sorting of cultural identities — by geography, educational attainment, religion, race, and cultural values — that has increasingly aligned with party affiliation. This alignment makes political conflict feel existential rather than ordinary, because voters increasingly experience their political identity as inseparable from their broader sense of who they are.

• The political coalition that has formed around these grievances — organized under the banner of Make America Great Again — draws on economic populism, cultural conservatism, elements of white Christian nationalism, and anti-elite sentiment. It has displaced the traditional business-oriented wing of the Republican Party as the dominant force in GOP politics and has organized millions of voters who had previously been less engaged or had voted Democratic.

• At the same time, the root causes of this crisis — structural inequities, economic dislocation, the politics of demographic change, and the collapse of a shared information environment — remain inadequately addressed by either major political party.

• Both political parties share blame for failing to address the root causes of our current political crisis, but they are not equally culpable.

  • Today’s most influential Republican ideologues explicitly reject the traditional American notions of inclusive democracy and are trying to leverage the formal and informal power of the presidency to create an executive branch that is all-powerful and not subject to the rule of law.

  • Even as Trump’s popularity declines rapidly, only 36 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, according to the June 2026 Real Clear Politics polling average, trailing the GOP by approximately 2 percentage points. The Democratic Party is perceived as being elitist, out of touch with working-class voters, and overly focused on cultural issues rather than economic anxieties.

• Of course, today’s crisis is not just about what is happening in Washington. Today, 38 states are controlled by a single party across both the governorship and the state legislature — a striking concentration that reflects the depth of partisan sorting at the subnational level. As a result, state and local governments have become increasingly drawn into national partisan conflicts. At the same time, state and local governments retain higher levels of public trust than federal institutions. Therefore, efforts to rebuild democratic consensus around shared local concerns about economic opportunity, public safety, and community well-being may gain traction more readily at the subnational level than in Washington.

That all sounds kind of bleak: long-standing, complex and worsening problems that have metastasized into a crisis at the core of our democracy. And there is no magic fix. It will take a long time to fully address the root causes behind today’s crisis: inequality, the sorting of our country into two increasingly separate bubbles, and profound differences in key areas of our national identity. Even if the upcoming midterm and 2028 elections are won by candidates who want to solve these problems, success is not ensured. However, there is also reason to hope.

“We Must Hang Together”

The perception that things are broken and we have become a fractured society are corrosive on their own, but they are also exaggerated. Large bipartisan majorities agree on a host of fundamentally important policy priorities, such as rebuilding our infrastructure, housing affordability, government and electoral reform, healthcare affordability, and the threats posed by unregulated technological change. In all of these areas, blueprints for progress exist at the local, state and national level, if enough political will can be generated to force action.

In response to this need for collective action, a coalition of civic organizations and U.S. experts on international democracy are proposing a bold, three-year strategy to reverse democratic decline and lay the foundation for all Americans to thrive together. The Renew American Democracy (RAD) Strategy is designed to strengthen the U.S. democracy movement and encourage a broad range of groups across the civic ecosystem to come together around a shared vision and common strategy. Watch this space in the coming weeks to learn how we can build a better future for all Americans.

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Josh Kaufman is the lead author of the Democracy, Human Rights and Governance Assessment of the United States and served as the Director of the USAID Office of Policy until July 2025. He previously led the USAID team responsible for conducting democracy assessments around the world.