American Democracy, A System Corrupted: Using Artificial Intelligence to Track Democracy’s Decline and Chart the Path Back

Is American Democracy Dying?In 1990, American democracy was the healthiest it had ever been. By 2025, the machinery that protects it had been quietly dismantled—piece by piece, by both parties—while the rest of us were busy living our lives.This book tells that story.Not through opinion or spin, but through a 35-year detective story that traces how a series of decisions—each one defensible on its own—linked together to produce a country where Congress accomplishes nothing, the Supreme Court rules along party lines, and the president wields powers no single leader was ever meant to hold. Both parties built this. Both parties own it.To cut through the noise, the authors tasked two competing AI systems to sift through over 100,000 laws, court rulings, executive orders, and government actions—identifying the turning points that matter and discarding the ones that don't. From there, each year is measured against a ten-point authoritarian checklist drawn from political science, producing an annual health score for American democracy. The two systems worked independently and reached the same conclusions. The thermometer read "healthy" in 1990. It doesn't anymore. Read more