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America, as the song goes, is land of the free, home of the brave. And GOP loves to say that other countries hate us because of our freedom. So, this begs the question, how free are we?
Well in 2016 we came up 23rd. As per the Human Freedom Index, which purports to measure this, but it comes from the Cato institute, a right wing/libertarian think tank, so use however many grains of salt you think that requires. But as per google, it seems to be the most accepted ranking of nations on the freedom vector, and looking at the countries it seems to get the order right.
Well 23rd isn’t great, I mean it’s not exactly the beacon of freedom we’d like to think we are, but it’s respectable in a gentleman’s C sort of way. So what happened after 4 years of Trump?
Well according to the freedomhouse.org website, the U.S. hasn’t improved. In 2020 it ranked 56th on it’s list of free countries, “This problem has been compounded by efforts to undermine democratic norms and standards within the United States over the past several years” it gives as reasons for the U.S.’s decline in score from 94 to 86 from 2009 to 2019 (the score that serves as the basis for the rankings.) This is substantially closer to India, ranked the world’s least free democracy, than to our neighbor to the north, Canada,which ranked in the top ten of free nations.
