what is an 'illiberal democracy'?

The US election is too close to call - but whatever the result, can America's political system be compared to any other country?

Some would say that the USA is looking more and more like other countries:

Trump’s bid to stop the count risks turning America into an ‘illiberal democracy’ like Turkey | The Independent

Including European countries:

Former Obama administration deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted, “If you want to know where Trump wants to take America in a second term, look at Russia, Hungary and Poland.” While comparing the United States’ potential future to Russia’s mafia-state was a stretch, Rhodes’s references to Hungary and Poland were not.
In both countries, conservative parties have pursued power at all cost in recent years, including by abandoning any pretext of adherence to a previously agreed-upon set of norms for governance. The result has been a resounding, if slow-motion, decline in democratic health.
Freedom House removed Hungary from its list of democracies last week, calling the country’s decline “the most precipitous ever tracked” by one of its flagship reports. Freedom House now labels the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban a “hybrid regime,” meaning that it marries some elements of democracy with those of an autocracy.

Opinion | Where would U.S. democracy head in a second Trump term? Hungary and Poland show the answer. - The Washington Post

Democracy did not die in Hungary in 2015 when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán decided he needed an expensive border wall to see off a nonexistent "invasion" of asylum seekers.
When Poland's government that same year started stripping power from the country's courts by filling large swaths of the judiciary with apparatchiks loyal above all else to the right-wing populist party, the rule of law still applied.
Turkey's leader was once seen as a potential model democrat in the Islamic world. Today, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the world's biggest jailer of journalists.
Experts agree that democracy is fragile, and that a country's descent into the type of illiberal politics that has emerged in recent years in parts of Europe, in Brazil, in India and elsewhere, has been nothing if not gradual. It creeps up on you.

What authoritarian countries can tell us about democracy and Trump

Let's look at Hungary, from inside and outside the country:

Are Orbán’s Hungary and Trump’s America one and the same? – Daily News Hungary

Trump’s twinship with Orbán shows ‘illiberal democracy’ has a home in the US | Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Opinion | The Guardian

American Orbánism - The Atlantic

Is the U.S. at Risk of Mirroring Hungary’s Democratic Backsliding?

The US Ambassador to Hungary has had two good years, however:

Relations between Hungary and the United States could not be better, outgoing US Ambassador David B. Cornstein said in an interview published in daily Magyar Nemzet’s Wednesday issue. The ambassador told the paper that US-Hungary relations had been “rather poor” when he came to serve in Hungary in June 2018.

US Ambassador: 'Orbán Gov't Not Totalitarian, Hungary Democracy'

But things are divided in Poland too:

Duda's Polish Election Victory Is a Warning For Trump's America - Bloomberg

Poles in America demand Biden correct himself after calling Poland and Hungary 'totalitarian regimes'

U.S. ambassador says EU criticism of Poland 'overblown' | Reuters

What Poland’s presidential politics tells us about Trump’s re-election bid

Here's a very interesting book from a Brit living in Poland:

Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit | Books | The Guardian

Here's another look from the centre:

US Election Splits Central Europe | Balkan Insight

To finish, some general concerns:

Democracies around the world are under threat. Ours is no exception - Los Angeles Times

Republicans’ Authoritarian Ambitions Will Live on Past Trump

How Do We Fix American Democracy? 

There was the contested 2000 presidential election, when the popular-vote winner did not win the Electoral College and five unelected Supreme Court justices settled the outcome. The series of court decisions, culminating with the disastrous Citizens United v. FEC, that unleashed a tidal wave of corporate money into our elections and diminished the power and influence of individual voters. There was also the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and opened the door yet again to widespread disenfranchisement of black and brown voters, including the hours-long wait times to cast a ballot that we’re seeing right now.

Biden: Should He End Electoral College, Pack Courts to Fix Democracy? - Rolling Stone

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