The labor movement has played a key role in fighting for democracy all around the world. The fight for greater democracy is especially important in the United States right now, as the US government continues to support Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza over the opposition of a majority of Americans. But congressional and White House support for the war on Gaza is just one particularly dramatic illustration of how our political system fails to represent the popular will, and in particular the interests of working-class voters.

According to V-Dem’s liberal democracy and electoral democracy indices (which measure factors such as the quality of countries’ legal systems and electoral processes), the United States ranks at twenty-third and twenty-seventh in the world on each measure respectively, and is considered to be an “autocratizer” that is in the process of democratic backsliding. In contrast, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway consistently rank the highest along those two indices. While a variety of factors feed into V-Dem’s qualitative measures of how democratic a country is, almost every country that ranks above the United States features electoral mechanisms involving proportional representation.

A supermajority of Americans feel exhausted and angry thinking about politics. It’s part of a broader trend of dissatisfaction among voters, and the share of voters who say they have an interest in the upcoming presidential election has hit a twenty-year low. Even despite a recent uptick, voter turnout in the United States continues to underperform with respect to its Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) peers.