7 Women's Rights - Although Dobbs was repealed, the project’s Women’s Political Empowerment Index captures, on a scale from 0 to 1, the extent to which women in a country enjoy civil liberties, participate in politics and civil society and hold positions of political power. Women’s empowerment in the United States soared from 0.40 a century ago to .91 in 2009 — and in 2023 it remained at a hair beneath this peak.
8 Democracy - After surging from a score of 0.53 a century ago to 0.91 in 2015, the country lost ground in 2017, but recovered much of it after 2020. As they say, “The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory.” When we take an objective look at how the country is doing and which way it has been going, we see that American life is not a hellscape of carnage and decline. What stands out is a resilient democracy that tends to recover from setbacks and make halting progress.
