From Asia to Europe to the Americas, strong men are growing stronger and democracy is struggling.

In Hong Kong, more than a million people filled the streets two years ago in protests against China's moves to crack down on free expression.

Then, a new national security law targeted protesters with harsh penalties including life in prison.

And now 10 prominent democracy activists, including a media mogul and billionaire named Jimmy Lai, have been sentenced to prison time for participating in those protests.

Promanent Pro-democracy campaign is guilty of unauthorized assembly. It's the latest blow to the city's democracy movement.

Heading west to Russia, President Vladimir Putin plans to tighten state control over the internet. His government labeled one of Russia's media organizations a foreign agent. Find it millions of dollars and froze its bank accounts.

This pressure campaign against independent media that we've seen in recent months is more extreme in many ways than the final years of the Soviet Union.

Jamie Fly is the president of the organization Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. Authorities also closed its Moscow Bureau.

We are not going to back down in the face of this pressure.

And in Brazil?

People were already concerned about President Jair Bolsonaro committing to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses next year's election.

And that was before he said recently that the military would follow his orders if he sent them into the streets.

Bolsonaro reiterated that freedom in Brazil is in the hands of the military.

So is democracy in these places fundamentally broken?

I would reframe the question and suggest that we think of democracy not as an assolid state, but as a vector.

Masha Guesson is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of Surviving Autocracy about the corrosion of American democracy.

They argue that any country in the world is becoming more or less democratic at any given time.

So Guesson argues we should be asking which way are things headed?

We're enfranchising more people making our government more a government of the government or we're going in the opposite direction.

And I think if you think of it that way the answer becomes suddenly very painfully clear. We're going in the opposite direction.

Consider this all over the world democratic institutions are under threat.

The United States is a part of that trend and may also be one of its causes.

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