Yes. This is bad news and continues a trend which has being going on in various parts of the world since the collapse of monarchies and the collapse of colonial empires which occurred after WWI.
The problem is two-fold. The first dimension of the problem is political impatience and the desire to fix things quickly and efficiently. Quickness and efficiency are the hallmarks of authoritarian hierarchies, because democracies are slower to arrive at political solutions and because they use political compromise which often produces imperfect solutions and thus reduces the pace and efficiency of the agreed-upon solutions arrived at in the short and medium terms. Impatient people and electorates are thus often seduced by the quickness and seeming efficiency of authoritarian regimes and only later realise that these regimes are worse threats to them than the problems they solve.
The demand for quickness and efficiency has also led to the rise of militarism in democracies as people and states are no longer willing to wait for the imperfect and slower solutions offered by diplomacy between states. Instead democracies are turning to martial solutions, which while quicker often produce very poor results as problem solutions. This rise of militarism and the interpretation that we are always at war with something, states, non-state actors, drugs, poverty, and even ideas/ideologies or religions has led to the desire in many democracies to regiment the state and its people more; which reduces or removes rights and freedoms and leads to the growth of militarised security and surveillance states which further undermine liberal democracy in pursuit of protecting the intensively managed status quo.
The second dimension of this problem is the drift of many liberal democracies towards plutocracy and oligarchy, which quietly undermines liberal democracy through the effects of concentrated wealth and power/influence. These concentrations distort and corrupt a democracy. As the distortions accrete and accumulate on the nominally democratic institutions, these institution become more devoted to preserving a favourable status quo for the oligarchy rather than solving the real problems facing the wider interests of the whole electorate. The desire to maintain a loaded and increasing preferential status quo increases the tolerance among the oligarchy's elites for a top-down decision making which eventually crosses a threshold into oligarchic authoritarianism through intensively managed, top-down democracy. Likewise this top-down, intensively managed democracy which is preoccupied with maintaining a preferential status quo for the oligarchs, alienates more and more of the wider electorate. Voters either become apathetic and cease to participate in the democracy, making the fringe political parties and movements stronger due to the apathetic voters absence in the political process (acting as a political keel and inertial ballast to stabilise the ship of state) or the voters become disillusioned by the process of democracy itself, making such people easier pickings for the siren-songs of populist movements led by charismatic and authoritarian demagogues promising quick and efficient solutions if just a little of their freedom is set aside for now.
Those two currents are causing the "retreat" of liberal democracy in the world today. The historical and long-view explanation for this drift is as follows. The rural farmer-gentry and the independent-minded small business folk who birthed this ideology of liberal democracy and individual freedom/responsibility in the 17th and 18th centuries have been largely displaced and replaced by hierarchical corporations and institutions which in their own operations eschew democracy and prefer authoritarian rule internally. Meanwhile urbanisation has packed so many human beings into close proximity that collective concerns and collective solutions/rights and responsibilities are challenging individualism and the primacy of individual rights and responsibilities thus undermining the foundational principles of classical liberal democracy. We are moving towards a hive mindset with kings and queens emerging from the drones to lead the "sheeple" using intensively managed top-down democracy and the "sheeple" don't like it and so are walking away and into the arms of would-be tyrants and dictators.
The times, they are a chang'in.
Cheers?
Evilroddy.
