What Other Countries Can Teach Us About Defending a Democracy in Crisis
In recent years, autocrats have been defeated in Brazil, Poland, and South Korea. What can we learn from the brave people who stood up to the dragon and saved their villages?
The best way of preventing authoritarian leaders from overthrowing democracies is to make sure that they never get into power in the first place. That’s what the French did last year when parties on the left united and then made a second-round pact with the centrists to prevent Marine Le Pen and her far-right National Rally from winning a parliamentary majority. And now the courts have convicted Le Pen of corruption and barred her from running for office.
Americans have obviously screwed the pooch on that particular method of preventing autocracy. Voted out of office, slapped with multiple suits, convicted of a felony, denounced by dozens of his former appointees, Donald Trump nevertheless managed to use these setbacks as evidence that even a billionaire ex-president can be an “outsider” who’s taking on the “establishment” and sticking up for the “little guy.”
A decade of Trump? That’s a sobering prospect. A 100-year-old president-for-life presiding over the dying embers of American society? A horror story indeed.
On the eve of the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, the challenge has now become infinitely more difficult. America is now living through that horror movie cliché where the call is coming from inside the house. The seemingly indestructible culprit has returned for a more horrifying sequel to destroy U.S. democracy from within. Worse, all the failures of his first term are now helping him craft more successful disruptions in his second.
With a cowboy president shooting from the hip in all directions, what can Americans do to prevent Trump from taking down democracy (not to mention the economy, the international system, and the planet)? Even New York Times columnist David Brooks, who admits in a staggering understatement that “he’s not a movement guy,” has recently declared that “it’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising.”
Alas, America has no history of such uprisings from which to draw, except perhaps the American Revolution and that was a long time ago. With few domestic examples to inspire, everyone is now searching the globe for cases of successful resistance to authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, most examples of such uprisings involved years and years of organizing. It took a decade to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, nearly two decades to oust Augusto Pinochet in Chile, slightly more than two decades to overthrow Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and more than a half-century to depose the Assad’s father-and-son regime in Syria.
A decade of Trump? That’s a sobering prospect. A 100-year-old president-for-life presiding over the dying embers of American society? A horror story indeed.
But there are other examples of more compressed resistance from which Americans committed to a national civic uprising can take inspiration. In recent years, autocrats have been defeated in Brazil, Poland, and South Korea. What can we learn from the brave people who stood up to the dragon and saved their villages?
Dumping Bolsonaro
Like the United States, Brazil is a deeply divided country, with an even larger wealth gap. As Oxfam reports, “Brazil’s six richest men have the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the population; around 100 million people. The country’s richest 5% have the same income as the remaining 95%.”
The leftist Workers’ Party successfully mobilized the have-nots to win a series of elections in the 2000s. But in 2018, buoyed in part by Donald Trump’s win in 2016, an aggressive, nationalist outsider, Jair Bolsonaro, capitalized on voter frustration with corruption and persistent poverty to become the country’s president. The leading reason for voters to back the sexist, homophobic, religiously conservative Bolsonaro was anti-incumbent sentiment, a profound dissatisfaction with the political status quo.
Once in office, Bolsonaro threatened to pack the Supreme Court with his supporters and, when that failed, to ignore its rulings. He praised the country’s past military dictatorship and threatened to send troops into the streets to restore “order.” He ramped up the disastrous deforestation of the Amazon. Like Trump, he failed to address the Covid-19 pandemic, pushing Brazil to the top of the list of countries with the most fatalities (after the United States and Russia).
There were plenty of protests against Bolsonaro. But his allies in Congress provided a legislative shield against impeachment. Which meant that the most effective form of resistance turned out to be judicial. And that judicial resistance largely boiled down to one person, Alexandre de Moraes, a member of the country’s Supreme Court. As Jon Lee Anderson explains in The New Yorker:
After Bolsonaro took office, in 2019, de Moraes led an ever-expanding series of investigations into him and his family. As Bolsonaro’s supporters formed “digital militias” that flooded the internet with disinformation—claiming that political opponents were pedophiles, spreading blatant lies about their policies, inventing conspiracies—de Moraes fought to force them offline. Granted special powers by the judiciary, he suspended accounts belonging to legislators, business magnates, and political commentators for posts that he described as harmful to Brazilian democracy.
These actions went a long way toward constraining Bolsonaro’s power and reducing his overall popularity, so that by the time the next elections rolled around in 2022, the strongman lost his reelection bid.
U.S. Supreme Court justices don’t have the same kind of power as their Brazilian counterparts. The court as a whole has an even more limited ability to constrain the Trump administration if the latter decides not to implement the decisions it doesn’t like. It’s also going to be difficult to rein in Trump’s digital militias, given Elon Musk’s control of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s capitulation to Trump over at Facebook.
But one lesson from the Brazilian case is the need to launch immediate investigations into government corruption and misconduct. This can be done in the United States by way of congressional requests for reports by the Congressional Research Service, which for instance deemed the defunding of USAID to be unconstitutional, or to the Government Accountability Office, which has been tasked to study the impact of the mass firings of federal workers. Lawmakers can also hold informal hearings on the unconstitutional actions of DOGE and the executive branch.
Don’t wait and play a defensive game. Be as bold as the Brazilians against Bolsonaro and go on the offensive.
Displacing Law and Justice
The right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) took electoral advantage of the discontent of Polish voters, particularly in the countryside, who had not benefited from the country’s rush to capitalism after 1989. Poland A did well by the liberal reforms; Poland B didn’t and took revenge at the polls by voting for PiS.
Like Donald Trump and his MAGA forces, PiS had a first taste of power when it governed for two years in a coalition government and didn’t accomplish much. When it came roaring back in 2015, PiS knew exactly what to do. First, it went after the courts. PiS was determined to destroy the country’s constitutional order and remake Polish society according to conservative, nationalist, and religious principles.
The first target was the constitutional court, which had blocked PiS initiatives in that first administration. As Christian Davies writes:
The ruling party’s strategy played out in three parts: First, to deny opposition-appointed judges from taking their place on the court. Second, to pass laws designed to paralyze the court and prevent it from functioning effectively. Third, to force through the appointment of judges loyal to the ruling party. All this was done in open defiance of the law, the constitution, and multiple rulings issued by the Tribunal itself.
This attack on the judiciary, which was also accompanied by assaults on the media, free speech, and nonprofit organizations, precipitated a battle with the European Union, which put pressure on the Polish government to reverse its judicial “reforms.” But with the courts now aligned with its agenda, PiS looked as though it would consolidate its power indefinitely. In the 2019 elections, it even expanded its legislative majority in the lower house of parliament.
Four years later, thanks to its control of the media and other methods of rigging political outcomes, PiS again came out on top in the 2023 parliamentary elections with 35% of the vote. But this time, three opposition parties were able to unite to sideline PiS and form a new government. Poland’s constitutional crisis had come to an end.
How did the Polish opposition manage to beat a clearly still-popular party?
Perhaps the E.U. pressuring from the outside might have helped. But part of the PiS base was Euroskeptical, so the party could use E.U. pressure to rally its nationalist supporters.
More influential was the ability of the Polish opposition to overcome its fractiousness and bring together leftists, liberals, Solidarity true believers, traditional conservatives, and interest-group advocates like environmentalists and pro-choice feminists. In 2015, after the PiS government refused to follow a Constitutional Court verdict, major street protests broke out and a journalist called for a new civic movement patterned after the communist-era dissident group, the Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR). “We have to remember, the goal isn’t to overturn the legally elected authorities of the country, but rather the defense of democracy,” the journalist wrote.
Out of this ferment came the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), which organized a series of massive protests around the country. Within a few months, it had garnered the support of 40% of the population. Because it wasn’t a party, KOD could appeal to a large segment of the population that had become disgusted with electoral politics. It successfully promoted the message that PiS was no ordinary party pushing for an ordinary platform of policies. Rather, PiS was a threat to the very legacy of the Solidarity movement that had liberated the country.
The United States needs just such a nonpartisan umbrella organization that can appeal to the largest swath of the anti-Trump community. Let’s call it the Society Organized to Save American Democracy (SOSAD). It stands for mom, baseball, apple pie, the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, fairly compensated work, equal rights for all: in short everything that makes America truly great.
Reversing a Coup
To overcome a parliament that blocked his policies, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on the evening of December 3, 2024. The president ordered police to seal off the parliament and special forces to enter the building.
But the coup lasted for only a few hours. Enough members of parliament managed to get into the building that night and hold a vote to lift martial law. Meanwhile, spurred by news spread rapidly by electronic means, citizens began to gather in public places to protest Yoon’s actions.
South Koreans saved their democracy because of brave legislators and determined civil society activists. The country has a long history of civic engagement, going back to the democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s and efforts to bring down former President Park Geun-Hye through months of candlelight vigils.
The defense of democracy perhaps feels more urgent in countries where it’s not taken for granted.
“The speed of this latest democratic defense suggests that lessons learned during decades of mobilization have strengthened South Korea’s institutional guardrails and nationwide vigilance against executive abuse,” writes Darcie Draudt-Véjares.
This month, the country’s constitutional court upheld the parliament’s impeachment and officially removed Yoon from office.
The lessons from the South Korean case are clear. U.S. legislators have to step up—as Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) did with his 25-hour filibuster and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have been doing with their recent rallies. Meanwhile, civil society must organize rapid responses, not just within silos (like the recent letter from university presidents) but across institutions.
One key lesson from the South Korean experience is the role of labor. After Yoon’s martial law announcement, the main trade union confederation immediately called for a general strike until the president stepped down. The prospect of a significant hit to the Korean economy was a wake-up call for many who hadn’t yet made up their minds about Yoon.
U.S. labor has had a love-hate relationship with Trump. Many labor leaders refused to back the candidate even as support among rank-and-file members surged. Several key unions—Teamsters, UAW—have been enthusiastic about Trump’s tariffs.
Any opposition to Trump must appeal to working people who feel ignored and undervalued by politicians and the elite. They are a core part of Trump’s support, but they are certainly persuadable. When the costs of Trump’s actions begin to rise—at the pump, in the grocery store, through reduced checks from Medicare and Medicaid—they may well be ready for a political change.
Why were Poles, Koreans, and Brazilians able to turn back authoritarianism where others have failed? All three have histories of strong civil society engagement in politics. All three had credible leaders—Donald Tusk, Lee Jae-myung, Lula—who could step in as alternatives.
And all three countries have had rather short experiences of democratic rule. In 1981, South Koreans were living in the shadow of martial law, which had been declared the previous year. Poles entered a martial law period in December of that year. And Brazilians were living under a military dictatorship that wouldn’t collapse until 1985.
The defense of democracy perhaps feels more urgent in countries where it’s not taken for granted. So far, America is failing the stress test that Trump is applying to the country’s democratic institutions. But if Americans are willing to learn some lessons from Brazil, Poland, and Korea, maybe we can defeat the dragon as well.
