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?

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:

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.

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........

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