How to Stop Dictators with Zack Beauchamp

We do have a really immediate issue here in the United States of there's another, I mean, it's almost, it's March now, right, when this is airing, so we're, we're like a few months out, quite a few months out until November from March at this point. And there's going to be a lot more authoritarianism between them now, right, and even if Democrats do win the midterms, there's going to be other forms of executive power grab that Congress doesn't have control over. There's going to be decisions to collaborate or to resist from corporations, from universities, law firms, civil society groups, there are going to be people who are going to be motivated to go to protests and might try to stage actions in state legislatures, like there are all sorts of different arenas that can help determine the outcome, and no one is as significant as the result of the midterm election. Like I agree with you, if you're running for Senate in a red state and your goal is to stop Trump from being authoritarian, do what you think based on the context of your state is most likely to win. Hello, welcome, why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes. We are now in the second year of Donald Trump's second term, and I think the best thing that could be said is that he has not yet succeeded in completely destroying the American Constitution order and replacing a Democratic Republic with a presidentialist dictatorship. That's the project, it's the ongoing project, but it has not yet been successful. It's been more successful than I would like. It's moved in that direction more than or about, I think, in the ways that I feared, but I would say at this point, the sort of forces on each side are kind of an equal voice. It feels to me like there's a kind of, not a stalemate, but a draw on the terrain run right now. That's because Donald Trump is incredibly unpopular, partly is that we've seen real civic resistance rise up in response to some of the most egregious cruel and violent overreaches the government, particularly the shooting deaths of two American citizens in broad daylight on camera. One of the things that has happened a lot in these perilous times is we've looked to other countries for comparisons, particularly on the question of how does a democracy slide into something different? And there's been a whole literature that's grown up around that, a lot of paying attention to Hungary and Victor Urban, who's actually a free election right now, and that's an interesting case. There has been a lot less attention paid to comparative examples, countries that had similar threats and beat them back, not like forever and ever, everything's fine now, but managed to successfully repel attempts to turn democratic nations into something non-democratic, some other form under some kind of authoritarian rule. And we've had these discussions, those other countries exist. And so I love the fact that Zach Beesham at Vox underwent a sort of reporting project in which he said, OK, look, there are other countries that have done this. How did they do it? And what do they have to teach us about how these efforts might be successful in the US? I love the piece, it's over at Vox.com. We don't do enough comparisons here in the US. We really tend to think of ourselves as totally sewage-generous. This happens in policy discussions all the time, where it's like, well, what, you know, every country's got to figure out tax rates and healthcare and immigration, like there's lots of things, there are lots of examples to choose from. This was an example of that kind of thinking that I had not encountered, and I thought it would be a great conversation to have today as we sort of work into year two of the Zach Beesham from Vox.com, welcome to the program. Hey, Chris, I'm a long time listener, first time caller, so it's nice to be here. That's great. How do you sort of get the idea for this undertaking? It's funny. It was actually very similar to what you were just describing, is that I had spent years writing about how democracies die. And I got really frustrated early on in the Trump administration because I realized I knew a lot less about how they lived. And it turns out that that wasn't just like a personal failing on my part that I hadn't done the research here. It's that nobody had done the research. There were a few scattered examples, but if you look that I did at academic databases and try to assess, and plus, you know, journalistic reporting and try to assess what people had written, what is established about the knowledge base here, the answer was very little and was overwhelmingly dwarfed by the understanding of how a democracy dies or what one does to take a democracy and turn it into some version of authoritarianism. So I started trying to piece together what we did know or what the evidence base currently said and then just do like real original investigations into the cases that I think were like most relevantly similar to the United States. I think honestly part of the reason why we know so little is like a lot of this has happened in the past 10 years of the relevant of the way democracies die now is pretty new. It's very dissimilar to what happens prior to the end of the Cold War. And this can be shown quantitative evidence too. And so we had to basically start from scratch and people started by learning about the disease and only now are starting to learn about the cure. So let's stay with this sort of how democracies die question because you know, you're right. It has become a very developed literature, sadly because there's more and more examples. I mean, I think by some indexes we've seen steady decline globally year after year over the last say 10 years. I want to ask about a thing you just said that the way they die is different now than how they would before the Cold War say more about that. So prior to the end of the Cold War, the most common way that a democracy would die was a military coup. And that stopped happening as much. Now there are some recent examples. It's not like the military coup is a thing of the past, but that really doesn't work very well. There are fewer coups and their success rate is lower than what was true prior to the end of the Cold War. There are a few theories about why that's the case. I think the Cold War itself actually is a big cause of that, right? Like you don't have the United States going around backing up a bunch of anti-Soviet coups. And that is different. Right. Yes. When you can do your military coup and the US will, you know, one of the two great powers in the world is going to support you. That does give you a leg up. Yeah, that's like a big part of the story or the Soviet Union would help sometimes too. So it's not just us, but it is, yes, good. But another part of the story is that it just became a lot harder to maintain government legitimacy in a world where democracy kind of triumphed globally, ideologically, right, where it really became the case that people expected governments to be in some way responsive to their people. And military dictatorships aren't like that. And so we saw this huge wave of democratization around the world, really, at the sort of end of history moments, turn to the 21st century. And there was a reason that people really optimistic about democracy then because it really had taken over the world in an astonishingly short period of time. And so as the authoritarians adjusted to this new reality that it wasn't just, you know, it was difficult to maintain legitimacy at home. It's that there were international trade networks that went more open to you if you were a democracy, there's a general sense that democracy is performed better on a whole set of governance metrics. And so you started to get everybody, except with a few exceptions, but the vast majority of countries talking about the world and governments acting as if democracy was the way to go. So what happens in, I would say, the late 2000s, early 2010s is that authoritarians in democratic contexts really innovated, they developed a way to hollow out a democracy from within that does not involve saying we are not a democracy anymore, involves maintaining a democratic facade. And so some of the pioneers here were Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, who tricked large portions of the international left into thinking he was a democrat before it was too late. Erdogan in Turkey, who was seen as honestly a democratic reformer for the way that he took on Turkey's military, which had been established in politics for a long time, which knew a thing or two about coups. Right. Because I was consolidating a lot of power to zone hands instead of the coupsters and Victor Orbán and Hungary. All right. He's sort of the poster child for right wing anti-democratic politics. And those three were really very early on in doing this and it has now become a pretty established playbook used, I would say largely, not primarily, but largely by right wing populist leaders to dismantle democracy from within. Yeah, this is really important just to sit with this for a second because yeah, the notion of the coup, which is like, you know, the state media apparatus comes down and then, you know, all the networks are suddenly carrying a guy who's in military garb and maybe with a gun on his table saying, like, this is a break, right? I mean, the whole point of that is like the sort of use of force and intimidation is like there is a break with the old regime. There is now a new regime. There's a break with the old order. There's now a new order. We were one form, now we're in control. And you know, part of the kind of propaganda incentive there is to make people scared, right? To sort of blare out that you're in control. And once that becomes more difficult or disfavored, this idea of hollowing out a democracy, the fundamental kind of bad faith and seriousness of the project, I think, is such an important one and has been so maddening to witness up close, right, in our own country. This sort of double talk about it all that drives you really insane in some ways it would be easier, right? I mean, when Donald Trump said, I want to be dictator for a day, like in some ways that was sort of useful, but also kind of just in general, that's right, just one day. And then he flirts with it sometimes, but you're constantly getting this kind of obfuscatory rhetoric that masks what the true intentions are. It drives me crazy, right? You say it's frustrating. It's just like you can't even. have a conversation about the thing because first you have to establish that the thing is happening. Yes. Which is the entire point of the thing, right? Because we're in this world where democratic legitimacy is so valuable, we're just putting a gun on the table and that analogy will lead to you, you know, a poor business environment, popular operasings, huge headaches for governments that they just don't want to deal with. They have to be able to trick large portions of people. We live in a world that is dominated by plausible deniability. The people can either intentionally or, you know, sort of sub-rosa, light of themselves, about the kind of political movement they're backing. Because it's really interesting, right? When you think about this ongoing perennial fascism debate in the United States, it's like part of the reason it doesn't end up mattering is because, I mean, it's interesting. And it's important in some ways, but it like, doesn't move the table politically is because all we're doing is having a conversation between people who oppose the current government and view it as a threat to democracy, right? Like whether you call it fascist or not, it's sort of like they're going to say they're not, right? And they will never, ever be like, we actually are a fascist movement. We actually are a Nazi movement. Because that kind of thing is overwhelming on popular among everyone. That's just like not how you build in the United States or Europe. You have to, even if you are far right, whatever particular definition of fascism you want to use, like you fit the definition to a T as I think some parties, and in some ways the Trump increasingly do, they're never going to admit it because and never use that label. It really is very damaging, even among their own base. We'll be right back after we take this quick break. You know, this is a slightly weird tangent, but I'll just say it because it's something I've been saying a lot of time on. I'm writing another book and it's a history and partly involves history of the early mafia in Sicily. And everyone now knows the code of omerta and silence, but I think we sort of misunderstand what that code was. It's not just that you don't snitch, right? The original sort of code of omerta is that they denied the mafia had existed. I just read this report, an early sort of parliamentarian who went down to Sicily to write this report, sort of on the first reports. And one of the things that's maddening is like no one will actually admit the thing exists. Like here they are. They're going around implementing essentially a mafia takeover of all the machinery of both business and state there. And everyone's like, what do you? I don't know what you're talking about. And it sort of drives everyone crazy. And there's a sort of similar thing happening with these movements, right? They won't name what they are. They won't sort of probably wear on their chest. They're not marching, you know, well, with the summer. But generally, you're not like in black shirts and, you know, saying we're, you know, we're fascists. There's some that do that. But mostly it is this kind of insidious double-speak, lying, hollowing out that is the project. Yeah, it's at the heart of it. And it's how you do authoritarianism in a world of democratic dominance, right? So, tactically, what that means is you don't say what you're doing. We've been discussing that. But it also means you do things like instead of declaring that, you know, independent broadcasting is illegal, you put your wealthy allies in charge of media outlets. And then you make it clear that if they don't tow the line, they will lose the privileged regulatory access that they have that allows them to, let's say, buy up their competitors. Not that I'm thinking of any particular examples at the moment when we're talking. You know, you use the powers of state to put unto pressure on independent organizations or opposition political parties. Universities? Yeah, universities, right? You start exploiting legal powers not to declare martial law necessarily, but to increasingly marginalize or target or terrify groups that might want to resist you or they're just disfavored out groups that you can use to whip up public sentiment against. Again, I'm not thinking of any specific examples here right now, certainly. And this is the really common playbook, right? That has worked over and over again in a lot of different countries. I mean, again, to varying degrees, there are lots of different reasons why something might be more successful in one place or another country, a very contextual differences between countries that matter. But it's the basic rule, right? You maintain the plausible deniability and you don't do things as obvious typically as like stuffing the ballot box or something like that. You just make it so elections are taking place on a playing field that's so uneven that it would take a real miracle for your party to lose. And if that miracle occurs, as may actually be occurring right now in Hungary, very interestingly, you structure it such that you might not be able to lose power at all, right? So there are rumors that Viktor Orban might be going to pass a constitutional amendment, which should do, to change Hungary into a presidential system. So he would appoint himself presidents. So that's illegal, right? And it's not nullifying the election, but it kind of is nullifying the election functionally. And that's the extreme desperation play. Like that's if you're in a lot of trouble. Normally it doesn't get to that point and it hadn't been Hungary until right now. Well, we'll see how the election goes in a month. Yeah, so the Hungary example is maybe we'll join, right? Join the examples that you write about. So it gives the countries that you looked at and why they drew your attention. Yeah. So I picked three countries as my real focus here, Brazil, South Korea, and Poland. And so the overarching question to me here, I think ultimately it lurks in the background of all these conversations. It's kind of pretend to be universal, but are like really about the United States. And there's a reason for that, right? It's not just American prokulism. It's not just that you and I are Americans. It's that the United States is the most powerful country in the world. Donald Chuck controls the most powerful army that has ever existed on the face of the planet and the nuclear codes and has like just put a bunch of military assets that are bigger than just about any country could even marshal like around Iran because he wants to. Yeah, we don't have, you know, ever. No. And everyone has to deal with that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just democratic decline here. Right? In fact, every other country, two degree that is almost unfathomable, right? Americans, we often think about our domestic politics, but our influence over other countries really is profound, even if we can't make them do whatever we want. And we set the tone for the world order. So if America becomes less democratic, the world by necessity becomes less democratic. Right? There's a lot of really good evidence that part of this post Cold War boom towards democracies was the decline of the Soviet patronage network for communist states and the rise of American economic pressure in the pressure that a lot of countries felt to join the American economic network. So like in very tangible ways, American democratic decline affects everybody. So I'm not just being parochial on like I'm looking for good test cases for the United States, right? It's also because it's a cute global import and be them in American and I care. And the reason that these were good test cases is because these countries were all democracies that were in at least in two cases, Poland and South Korea high income and Brazil middle income. Brazil is interesting because it has in many ways a structural political system that's quite similar to the US. Their constitution was patterned off of ours with some important differences that I think will probably get into at one point and all of them had elected leaders who had done roughly an equivalent of what Trump is trying to do here in the United States. I think Brazil is the closest case to somebody who like really tried to do that like just grabbing a bunch of power in the way that Trump has. But both recent leaders in South Korea and Poland have done the quietly we're not destroying democracy, but we're going to try to accrue a bunch of power and see what happens type move that we're seeing in the US. And then finally like the reason I picked all of them is because they had a kind of immediate happy ending like you said, not forever. Everything is fine. A lot of feedback I've gotten from people in these countries is, hey, wait a minute, right? Everything's not fine. They're still problems here. No final victories. No final victory risk of democratic regression. And I take that seriously right, I don't want to dismiss it, but there was an immediate crisis and it was defeated. And there have to be lessons for that given how deep our crisis is now. So I think the best way to do this would be just to give like a quick a capsule summary of sort of each country like Poland, South Korea, Brazil in terms of like, I guess in all three cases, sort of right wing populist aspiring authoritarian regimes. And then what the kind of crisis was in the resolution. And then I would like to talk a little bit about like, okay, so let's like zoom out and just talk through lessons. What are the things that have sort of emerged? What are the patterns? So just if you can walk through that just because I think people, Brazil's probably the one people are most familiar with because Jair Bolsonaro is such a Trump-like figure because they were like, they were quite close actually and have known each other for decades if I'm not mistaken. And I've been connected for decades. And he basically like pulled a knock off Jan 6 right down to like his people walking into the capital in in Brazil. The other ones I think are probably a little more remote for people to might remember that South Korean coup that Poland one I think has not gotten that much press. So just give us those sort of capsule version of each one. Sure. So let's start with Brazil. Chris, you hit most of the high notes here, right? Bolsonaro's like one thing you'll see is common in these cases is everyone got elected because people are tired of the incumbents. In none of these countries was anyone like, oh, I'm voting for authoritarianism. That was never the case, even for most of their supporters. And when you talk to Bolsonaro supporters right now, which I did in Brazil, they will tell you he wasn't the real authoritarian and the real authoritarians are his opponents. So it's the same correctional boxing that we were discussing earlier. But he gets elected in 2018 due to just like an epic corruption scandal. This sort of I'd say the biggest reason why he ended up voting, not the only one but the biggest. And in power, he really does try to do a bunch of unilateral stuff for some of which I was really surprised to learn while I was reporting the piece. Like one thing he did through a pseudo-executive order really early on was try to impose like state surveillance on non-governmental organizations, which he saw as kind of the opposition to human rights activists and stuff like that. Yeah, I didn't know that. His first day, yeah, I didn't know that until I started working on this. I went to Brazil and talked to a lot of people there. So the Brazilian cases in many ways, the ones I know the best of these three. And he interestingly encountered a lot of resistance, right? And not just from the opposition parties, right in the sense of the form of the left-wing parties that we knew were going to oppose him. But Brazil has this kind of loosey goosey center-right majority called the central that really dominates its politics and Congress. Central is more interested in getting power than anything else. They care more about getting reelected and they're corrupt. So ensuring corrupt profits. And he encountered a lot of resistance from them. And the reason was a bit surprising. It's that they are fine-making policy deals with him where like the central right overlap with the far right on economic issues like pension reform. They totally played ball. But when it came to consolidating power in the executive branch, Congress was not okay with that. Because it took away their ability to keep sustaining the patronage networks and the corruption that they really wanted out of office, right? So it's this interesting situation where the central right opposition is more corrupt than it is ideological. And that makes it like more resistance. Just have the founders to it up. Oh, yeah. I mean, in a way, kind of, yes. Well, yes, I mean, in a kind of perverse way, right? Because I mean, the thing that we're dealing with right now is, you know, there's all this stuff in the federalist papers in Madison, where, and this is like, you know, one of their immediate, immediately revealed miscalculations, right? That these sort of branch battles are going to be the most important ones. As opposed to partisan battles, right? And very, very quickly, you know, it comes clear that partisan battle is going to be very important. But those branch battles had retained a level of salience and a sort of zealous guarding, particularly from congressional, particularly from things like congressional appropriators. Yeah. That has really desiccated among in the in the Republican congressional majority here. I think do a pretty shocking degree for somewhat similar reasons. I mean, there, you know, there's a reason that you want to be the person that controls the per strings, right? Right. That's a very powerful thing. And to give away that power is a little nuts. And you do it because you're just ideologically in line with the president, or you just really depend on the president for your reelection, because primary elections determine basically, like, whether or not you say an office, and how many is it districts in the US that are non-competitive? It's like close to 90 in the house or something like that. 90%. Yeah. It's really a shopping number that are locked for one party. So, so Bolsonaro gets, so Bolsonaro has friction, even while he's trying to put this agenda into place, he's getting friction from a place that we haven't really seen a lot of friction from Trump, particularly in Trump two point out. There's probably more on the first Trump, but he does, he's getting friction from sort of inside the collisional tent in the legislative branch. Right. And that's true, even after he signs a formal coalition agreement with the center right, right? You might think that that's center right capitulation, but in Brazil, it actually was kind of presidential capitulation. He said he didn't want to form any coalitions. They were seen as corrupt. And he really wanted to build his own power base. You know, he appointed something like roughly half of his cabinet members were members of the military. Like that was his real, he wanted to build, like recreate Brazil's military dictatorship. He was an open admirer of the dictatorship, by the way, which ended in 1985, not a long time ago. Yep. And he also encounters a bunch of resistance from the Supreme Court for exactly this reason, right? The Supreme Court recognizes what's going on that Brazilian voters just elected an authoritarian. When I was reporting the piece, I found this really remarkable text message that a Brazilian Supreme Court justice said to, like, their WhatsApp group, which is kind of a funny thing to imagine, right? But the Supreme Court is just like, justices having a text message sharing, like, their group chat talking. And in the message saying, he basically says, we don't want to be the guys who empowered Hitler in 1933. Like that is what we know. And that's like, it's an incredible, incredible detail set to themselves. That's how they saw their job during the Bolsonaro administration. And he'd actually led to some pretty severe overreaches, right? The current sort of leader of the Supreme Court and who's led the anti-Polsonaro effort, a guy named Alexander de Morais, justice. He really used his powers against the government and against supporters of the government and civil society in ways that are democratically quite troubling. You've really seen the envelope. Yeah, I'm pretty much speech. I don't want to whitewash that and be like, Brazil's opposition is totally democratically clean. They're also in the midst of a corruption scandal right now. Unsurprisingly, it's a pretty corrupt country in general. But it really wasn't necessary. It turns out that somebody, both in Congress and the Supreme Court, pushed back pretty aggressively. Because when Bolsonaro came to the election time in 2022, Bolsonaro really pulled out all the stops to try to make sure that he couldn't lose. Because he'd been frustrated in this power consolidation effort, like, you know, the trying to slow a cruel presidential authority that leads to the kind of sub-rosa democratic backsliding we've been talking about, right? He just he couldn't pull it off because of congressional and Supreme Court resistance. So he decides to try to rig the election. And not in like, we're going to stuff the ballot box way they would get you caught in a we're going to send the highway police to close roads in like the opposition strongholds. Brazil has a national presidential vote. It was in the second round. So they just if he could suppress the popular vote in opposition strongholds, that's Brazil's northeast for the Brazilian left, then you could win the election. Basically, the election was very close and ended up being decided by like a percent roughly a percentage point. And so there's these highway roadblocks because a lot of places in Brazil are remote and you can't get to a polling station that easily. They block the buses of taking people to the polls and shut down the roads for some unspecified safety reason. What happens to Supreme Court intervenes within hours. The blocks are lifted and people get to vote. Maybe not everybody, but it wasn't enough that it can bring the election. Bolsonaro loses. Everybody else outside of his party in the Brazilian political system says great, free and fair elections. It's over. He starts plotting with the military to try to launch a coup like the old school kind of coup that we had been discussing something that wouldn't work. And the military didn't bite. And there's a very interesting question is to why they didn't. That no one in Brazil really knows, right? There's a lot of theories. One thing that I will note that's relevant is that the Biden administration plays a significant role here. They put a lot of pressure in Brazilian military. I think this is actually the most significant accomplishment of the Biden administration, potentially of the entire four years, certainly in foreign policy. The best thing that they did was play a significant role in saving Brazilian democracy. Great irony, considering they couldn't do it at home. And the US role in Latin America has not exactly been traditionally promoting democracy, but that's part of what happened. Anyway, they don't go for it. The two out of, but one of them does. The head of the Navy is on board, but not the army or the Air Force. And you can't really do a coup with boats. That's a place where you've got to jump together, I think. You're not going to be successful unless you got the whole team. Yeah. So the hands up bailing on that. And will you reference the redo of January 6th, which actually attacked not just the capital building, but also the presidential offices and the Supreme Court, like it was like a tripartite grand sacking. That is really their theory of victory on that day on January of 2023 is like, if we incite a riot, the military will get on board. And they have some reason to think that, but ultimately, again, their Supreme Court intervention to force the deployment of security services to suppress the riot. It goes nowhere. And now Bolsonaro is in jail. Like he will be serving at 27 year. They also have a way. It's so funny because they're Gen 6, like, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was a very different scene because you didn't, they just kind of walked around. Like there was no one stopping them really. They were kind of walking around. It was sort of empty. And so you don't have this like like the thing they're trying to precipitate is some big clash, right? With the excuse from military instead. It's just they're these Bolsonaro supporters kind of walking around these largely empty buildings. It's not like, you know, the day that happens in January 6 is like the day the vote is cast. So, you know, there's a huge there's all the security laws people. This was a very different vibe. Yeah, it's and it's interesting that happened in part because the head of the federal district, which is where the sort of, it's on a state, but it's a district where Brasilia is located is is a big Bolsonaro supporter. So he holds back state security services to let them just like a rampage and hope the military will see it as successful and it'll be fine. And then the Supreme Court intervenes and says, no, you actually like he takes away the powers. That's dim rises. Excuse me. Marius takes away the powers of the head of the federal district and says, you're not in charge of security services anymore. I'm deploying them. We're going to stop this, which is an example. Like, can you do that legally? Yeah, I'm sorry, but yeah. And so ultimately Lolo wins. He returns to be a president after he had been, he had left. He'd sort of passed over the party to a kind of, you know, successor he had chosen. He'd gone to jail in this corruption scandal. He'd gotten out of jail and ran for he runs for office. He wins. And then Bolsonaro is then indicted, right? Yes, that's right. He's investigating. That's when we learn about the coup plot that was happening in private. People didn't know. It's part of the investigation in January 8th that uncovered this like series of meetings. There are at least two very clear ones in the timelines I could find were like the heads of the military were asked to do a coup. All right, so this was very, I mean, very, very close to succeeding. It didn't or at least happening. it didn't, but the evidence is overwhelming against Bolsonaro. He's arrested. He's sent to jail. There are lots of other co-conspirators who are sent to jail, including the head of the Navy that we talked about a second ago. It's like what if the U.S. had taken January six seriously? And a lot of Brazil coverage has focused on that. I don't want to claim like I'm the guy that came up with this parallel. It was obvious. No, it's like they have their own, it's like Janie, you know? It's a fairly tight parallel. Yeah, that one's clear. I thought it was more surprising to me, and what drew me to the story was what happened before. Is why is it that Bolsonaro failed to consolidate Trump like powers when he really wanted to beforehand? So I thought that part was surprising, but the last part is still really important because it shows that accountability really matters, right? So Bolsonaro's in jail, he's not running in this year's presidential election because he can't, the court has said you can't run at this point. His son is running, and his son might win, but his son is an interesting figure, Flavio Bolsonaro. I tried to interview him, but he didn't bite on this one. Flavio is widely seen as very cropped as sort of like guy who managed his money, cropped money for the Bolsonaro family, though it's never been proven. Many people in Brazil told me this, and he also, it seems like kind of pragmatist as a result, like he's not the ideologue that his father was. So he's more willing to make deals and play with democratic rules if it can lead to his profit and his family's profit. So this is an enduring theme that I've learned in Brazil is that the corruption, which is very bad for their democracy in a lot of ways, helps keep a lid on anti-democratic politics. Well, there's something to that in the U.S. if I can extend the metaphor. One of the things I do think that has been interesting is you know, there has been a little bit of it's not quite the same tension, but I think like for instance, the Chamber of Commerce joining the tariff suit, you know, Amicus Brief on the tariff suit. So there are parts of the Trump agenda that, you know, the tariff, I think particularly. Now, they haven't, they have not, you know, they have not kind of waged the kind of campaign against it, they would have President Bernie Sanders said, I'm unilaterally slapping on hundreds of billions of dollars on tax tariff and taxes on people like it would be the end of the war. Yeah, I mean, it would have been full-scale war. So, you know, in that sense, it's not the same, but I guess there are, there are places where there is tension between what Trump wants to do and basically the financial interests of large powerful interests who are maybe not quite ready to kind of submit themselves entirely to the whims of this guy. That is, I think a productive area of tension, even though, you know, I'm not the biggest fan of the US Chamber of Commerce and like I mentioned, they conduct themselves is pretty bad and pretty bad for the country, particularly in the way that they have, you know, used the money they have both in lobbying and campaigning. But I think it's interesting there is like what are areas of frictions and fissures that aren't necessarily the ones that you like the good-hearted lives of Minnesota taking on the regime, right? Like that's one place that you see it. But what are other cracks or fissures in the power structure and particularly where he's trying to encroach on power that other powerful interests want to guard that can be sources of productive friction? Yeah, I mean, if I can preview the takeaways session that we'll get to after the talking about the other two countries, like one one interesting finding in the research on democratic resilience is that the role of capitalism is a little bit more ambiguous than people might want to think. For exactly the reasons you're just describing, right? It's not like big business has a ideologically vested interest in democracy, but they do tend to care about stability and they tend to care about predictability and they don't like being subject to the arbitrary rules of a federal government that can change regulatory policy at a whim, right? And so you end up getting the situation where capitalist forces have our kind of cross pressured, right? There's they have some incentives to be on board with the government and get those favors that the government wants to dole out as sort of a loyalty bonus. They also don't want things to get to the point where that's what they have to be doing in the first place. They'd rather have a predictable regulatory environment and a lack of like total catastrophic political chaos that reduces investment and makes things lawless profitable for them. So you end up getting pushback in certain areas under certain conditions from economic forces in ways you wouldn't expect. So yeah, I want to have a thought about that. I'm going to say until we get back around the takeaway. So now take me through so that that is an incredibly vivid story. It happened kind of in our metaphorical backyard by a guy that was very colorful and got a lot of attention. The other two got less attention. Maybe let's do Poland because that's next door to Hungary and it's sort of in some ways been in this lumped together in certain ways but has taken a different trajectory in the last five years, I guess. Yeah, I mean, Poland was kind of Hungary's mini-me, right? And it comes to Democratic backslide. Even though it's a bigger country and much more strategically important, but in comes to anti-democratic politics, Poland's ruling law and justice party or was ruling at the time period we're talking about starting around 2015. Really was consciously patterting their politics on Viktor Orban's demolition of Hungarian democracy. And unlike Bolsonaro, who's like very brash and loud and open about his admiration for the military decadership, PIS was much more PIS as the Polish acronym for law and justice name of the party. PIS was much more subtle. Some people say peace too, but I'll just say PIS because those are the initials in English, the way he gets spelled out, was much more subtle in terms of what it was trying to do and really tried to make it seem as if they're playing within the democratic game that their opponents were the ones who are really a kind of corrupt elite that was destroying and hauling out democracy from within, selling out Poland to globalist elites. Immigration was very bad, right? It's very much the traditional euro-nationalist arguments used to justify paragraphs the same way that Viktor Orban did it, right? So the biggest fight was over the judiciary, over PIS's effort to put political controls over the judiciary by getting their own people in place. That was the big fight. And they get away with this for a long period of time, right? So they, unlike the other two, were talking about they win a second turn, right in the 2019 elections. Now, they lose control of the Senate, which in Poland matters less than the lower house, Poland's a parliamentary democracy and control the government's determined by control of majority in the lower house or coalition on majority. So losing the Senate isn't like a catastrophic blow, but it does mean it's harder to jam through whatever you want legislatively. So that was a real defeat. Why that happens? Interesting. So while most polls at that point were not really thinking about democracy when they went to the ballot box, PIS did a really good job hiding or at least making sort of less salient what they were doing. It was obvious to the opposition, right? Those in their crosshairs that they were going to be squashed if they didn't do something. And so they came up with a kind of agreement not to run competing candidates in Senate elections. So you can have like a one-on-one referendum in the Senate against the peace candidates. And they that allowed them to win, right? And they said at the time, explicitly, we're the democratic opposition, right? That's what we're doing here. We're trying to preserve democracy. And that recognition and that change in tactics was enough to be able to flip the Senate. And then in 2023, they ended up winning an election. They defeated the incumbent government despite what it had done to try to ring, you know, everything, the political playing field in their favor. The biggest reason they did that is because of the power grab of the judiciary backfiring, the new PIS is very right-wing, their new judiciary, the Supreme Court issued a ruling banning abortion. It was incredibly unpopular. And there was a mass movement against it. That was like the single biggest reason why they lost. Now that is also a familiar story for Americans. Turns out banning abortion is not very politically popular. I mean, even in Poland, right? Yeah, it's like the most I mean, one of the most Catholic countries, certainly the most Catholic countries in Europe and the birthplace of the Pope John Paul, like those two sort of echoes are really interesting. To me, the other thing about it is they never had, you know, Bolsonaro is say what you will, he's a charismatic populist demagogue classically. So is Orban in his own way. Like they never had, they were trying to do something that I felt that was like less personalist if that makes sense. No, that's right. Like it's not like Trump or everyone. And I do wonder if that matters. Well, I think it did in part because the opposition did put together a charismatic popular figure. I named Paul Tusk, a former leader of the country. And Tusk, he really was the face of the opposition. And he was in the only opposition party. And there were some people who voted for his allies that maybe didn't like him that much. But he did serve as a credible face, right? A kind of person to orient around. And there's this interesting thing that Polish or experts on Poland have found recently is that they, the government thought that this was a weakness, right? They could single out Donald Tusk who had been deeply integrated in the European Union, leadership, who's the president of the European Council at one point, single him out as being like, and look, this guy's the guy who's selling you out. But it turned out that trying to demagogue against the really like the charismatic popular guy that had some credibility backfired, not only did it like motivate the opposition, but it turned him into the figure, you know, sort of the little leading figure and the guy that was fighting back against them. And that made people who maybe were on the fence about which party to vote for, willing to vote for his coalition. And the end result is like even members of the now former ruling party admit that they made a mistake by focusing him on this regard, on him in this regard, especially when they lacked. For their part, like their leadership hated him. Maybe it was jealousy. I don't know, but they lacked a credible charismatic counterpart, right? So in Brazil, Lula, the current president, leader of the left, is incredibly charismatic and talented. You know, one reporter I know in Brazil is like, if you speak Portuguese, it's like Obama of it better. I don't speak Portuguese. So I couldn't assess the validity of that claim. But he and he and Bolsonaro were very much matched in terms of their ability to speak to their core audiences and Poland, there was a mismatch. PIS just never had the charismatic Lou that you're pointing to. Yeah. And there's something to think about in terms of what the future holds here. We'll get to it later about in terms of Trump and his longevity or what he does. Which is going to be key. Yeah. Sorry. Let's talk about South Korea. Okay. So Korea is, I think, more similar to the Brazilian case than the Polish one, Korea. You had a, a president who was elected on surprise, surprise, a wave of dissatisfaction with the incoming comment, lovely party, same as Yoon Suk-yeol. And he had some credibility. He was a former prosecutor who had gone after people on corruption abuse of public power. It was generally seen as a representative of the hard right faction of the right-wing party. Right? It's politics and Korea mostly polarized between a major left-wing and major right-wing party. So we're dealing with two party system unlike the multi party system or at least a dominantly two party system unlike the multi parties that we've been talking about. And he takes power and is basically unpopular from the jump. Like it's very clear that he won because people were unhappy about where things were going off because they liked what he was proposing and some structural factors in Korean politics helped put him in a bad position to begin with or at least a position to fail. And one of the like the deep level of political polarization between the two parties and how dangerous it is in some ways, the dates back to the dictatorship. So like Bolsonaro, he was a fan of the 80s vintage dictatorship and military dictatorship in Korea. He was and he was not subtle about the side there. And the Korean left was born out of the modern Korean left out of opposition to the dictatorship, right? They were the opposition. And the Korean right was like the sort of trying to integrate elements of the dictatorship into democratic politics. They were motivated primarily by their fear of the North and communist infiltration in the South. So you have this political system where you've got a guy who was a very hard-line anti-communist guy to the point where he admires the dictators. In office, they're saying really extreme stuff and staring the pants off of the political left who remembers how brutal the dictatorship was and which works really hard to oppose him. And as they work really hard, he gets more concerned and more scared about his sort of paranoid vision of them as like a cat's paw of the North. And starts as soon as like really early into his term, discussing plans for an military coup or a declaration martial law. In 2024, he loses the midterm elections, the left now his power in the legislature. And this is like a crisis blow. And then in December of that year, after the elections and then some legislative gridlock in his inability to pass signature legislation, he declares martial law overnight. Bans the opposition, bans the open media, sends troops into the streets of Seoul, issues or restaurants for opposition leaders, like we're talking the very, very classic type of authority. Yes. Yes. And that's why it fails. Right? This is my big takeaway. Again, previewing a little bit at the end of this conversation, but like my big takeaways, the more obvious you are about being anti-democratic and the more obviously your opponents can pay you as anti-democratic, the more likely you are to fail. And Kriya was a really vivid example of this because like overnight, within hours of this declaration, you had people from both of the two leading factions, right, jumping over the fence to get into the legislature and to try to vote to end martial law. It wasn't a unilateral thing, elements of the ruling party wanted to end this too. But the thing that I found that was most striking, aside from these listeners you may have seen the video of this, right, of one, a positionally live streaming himself getting in there by jumping offense. It's crazy. But the really striking thing to me is the way that people in Seoul ordinary citizens mobilized to block this, like almost immediately. I think probably within minutes, but I don't have the timeline exactly, right? Certainly within hours at night. And it was at night too. So like I remember like people had been like out drinking and like are like coming straight from bars or clubs or whatever, like yo, WTF, like, I mean, it's an incredible, there's the footage of this moment is just so inspiring and kinetic. It's crazy, right? And thousands of people, we don't even have an exact count. It all happened too quickly for there to be any reliable estimates of how many people showed up. And so like I kept looking for this. I couldn't find it. And that's what I realized that's what happened. It was just too fast. And they're standing in front of the legislature, physically blockate soldiers from going after legislator wars or anyone else for that matter. And it turns out this was more important than I knew where it's I read a bunch of the Korean scholarship that started to be published last year. And if you looked at the details of the martial law order that you issued that night, he called for the arrests and for the plans that he had issued that he had developed, right, that came out during the investigation. He had issued orders to arrest the leaders of the opposition, right? And maybe, oh no, they might have even been killed that night. They weren't. Now why weren't they? Partially, that was probably because of dissent with them in the military. But it was also because as some Korean scholars pointed out, the protesters physically blocked the people with guns. They stood in front of them and said, you can't move. You're not getting through me. You're not doing anything. And it is very possible. We don't know how plausible, but very possible that that act of defiance by ordinary Koreans prevented the military from arresting the people who would later vote to the military or the police to later vote to end the state of emergency and the declaration of martial law. So that act of bravery wasn't just like, you know, people showed up and stood around after drinking. It's that after a night of drinking, they went up and gotten front of the guys with guns and said, no further and maybe possibly putting their bodies on the line, save Korean democracy. It's really astonishing. And he then gets, he gets impeached, right? There's like a forum. He gets impeached and then a big fight. And it wasn't like, it wasn't all, you know, the kind of momentary consensus that forms in the kind of shock of this, which is totally consensus. There are members of his party who are like, no, this is not cool. There is some sort of repolarization that happens afterwards. It's not like a clean cut easy, you know, Nixon runs off resigns and disgraced with his tail between his legs. It's like a, it's a big fight afterwards to actually impeach him and hold him. That's right. That's that's right. Right. It's like I said, the polarized logic of Korean politics rooted in these Cold War, dictatorship area, disagreements and the threat from the North, which is very real, right? Because those are powerful and they don't just go away, even given that immediate threats to democracy, but in the immediacy of the moment, they did sort of. And then there's impeachment. And now Yoon has been convicted, right? He's been and sentenced to life in prison. And it's funny. It's so crazy. I remember seeing some Americans being like, this was amazing on social media. It's incredible what a democracy can do when they do a lead accountability. And then when Korean observers like the discourse in Korea isn't like, it's amazing. That's why isn't he dead, right? Why isn't he being responsible for punishment? And so it really comes to, it shows how much we've come to take for granted, but our system doesn't work. And what people and other democracies expect when a leader commits crimes against the democratic order. More of our conversation after this quick break. All right, so there's, I mean, what's interesting is like, even though these are very different contexts, I mean, it's three different continents. It's different systems, you know, sort of two party, multi party. They're these sort of through lines. It's very recognizable ones. What are the kind of, what do you feel like the big lessons, the takeaways or discoveries you made that do feel applicable here? Yeah, I mean, the biggest one, I alluded to it a second ago, but the biggest one in the most straightforward one, and I think the one that is like least appreciated in the conversations surrounding this is the sense of democratic threat is absolutely decisive to whether or not one of these authoritarian parties fail. It almost seems too obvious to be worth saying, right? It's like if you, if you are trying to be very obvious about what you're doing that people will resist you, but it's actually contrary to the conventional wisdom in this area. One thing you hear from pollsters in the United States, and even scholars of comparative democracy, is that democracy as an issue is too abstract to get people to care about it, right? They care about what tangibly affects their lives, they care about, you know, pocketbook issues, maybe they care about social issues too because that implicates them in world code, but democracy, well, that just sounds really vague. But what I learned studying these three different cases is that when democracy doesn't matter, it's because people think it's not under threat, they just don't believe that there's a real chance that the democratic order could actually end, right? But when that threat starts to feel real, people across society, I mean, think about the different groups we've talked about here, the Brazilian Supreme Court, the Korean people, [laughs] and the Polish opposition. Like these are all various different people, not only like different countries in different contexts, but different social groupings with different incentives and different ways of relating to the current government. They all aligned on strategies of resistance and change their behavior because they believed that democracy was an as that existential threat. It was, and they were right about that belief. But do you mean believe like what actors you're talking about? Ordinary citizens, political parties, politicians, civil society, all of those. All of those, yeah, all of those. I think that in different ways they can all matter, right? And the perception of democratic threat can be motivating for each of them. >> So I think here, you know, there's a little bit of attention right now, I think. And I think there's a conventional wisdom that's borne out by polling. And I don't think is ludicrous, which is that like the way to restore American democracy is for a democratic opposition party to defeat the aspiring autocrat and his party in the midterms. I think basically everyone who's rooting for American democracy to live understands that that's like a necessary condition, right? Like a world in which the Democrats did not win back one house of Congress in the terms way, way worse for the prognosis. But the question of, well, how do you do that? And I think there's sort of two theories. One is you just have to do it through normal politics, which is like the price of eggs, right? And we've seen this over and over, you know, the polling is very clear that people's number one concern is affordability in the economy. It sort of dwarfs everything else. You've seen Democrats talk about it that a lot. They talk about healthcare, which is also up there. It's probably their best issue. And even to the point of kind of parody, right? Like I saw this, I saw this, I saw this post that's like live rent-free in my head if someone's like a parody of like Chuck Schumer talking. And he's like Donald Trump promised to bring down prices day one. Instead, he started a nuclear war that's incinerated their entire family. Donald Trump can't keep his prices on affordability. It's like, yeah, and I keep thinking about that. Because it does sort of nail a little bit of the sort of strangeness of this particular case, you know, that you get like, like we have masked agents shooting down people in the middle of the street. Like how's that going to cheap it? Like make your rent affordable. Yeah, wait a second. So like, what, but again, I don't want to parody too much because I do, like I do think it's tempting for people that do care about this a lot to project that everyone cares about it. And that the way to win the marriage terms is to make people care about it. And you know, one of the lessons in 2024, I think is like, people really were pissed off about the cost of living. That really was the most important issue. And if you don't meet people where they are, you can run some real electoral risks. So that's on one side. On the other, what I'm hearing from you is like, actually the sense of threat can be broadly motivating. But it sounds like that's a little bit of a question partly of how mobilized and unified the opposition is, but also the sort of actions the government is taking. And I think in this respect, I think Minnesota was instructive, right? Like the closest the country has felt to some like genuine dystopian version of authoritarianism to me in the Trump years. Our massed agents going around surveilling citizens and then like shooting them in broad daylight with zero accountability. No question. And I think that that, that had real political consequences and was basically essentially a political defeat for them. That was too far. Talk about that in that context. Yeah, I think the Minnesota example is really instructive because that does show that this dynamic that I've seen operating in other countries applies to the United States too. I mean, you had people like Joe Rogan talking about how they found this obscene and authoritarian and using analogies to dictatorships abroad, right? Like it's really, the degree to which that made the, what we talk about when we talk about authoritarianism legible, like this is the term I like that is legible, right? Cannot be overstated, I think. And partially, so it is just about like screw ups by the government when they go too far, when they make their intentions too obvious. That creates opportunities, right? For counter messaging for showing what their actual intentions are. That's like, that's really part of the story. I think another part of it, though, is that we often sort of fall into a trap where elections are the only thing that matters and not just the thing that matters most, right? And I think that's a really important distinction to parse out because I don't claim to be an expert on like what you should be doing if you want to be, let's say, winning, I don't know, in a highly serious way. Yeah, yeah, that's not my area of expertise. I'm not a poster that I have my views, like anyone else who writes about American politics, I got some views. Yeah, but I really truly am not like it, that's not what I know of the best, right? And so I'm not trying to say that because democracy was a motivating issue for people in Seoul and that I have a martial law declaration, therefore you should be talking to Ohioans about Trump being kind of like Hitler. Like that doesn't follow, that's not right. But we do have a really immediate issue here in the United States of, there's another, I mean, it's almost, it's March now, right? When this is airing, so we're a few months out, quite a few, but quite a few months out until November from March at this point. And there's gonna be a lot more authoritarianism between them now. Yes, exactly, yes. Even if Democrats do win the midterms, there's going to be other forms of executive power grab that Congress doesn't have control over. There's going to be decisions to collaborate or to resist from corporations, from universities, law firms, civil society groups. There are gonna be people who are gonna be motivated to go to protests and might try to stage actions in state legislatures. Like there are all sorts of different arenas that can help determine the outcome. And no one is as significant as the result of the midterm election. Like, I agree with you. If you're running for Senate in a red state and your goal is to stop Trump from being authoritarian, do what you think based on the context of your state is most likely to win. Don't just listen to me talking abstractly about democracy. Yes, yes, right. If what you're trying to do is to motivate civil society resistance or try to make the spectra of authoritarianism feels real to people, feel real to people in ways that galvanize meaningful forms of resistance, you can't just do this, talk about the price of eggs thing. Right, you have to actually talk about democracy. You have to talk about the specific ways democracies under threat. You have to make it clear to people who are in positions of influence, not just in government, but also maybe even in your local community that democracy is at stake and what we do plays a role in the outcome. That's the only way that you get people to actually take action in these areas. If you ignore it, and I think there is a role for national leadership here, right, not everything has to be about what rhetoric is best maximized to appeal to the median voter in Ohio or Texas, right? All those things matter. It's just like not the case that every act of political speech is expressive act that'll reach those voters. So you have to think about other purposes and other ways in which rhetoric can affect people and your choices of how you focus people's attention. And so you have to think about motivating and creating the sense of democratic threat. If you don't do that, it's going to be just much harder to prevent many other ways in which authoritarian power is consolidated in a backside of democracy. - What about the Brazil example is interesting because when I was reading your piece and reading that part, and also when I followed the news, I keep having this interesting counterfactual, like imagine a six three liberal Supreme Court with Donald Trump. - Yeah. - And what you would have would be this almost immediate showdown, like they would be issuing, they would be upholding lower court temporary restraining orders all the time in injunctions. They would be stopped, you know, intervening. They'd be moving quickly. They would like get that court acted. And the Brazilian Supreme Court, we should note is not a direct analog constitutionally. They have powers that are actually quite different and I think exceed the Supreme Court here to the degree that I think there's a plausible case that they've again, push the envelope slash maybe overstep those powers. But I really think like we don't have that here. I guess I was just kept being haunted as I was reading the Bolsonaro and I'm like, right, yeah, it would be a really different situation. And we'd be in much better shape if we didn't have this client Supreme Court. - Yeah, I mean, that was the thing that I think shocked me the most about the early, the first year of Trump, right retrospectively, is how willing the Supreme Court was to let some obvious lawless behavior go and to override rulings from lower courts. They're providing that temporary relief. I'm curious genuinely about whether future court rulings that are permanent look more like the tariff rulings are more like their temporary ones, right? Is the sort of the median conservative voter in the court trying to split the baby basically and give Trump what he wants temporarily while ultimately maintaining sort of something, some semblance of constitutional plausibility. After that, I don't know what the answer is but I do know that I expected more even from a partisan court given how at odds with the sort of original most interpretive framework that these guys are really, I think sincerely in love with, many of Trump's actions were. And it's just so shocking to go to Brazil and talk to people there about how they see their court and to read the things that justices have said and then compare it to the way the U.S. Supreme Court has become a complete political football 'cause I don't wanna say that the Brazilian court was always so high-minded, in fact, you referenced Lula going to jail, the Supreme Court upheld his conviction, right? When, and this was when he was trying to run for president again in 2018 and very well could have been the only plausible candidate who could have been Bolsonaro that year. Paul suggested that Lula was the only guy who really had a shot. So in some ways, the entire situation was the Brazilian Supreme Court's fault. And that resulted in part because of their ideological divisions between conservative and left leaning. justices over the lool of the facts of the lool of the case and over how to think about the court's role and its responsibilities in Brazil's and dealing with Brazil's democratic system and its broader issues of corruption, right, there were just lots of divisions inside the court. And those went away when the sense of democratic threat became acute enough. And I just am wondering by constantly wonder, what would it be like to be able to give John Roberts a truth serum and be like, buddy, you have to know that democracy is at stake, right? Like, what are you thinking? Right. So two of the major takeaways are sort of related. One is that like the more open things become the better for the opposition, right? That there's like the kind of the more ham fisted, the more that it looks like a power grab, the more it looks like, oh wait, we are, they're really trying to do this. The better that is the opposition. And similarly, it's really important as a sort of necessary condition to activate the sense of democratic threat as broadly and as widely and as sort of strongly as you can. Right. And both of those have been challenges here. And we, I think we've seen evidence of both of them. What are other takeaways? I think another one. This is derived primarily from the Brazilian example. And as much more prospective, rather than like sort of what we can do right now, is that maybe the United States ought to consider some pretty fundamental structural electoral reforms, right? Yes. This comes up a lot. And honestly, I really resisted this conclusion for a long time, because it seems kind of hopeless or given how hard it is to do anything in the American political system that like revamping the way we do elections is not an easy feat. But I didn't want that to be the conclusion. And also it's because I read articles about this and people would say, oh, and therefore what we should do is change the American electoral system and like, oh, so it's just that easy, isn't it? Right. The electoral system. But I kind of think we need to change the electoral system, really become there's a political scientist named Lee Dropman, who's really advocating for a multi-party system in the US have really become Dropman tilt on this issue. The more I've read and thought about it, and it's not impossible to do, you need to just change the way that house elections work, such that instead of there being multiple districts per state, there's one in seats are allocated via a proportional rather than winter takes all results. You can do that. Doesn't require constitutional amendment can be done. But there's a lot of barriers in the way of doing that. And so I've started to wonder if there's like two tranches of questions. Like, well, this I know that there's the question of how you deal with the fact that the current president wants to subordinate to bankruptcy. What are the immediate resistance tactics? Those are the other takeaways we've talked about. And the second question is like, how do you think about the task of post-Trump reconstruction of democracy? What does that entail? And what would it mean to go about doing democratic repair that's meaningful? And there'll be opportunities for that. And I think that in those planning, like a lot of the stuff that's being discussed when you hear Democrats talk about Project 2029 or whatever is basically a sort of standard democratic policy agenda. Like, let's do better healthcare policy. Throw that out the window. It is not time for me. Right? Like the next president, if a Democrat does one in 2029, cannot be focused on just enacting another technocratic change, even a very progressive technocratic change that I might agree with substantially to various different policy areas. You need to be revamping the system. You need to figure out how to make sure that nothing like this can ever happen again. And to change the structure of it such that we no longer have electoral incentives for political parties to be supine when the head of that party becomes an authoritarian, which is that's really at the root of our problem right now. Everyone knows that the old guard of the Republican party and probably most Republicans in Congress, or the Senate, I should say, don't want this. They don't want Trump to be acting like this. They would like things to go back to the way they were before, at least to some degree. They're afraid. They're afraid of losing their jobs and to a degree. They're afraid of losing their lives. This is not a trivial thing. And if you get these people talking honestly about it, and we need to change our political system such that that can't happen again. Right? And I think structural electoral reform is one of the most promising ways to do that. And another one is a lead accountability. That's another big takeaway from these stories, right? Is all three of these countries, right? Pulling, there's a allegedly corrupt member of parliament, I believe, who's currently hiding out in Hungary to avoid getting arrested by the current government because of their charges. But they're like, they all pursued serious accountability for wrongdoing. And we have, Adam Surwer just published a great essay about this in the Atlantic. We've since Nixon adopted a bipartisan framework of elite impunity in the United States. And I think fixing our current broken electoral system and ending our tradition of elite impunity need to be at the top of our prospective, our after Trump agenda, if we can be lucky enough to get to a point where American democracy is still functioning reasonably well after the next election. So that's my other set of big takeaways is that there needs to be ruthless prioritization of fixing the structural ideological essentials of the American system. Zach Beecham is a senior correspondent in Vox where he covers the crisis of global democracies, author of the reactionary spirit, which is a book on that topic. And this piece, which is called How to Stop a Dictator, Vox.com. It's really, really, really great. Go give it a read after listening to this conversation. Zach, thanks so much. Hey, Chris, this is great. Thank you so much. You can get in touch with us by emailing with [email protected]. Why is this happening? It's produced by Donnie Holloway and Brendan O'Milliam, engineered by Greg Devins and Hazik Bin Ahmad Farad. He allows our senior manager for audio production. Joanne Kong is our associate producer for video. Our co-ordinating producer is Franny Kelly. Asia Turner is the executive producer for MSNOW Audio. New episodes come on every Tuesday. You can watch us on YouTube by going to ms.now/withpop. [BLANK_AUDIO]