Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / By

Turning Back the Slide: Protest Movements That Stopped Authoritarian Drift

Before I go further, I’m not a politician nor did I focus on political science in college, so I just happened to find the term “authoritarian drift” while trying to write about the comical devastation that is the U.S. today. The term was perfect: not a short-term disruption but a deliberate reversal of democratic ethics. Not skating around the facts but simply ignoring them completely.

Right now, we’re not in a dictatorship —  we are somewhere stranger: where the forms of democracy still exist, but the function is slowly being hollowed out. The laws haven’t changed much. What’s changed is that some people in power have stopped pretending they care about the spirit behind them. In many corners of the world, especially our own, we’re seeing a quick, noisy slide away from democracy. DEI is mocked and replaced as “DOGE.” Free speech is applauded when convenient and punished when disruptive. Protest is rebranded as extremism. Books are banned, rights reversed, dissent redefined as disloyalty. Whistleblowers are prosecuted while corruption goes unpunished. Congressional subpoenas are ignored without consequence and the judicial branch isn’t heeded. In other words, the U.S. is exhibiting classic signs of internal imposition—not a constitutional rewrite, not a coup, but a systematic undermining of democratic norms without formally changing the rules.

If we are not yet in a constitutional crisis (one in which there are no constitutional rules to guide the resolution to a conflict), we are close enough to feel its approaching headwinds.
Alex Keyssar

We, as U.S. citizens, can obviously go down that rabbit hole since we’ve already begun. After all, you don’t have to overthrow a democracy to kill it. You just must win once (with Trump, twice) —and then bend the rules until no one else can.

This is not new. For example…

…on a wave of frustration with inequality and corruption. But once in office, he rewrote the constitution, attacked the press, and centralized power. His successor, Nicolás Maduro, deepened the crisis. The result: food shortages, mass migration, crushed dissent, and a hollowed-out democracy barely recognizable from the one Venezuelans voted for.

Lesson: Populism can start by challenging elites—and end by replacing them with a worse one.

But under Viktor Orbán, democratic norms have quietly eroded. Courts have been stacked. Independent media silenced. Electoral maps redrawn. All of it done legally, gradually, procedurally. Orbán calls it “illiberal democracy.” The EU calls it deeply troubling. Citizens still vote—but on terms rigged long before they cast a ballot.

The Weimar Republic had a constitution, elections, and a free press. But under the weight of economic collapse, conspiracy theories, and fearmongering, it fractured. Hitler didn’t seize power by force—he was appointed chancellor. The Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act gave him emergency powers. Within months, democracy was dead by democratic means.
Lesson: Authoritarianism rarely knocks. It walks through the front door when the public is too exhausted—or too entertained—to lock it.

Each of these countries had elections. They had institutions. They had moments when people could have intervened—but didn’t. Or couldn’t. Or waited too long.

So I wanted to write about democracies that drifted toward authoritarianism but snapped out of it. Turns out, there aren’t many — but that’s not the same as none. The following movements—from Eastern Europe to South Korea, from Chile to Ukraine—remind us that democratic erosion isn’t fate. It’s messy. It’s a test. And some people have passed it before.

In 2016, a corruption scandal exposed President Park Geun-hye’s shadow government—led by her unelected spiritual advisor. Koreans didn’t scroll past. They came out in the millions, every weekend, in the cold, with candles. It wasn’t a riot. It was a rhythm. Singing, marching, joyfully unignorable. Eventually, the government folded: Park was impeached, convicted, and replaced by someone who stood with the people.

Lesson: You don’t need a revolution when your people remember what democracy is for. Just enough light to make the rot visible.

I almost skipped Ukraine. With the war, it’s easy to file it under tragedy. But before the tanks came, Ukrainians had already fought authoritarian drift—and won. In 2004, when a rigged election handed victory to a Russian-backed candidate, citizens took to the streets in winter. Freezing cold. Day after day. They called it the Orange Revolution, and they refused to leave until a fair election was held.

Lesson: They didn’t fix everything. But they made the theft impossible to complete—and that mattered.

Zambia doesn’t make headlines often—but it should. This country has quietly staged one of the most consistent resistance stories on the continent. It transitioned from one-party rule to democracy in 1991. Since then? A back-and-forth between drift and correction—proof that the people weren’t done fighting.

After years of creeping authoritarianism under President Edgar Lungu—media blackouts, protest crackdowns, judicial pressure—Zambians could have given up. But they didn’t. In 2021, they turned out in massive numbers to elect opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema, the very man Lungu had jailed and harassed. The vote wasn’t just a win—it was a thunderclap.

Lesson: Sometimes, the most radical protest is showing up to vote—again and again—until they can’t ignore you anymore.

Under Bolsonaro, Brazil saw open attacks on press, science, and the courts. After he lost in 2022, his supporters stormed government buildings. But this time, the system held. Just barely. Institutions pushed back. Protesters were arrested. Democracy didn’t collapse.

Lesson: You don’t always win by landslide. Sometimes you win by not losing everything.

Not long ago, Sierra Leone was a country synonymous with chaos: child soldiers, blood diamonds, a brutal civil war. But after the guns went silent, something remarkable started happening—a democracy took root where devastation once lived.

Since the early 2000s, Sierra Leone has held regular elections, and while the drift toward strongman tactics did show up—media bias, corruption, violent crackdowns on protest—the people never fully let go of their stake in the process. In 2018, they elected opposition candidate Julius Maada Bio in a tight but peaceful contest, despite elite resistance. And he came in talking about transparency, anti-corruption, and a reset.

Lesson: Sometimes, recovery isn’t just from war—it’s from apathy. And that takes guts, not just peace talks.

No coups. No slogans. Just pots and pans. When Iceland’s government bailed out corrupt banks in 2008, people banged cookware in the streets until the whole cabinet resigned. New leadership. New laws. A new constitution (almost).

Lesson: Sometimes you don’t need fire. Just a wooden spoon and a betrayal too loud to swallow.

A break-in. A coverup. And then? Investigative journalism, televised hearings, and a Congress that still believed in its job. Nixon resigned before impeachment could finish him. Watergate proved that institutions don’t just “hold.” People held them accountable.

Lesson: Corruption is nothing new. What matters is whether anyone still cares enough to stop it.

Closing?

So it’s about resistance—what happens when people realize the slide is happening and choose not to watch it in silence. They didn’t always fix everything. They didn’t always win as cleanly as possible. But they saw what was happening—and said No before it was too late.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *