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.
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…
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.