Lawfare Daily: Resisting Democratic Backsliding

[Intro]

Laura Gamboa: I think activists in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, have been doing this kind of work for decades, and I think they have learned valuable lessons on how to mobilize, how to protect their movements, how to leverage political institutions. And, and some of these lessons have been hard learned, you know, like they have been costly mistakes that the United States does not need to make.

Quinta Jurecic: It is the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Quinta Jurecic, a senior editor at Lawfare here with Laura Gamboa, an assistant professor of democracy and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She studies democratic backsliding, specifically how opposition movements can resist encroaching authoritarianism, and what strategies are most effective in doing so.

Laura Gamboa: I think the worst possible world is where nothing happens. I think the, the second worst possible world is where individual groups are doing things separately.

Quinta Jurecic: We spoke about what her research can tell us about backsliding and resistance under the second Trump administration.

[Main podcast]

I wanna start by asking you to give us a bit of a diagnosis. You're a political scientist. You study democratic backsliding and opposition tactics. So from your perspective, how healthy does U.S. democracy look today?

Laura Gamboa: Very unhealthy is a quick answer to that question. Democratic backsliding—usually I think about it as a slow process of democratic decay in which eventually the regime just ceases to be democratic and turns in some kind of form of authoritarian regime. And now, of course everybody thinks authoritarian regime and they think about Cuba, but that's not what I'm having in mind right now.

What I'm having in mind right now is something is, is a regime that has elections that somehow the opposition systematically cannot win, right? Like where, where the, the state is weaponized against the citizens where freedom of the speech is very censored. Where news outlets all of a sudden get shut down or they cannot find paper or they cannot find licenses to broadcast, these kind of things.

And I think we're starting to seeing the first signs of that in the United States. It's very clear that the government is using the state apparatus to, to target citizens that disagree with them. They're starting with very vulnerable people in the country, noncitizens, but they have made clear open threats to citizens as well. And these have come verbally in the Oval Office laughing with Nayib Bukele, or they have come as, as institutional attacks, these executive orders against law firms or the attacks against universities that pretty much seek to silence people into compliance, right. And so I think in general, my assessment of the U.S. democracy is all my alarms are up. I am really, truly, very concerned.

Quinta Jurecic: And what you particularly look at is sort of how people respond to backsliding, not only the sort of authoritarian push, but the other end, the question of how civil society and opposition politicians respond. Again, from, from your perspective as someone who studies this, how do you kind of evaluate what the pushback has looked like in the U.S. over the last few months?

Laura Gamboa: I'll start with the, I guess the bad news. I don't think it's bad news really, but I think in general, unlike what happens in other countries, I, I think in the U.S. this was particularly surprising. I think Americans in general are less attuned to these kind of threats. In Latin America, we have seen them all. So we're very tuned to these things. You know, we see people being catch by masked unidentified officers and put into vans, and we know what this means and we know what this is. This is very clear for us.

I think for Americans, this is not so clear in general, like, you know, of course there's the academics and civil society activists and some politicians that are very that, that are more attuned to this. I think there's also a kind of a blind trust in that the system will somehow balance out that prevail during the first months of the administration. You know, I think that's ending right now. I think there's more, more leaders, especially Democrats, have been jumping into the, into the mode of, no, we, we really need to do something and we need to do it now.

But in general, I think for, for at least the first, for January and February, what we saw was more of a, oh, this will balance out like the system somehow magically will respond. And in my experience, systems do not magically respond. Institutions are only as strong as the people who support them, right, and I think particularly in the case of the United States, institutions might be a little bit more vulnerable in the sense that because constitutions in Latin America have been written after dictatorships. We have put into place rules, very clear rules about certain things that here in the U.S. are just vague, informal agreements. And so I think violating formal agreements is significantly easier than violating clear cut written rules.

I think civil society was a little faster to respond, and I think what they're doing is good. I'm hoping they're doing more than what we're seeing. I'm not connected to civil society organizations, so I don't dare to say whether they're doing it or not, but I hope that they are trying to build a more articulated movement around the protection of democracy that not only mobilizes demonstrations every weekend, but mobilizes like trains people, creates other forms of resistance, connects with policy makers, so on, so forth.

In general, what I have seen in my research is that unlike what happens with a coup, the erosion of democracy leaves the positions with resources to fight back. Now, in the case of the United States, the undermining of the state has been particularly quick—faster than it has been in El Salvador, faster than it was in Venezuela, faster than what we, what we saw in Hungary. That being said, we still have like, opposition still has pockets of support. They have money, they have people in Congress, they have courts that are fighting back. So I think as long as we have those things, or as long as the position has those things, they can stop the erosion of democracy.

Now there's a couple of, of strategies that I think my work and others, other people's work has identified as more successful than others. The first thing that I would say is, let's not do anything stupid. These resources are brushes. Let's not risk them in terms of, let's not launch a, a fail coup, which is what we saw in Venezuela early in Chávez’s government or broadly exclusionary types of protests, right? I think there, there is a way to leverage the streets, there is a way to leverage Congress and the courts, but it needs to be done in a, in a smart way.

The second thing that I will say is we need to use them. Not using them is not an option, right? So having those resources and not leveraging them is really not an option. I think waiting is is the worst possible strategy, because a lot of the people, what they say is, well, look, let's wait until the elections next November, and then we're gonna have more numbers.

I'm like, I, I hate to say this, but those elections might not be free and fair, right? There's nothing that guarantees us that like I, I know we used to live in a world in which that was a somewhat a guarantee—though I think if you live in some states in the United States, that was less true—but today, I don't think that that's a guarantee. I think we're gonna have to fight to protect that.

Likewise, I think it would be wise to start thinking about setting up mechanisms to compete or, or participate in a polity that is, that is biased, that is, that is, has institutions that are co-opted, right? So I think we need to start thinking about mechanisms to protect our citizens, to help those who are fighting. I think particularly, for instance, federal workers like that decide to, to do lawsuits and things like that. How are we gonna support them? How are we gonna help them? How are we gonna train them, so and so forth.

I think that in context where elections are not free and fair, usually participating in elections and winning the election is not enough. Oftentimes you need to mobilize people to support the result. And again, I think civil society movements maybe already been doing those things, and if, if, if they are, that's, that's awesome, but if they, if, if they're not, or, or, or if there's anybody hesitating, I think we shouldn't, I think we should be prepared to defend our vote and defend our institutions in the street.

I think what we have observed in other countries, especially recently, is that the best, the best form of contention is that that combines some kind of institutional space like an election with contention. It's not only going out on the streets with a broad range of demands, its going out on the streets with a very specific, actionable, achievable goal. And I think those are the ones that are more successful.

Quinta Jurecic: So I wanna dig into the specifics here and what you found in your, your research, but before we do, I think it's probably, it might be useful to kind of back up a little bit and clarify, you know, why is it helpful for Americans in this moment to kind of look at the U.S. in comparison with other countries that have suffered from backsliding.

Particularly here, we've been talking about Latin America, although not exclusively Latin America; I've definitely been wondering whether sort of U.S. political analysts might be better served by looking to Latin America, given the kind of similarities in terms of, you know, presidentialist systems that are now kind of weakened in, in terms of democratic health. What do we gain from looking at things in that comparative perspective?

Laura Gamboa: I think the United States does not need to invent the wheel. So I think these processes of democratic backsliding, there are things that are unique for each country, and as I mentioned before, I think in the U.S. there is a technological component to this that is relatively new, and then there is a speed at which it’s happening that is also relatively unprecedented. That being said, everything else we have seen, right—the weaponizing of the courts, the disappearing people, maybe not into other countries, though we have also seen people being disappeared into other countries.

You know, I think activists in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, have been doing this kind of work for decades, and I think they have learned valuable lessons on how to mobilize, how to protect their movements, how to leverage political institutions. And, and some of these lessons have been hard learned.

You know, like they have been costly mistakes that the United States does not need to make, right? There is a, a generalizable lesson. Like, for example, early protection is best. The earlier you start to protect democracy, the better your chances are. There is a wealth of knowledge about sort of how to leverage, how to best use Congress, how to best use the courts, but also how to protect them when they're ready to to defend democracy.

I also think—and I think this is particularly important for this country—that most transitions to democracy and most sort of regimes that have successfully stopped democratic backsliding have done so building bigger tents. But building a big tent is hard, is really, really, really hard 'cause you have to all of a sudden jump on board with people you may disagree. And there are ways to do that, there are ways to reach out, there's different peoples, different movements.

So I think in general my sense that the United States does not need to invent the wheel, I think there's lessons, important lessons that we have learned throughout to identify and react to these kind of threats.

Quinta Jurecic: So let's get into the specifics. So you, you read—in your book, you sort of compare case studies of Venezuela, which has a sort of case of backsliding where civil society was not able to prevent it, and then Colombia, where there actually was success in preventing against backsliding. And I found that comparison really useful in kind of conceptualizing what tactics might work and might not work so well.

So talk me through that comparison. What were the different strategies that opposition groups tried and what worked and what didn't?

Laura Gamboa: So when I think about strategies, I usually think about them, I split two different aspects of them. The first one is what the strategy wants. So broadly speaking, in Latin America, broadly speaking, in Turkey, what we observed is some oppositions wanting to just remove the executive. So what we have is a very specific type of democratic backsliding in which the executive uses and abuses institutions and institutional reforms to expand their powers, right? And so the opposition says what we need to is remove this person from office. Other oppositions, however, have said, no, this, this person was democratically elected; what we're gonna do is we're gonna hold the front until this person finished their term.

Now, to achieve either goal, oppositions can use institutional strategies, congress, courts, or elections, and extra-institutional strategies with me, which means nothing like any strategy that happens outside congress, courts or elections. And what I argue in my book is that extra institutional strategies with radical goals—that is strategies that seek to remove the executive from the streets via a coup, guerilla warfare protest, a strike—usually backfire. And they tend to backfire because the president was democratically elected, and so the opposition all of the sudden seems very radical, so the opposition loses legitimacy in front of both domestic and international audiences.

They tend to backfire too—in the book, I don't talk as explicitly about it—but also because they tend to polarize people, which goes against this idea of building bigger tents and gaining allies and all of these things, but also because they give the executive the ability to rally around the flag and push for more aggressive reforms, right? So if you try to remove the executive, the executive feels threatened and all of a sudden there is a backlash, right?

And so what we see in Venezuela is early on between 2002 and 2006 the opposition, a very strong opposition, trying to remove Chavez from office with a coup. At first with the, with like a general strike that has stopped the oil company on a tracks for a couple months afterwards, and then eventually by refusing to participate in congressional elections with the idea that that would just delegitimize Chavez. And in general, what happens at the end is the coup gave Chavez perfectly legit reasons to purge the armed forces. The strike gave Chavez, again, legitimate reasons to remove like 60% of PDVSA employees and replace them with loyalists—PDVSA is the oil company—and then the boycott gave Chavez a hundred percent of the National Assembly.

So you, so you start with an opposition that had between 30 and 49% of the seats in Congress. They had influence over the armed forces; they controlled the oil company; they had some leverage over courts and oversight agencies, and the ability to mobilize millions of Venezuelans to the street. And after all of these moves, the position is left with without the seats in Congress 'cause Chavez gets a hundred percent national assembly; without the PDVSA, without the oil company, or access to the oil company, which means without access to the money in Venezuela; without any influence over the armed forces.

And eventually because they don't hold, they don't control Congress, they lose their ability, their, their access to any kind of independent judiciary or oversight agency, right? And of course, once you have lost all of these resources, fighting back becomes significantly more complicated, which is what we have seen ever since 2006. Like the opposition actually has rebuilt itself. They have tried to participate in elections, but now, they're just at a higher disadvantage.

The alternative, I argue, is to use either institutional strategies with moderate goals, which would be legislating, litigation, electioneering, anything that uses institutions to stop specific reforms. The goal here is to separate the president being in power from, from the president, advancing an authoritarian agenda, right.

So really to make the comparison in the U.S. it wouldn't be stopping the president from implementing tax cuts, but rather stopping him from dismantling or, or giving access to unverified individuals to Social Security. So the idea is this institutional, this electioneering, congressional usually is very good to delay. Obstructing, like obstructing is a good tactic to delay the, these kind of power graphs, right? They, they, they inevitably—it will inevitably take longer for the executive to do certain things.

Not only that, but I think in general, acting in this way also helps gather evidence against these kind of moves helps build a stronger sort of, more bigger tent coalition because you can kind of showcase what the concern is without necessarily alienating people who could potentially be allies in the future. But I also think it helps when allies in the public because the longer these things stakes, the more scandals pop up, right?

And so what I show in Colombia is that in general the opposition use these kinds of strategies. They just used the congress mostly to delay as much as they could to obstruct, to find procedural irregularities that they can then push into the constitutional court so that the constitutional court could rule against some of these reforms. And in doing so, they were not able to stop every single power grab, but they were able to make it smaller, less threatening; they were able to delay it in such a way that all of the sudden the court was able to stop it, or it became–.

So for instance, the, the, the last one, which Álvaro Uribe’s attempt to get reelected twice. It went through the Congress and then the courts stopped it. Even if the courts had not stopped it, the decision would have come out almost two or three months after the registration deadline. You know, like so, so I think delaying creates problems for the executive and in general, it makes everything more costly. Like even if it doesn't work, just, it just is harder for the executive to push forward the erosion of democracy.

Now, there are times in which these kinds of tactics by themself do not work. And so every once in a while you also need to mobilize people from the streets, but you need to do so very carefully because what you don't want is to organize a demonstration, to have the executive repress protestors, even mildly, and for one or two protesters to respond with violence. Because then you got it is, it's a perfect excuse to, to repress, to crack down on the opposition.

And so really what you have to do is, is, is, is again, like build mobilizations that, that, that are well organized, that are well articulated, that have a clear objective. In Colombia, the best example I can think of was a, a movement, a pro-democracy movement that brought together people who supported Álvaro Uribe, people who did not like Álvaro Uribe, in defense of democracy. They stood in front of the constitutional court when they were making their decision to, with candles, to illuminate the court to make the right choice.

So I think in general, that's roughly the layout of, of the book and, and the argument. I think since then we have seen even better examples of how institutions and, and sort of social movements or civil society organizations can function together. And so it's kind of, not necessarily what appears in the book, but I think we are seeing more since the book came out.

Quinta Jurecic: Yeah, so what are some of those examples?

Laura Gamboa: Guatemala is a great example. So very much like the United States, Guatemala's government was captured by an elite in a pact of impunity and corruption. And the way that pact functioned was that they would, they co-opted the oversight agencies, they co-opted the courts. And then they were trying to control the presidency by eliminating any kind of real opposition candidate. They would accuse them of corruption or they would, you know, like invalidate their, their registration, like these kind of things until the only people competing for the presidency were people from the same pact, from the same coalition.

In 2023, that was what they were doing. Everybody was expecting that a member of the coalition—called the Corrupt Pact, that's how we know it—would actually win. What they didn't think about was a very unknown candidate, Bernardo Arévalo, who had like, I think a month before the election—if I'm not mistaken, I could be mistaken in the timing—he had like 3% support. Like it was very little. So they did, they figured they did not need to ban him from, from running or take away his registration, anything like that, they allow him to run.

Now, most people in those conditions would actually withdraw from the elections. They would have said, me, for me participating in this election is legitimizing something that is not democratic, that is, you know, illegal and

Arévalo, however, figured, I'm gonna participate. I'm gonna get three votes. And that's that, you know. And without knowing, he ended up getting enough votes to get in the runoff. Because the, the governing coalition was a split between two candidates, and so somehow Arévalo got enough votes, got more votes than one of those candidates. Once in the runoff, then it's amazing because there's only one candidate, one, one opposition candidate, and all of the sudden all of these forces that could have been divided in any other scenario coalesce behind him, and he ends up winning the election.

Now, the governing coalition in Guatemala decided that they really didn't wanna lose elections, so that they were gonna mobilize every resource at their, at their disposal to steal the election. So they tried to steal the ballots. They tried to ban Arévalo’s party, they tried to stop Arévalo from swearing into office every single effort.

And at that point is when social movements kind of come into the picture and start and start mobilizing in defense of the election. And we're talking about peasant and indigenous movements as well as sort of more urban led movements that had different agendas, not necessarily the same agenda, but at that point in time, they came together to protect the election.

And their most visible and their most stronger request was for Arévalo to to be sworn as president and they mobilized systematically and permanently for several days. They were very careful in avoiding violence or rejecting any kind of fringe violence that happened so that they couldn't be tagged as violent.

And they were incredibly successful in maintaining this, this nonviolent appeal, so successful that the international community all of the sudden decided to start pressuring lawmakers in, in, in Guatemala, and, and, and, and ultimately sort of the economic elites in Guatemala.  This was particularly so with sort of the United States was an important actor in this. And so the Biden administration starts pressuring this economic elite and they're saying, look like he won the election, you, you cannot just not let him get power. And if you do, there are gonna be consequences.

And eventually that pressure breaks the coalition. And you have a group saying, no, you know what? Let him swear into office and we'll figure out later. While the other one was like, no, we won't, and Arévalo ends up becoming president. But without, if Arévalo had not participating in elections, they would have never had that kind of momentum, and without the momentum, Arévalo would have never become president.

Quinta Jurecic: I think the, the Guatemala example is a really useful one to think about here because as you say, there are a lot of similarities to what's happening in the U.S., but there are also some differences that are worth digging into, and one of them is that role of the international community.

There's this kind of question in my mind as you were talking of okay, so we have this instance in in Guatemala, and it's a dynamic that we see elsewhere as well where rulers kind of attempting an authoritarian consolidation can be held back if there's strong international pressure toward democratization and that that really made a difference in Guatemala.

So then you can kind of turn that on its head and say, okay, so what happens if the hegemon that has been pushing for democratization is itself going through a period of democratic backsliding, which is obviously what is now happening in the United States.

So I'm interested for your, for your read on how that might affect dynamics. It feels like we're maybe seeing the EU kind of step in and try to call the U.S. out for democratic backsliding, but of course the EU plays a different role; the U.S. is, is in a different position in terms of, you know, it's less dependent on aid from others so that there's not as much leverage. What does that look like in your view?

Laura Gamboa: I think that there are domestic audiences. So, so—and ultimately you don't care how the authoritarian coalition breaks as long as it breaks, right? And so I think in this case, what you think about is A) how does this less direct, less overt and maybe less powerful international influence might help break the authoritarian collection inside the government?

Like I do think that at some point people, like business owners that support Donald Trump are interested in keeping their business and at some point. I, I cannot imagine that every single Republican member of Congress is on board with, with pretty much disappearing Harvard. Like at some point, I think like I, I, I think there is, there is, there is a breaking point, right?

And so to the question about the international pressure, I think the international pressure is useful, A) in sending a strong signal, but B) I also think it's useful in, in, in that by not acquiescing to the, to the administration, they, they also then, not only do they deny the administration legitimacy or the ability to say, see, we won, but they also create pressures inside the country that could potentially help break the authoritarian coalition.

But I also think about domestic audiences, right? Like, I think this message is from on both sides, right? Like the, the, the movement in Guatemala not only created pressures from the the U.S.; it also created pressures from below because more people were joining and joining and joining, right? And at some point, this is impossible to contain.

So, so I think domestic audiences are also important. I think that visualizing the abuses of the administration is essential to get people that maybe wouldn't have been on board or maybe wouldn't join a protest against the administration or maybe they, they, they, they would be ambivalent about what is happening or, you know.

Somebody who is close to me, I was talking about these, these interviews. Cause I have an interview, I have another interview this week. And so I was talking about these, these interviews and she was saying, but what is going on? And for me it was like, what? What do you mean what is going on? How is it you don't know?

Well, it turns out that, you know, like she doesn't, she's not a political scientist. She's not an academic, she's not a journalist, and politics is not at the forefront of her mind and her life individually has not changed much, right? And so I think, I think she's the, the median voter. And so I think we need to be able to reach to these people too. And the only way to, to reach to these people is to visualize the abuses as much as we can. And so I think those, those audiences are important.

Quinta Jurecic: So there's a lot to dig into there. And I wanna start kind of trying to apply it to the, to the U.S. context

In terms of what we've seen over the last few months, as you say, I, it feels like there was kind of a initial quiet when Trump came into office the second time around, possibly people just kind of waiting and seeing or hoping that everything would turn out okay. And then as the administration has really dug in and started to be more and more aggressive in a range of areas, there's been increasing dissent in a range of ways.

So we've seen an enormous amount of litigation in the courts, a lot of it quite successful. We have started to see more protests on the streets, particularly against Elon Musk. Recently, there have also been protests against the removal of these individuals from the U.S. to El Salvador particularly Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was removed there by mistake.

We've also started to see some stirrings of life in, in Congress, maybe not so much from congressional Republicans, but from Democrats who had themselves been pretty quiet. There was a extremely long speech by Senator Cory Booker who broke a very famous record set by the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond for the longest speech on the Senate floor. Senator Chris Van Hollen raveled to El Salvador and interestingly kind of live streamed himself doing it, which I thought was an interesting way of kind of trying to communicate to the public, and was successfully able to meet with Abrego Garcia.

So it seems to me like there's, there's starting to be more signs of life, for lack of a better term, in a sort of pro-democracy movement, but I'm curious what you make of those dynamics and how you see them slotting into the kind of categories that you've described here.

Laura Gamboa: I think all of those are good. Let's just start by that. I'm saying I think the worst possible world is where nothing happens. I think the, the second worst possible world is where individual groups are doing things separately, right?

And so the best example I can think of, think of is a joint speech that, or, or address that, that Donald Trump gave to Congress. And you had some people, some Democrats that decided to boycott the event. You had others that decided to stand up in the middle of the event and then there were kicked out, and then you had others that had like these little signs.

I don't think that any of them was successful or impactful, right? Like the news wasn't about them, right? I think the way to be impactful is to either miss the event, all of them together, or either all of them interrupt the speech one by one, right? Or all of them do some kind of other kind of performance in the middle of the speech, right?

And so I think the, the worst world is not doing anything. I think the second world, world is to do something in that manner in which we all pull for each side. It sounds to me that there's some coordination, and of course I will assume for the sake of my mental sanity there's more happening behind the scenes that I can see. So I think there's some coordination.

I, I worry a little bit because I still don't see coordination between sort of the, the politicians and sort of the social movement, the two massive demonstrations that we have had recently. But it might be happening and I just don't know about it, right.  I think in an ideal world, these things end up somehow articulating each other, right.

And, and I think the next, the next stage with that will happen is in protecting the courts. So the courts is where a lot of these battles are being fought right now. And I think we will need both sort of Democrats and independents and non-Trumpist Republicans or Trumpist Republicans that think that this is too much protecting judges and the judiciary altogether, right, 'cause at the end of the day they don't have the power of the sword.

So, so I think the next stage in which this could happen is the courts. And the best example I can think of for that is actually not in Latin Americas, in Poland, where, when. PIS, that the Law and Justice Party tried to, to forcibly retire certain judges, certain justices, and, and these justices refused to leave their office. Literally, that's what happened. There were crowds of people walking them into the freaking building and protecting the building. Like, you know, like at some point you're gonna need bodies for this kind of thing.

Quinta Jurecic: Yeah. So that brings up two things for me, so, that go in different directions, so let, let's just take them one by one.

First on the, on the question of the courts, it actually occurs to me as you were talking that, you know, this issue of the courts may fall into the category of something that splits the kind of ruling coalition in the sense that obviously, it turns out that a lot of sort of constitutional values in the United States are maybe less deeply held than, than we had hoped, but one thing that people tend to feel really strongly about is that you do what a judge tells you. That's just, it's very, very ingrained and I've seen a bunch of polling, I don't have it in front of me, but if a pollster asks, you know, what would you think if Donald Trump were to disobey an order of the court, nobody likes that. Not even Republicans. It's actually, it's really striking how unpopular that is.

And then particularly among the sort of political and legal elite, that this idea of the courts is very, very prominent, precisely because the conservative movement has put so much energy into building the courts as a space of sort of right-leaning power. And so that Trump's attack on the courts is actually really potentially leading to a fissure in, in kind of the way that you're describing. Obviously, I guess we, we won't know until we see how this plays out. But it did make me think that that might be an example of kind of what you were describing.

Laura Gamboa: Yeah, I, I would agree. I think that that's a good, a good window of opportunity to do that. That of course, requires A) sticking in support of the courts, even if you think the court is too conservative, even if you don't like the, the majority, even—like, I think at some point just protecting the court comes first, you know?

I actually think the United States at the subnational level also has a good example of, of how this can happen. I used to live in Utah, very red Utah, and in Utah, local movements tried to leverage the fact that there's a, a sizable group of Utahans, of Republican Utahans, that are not Trumpist really. And so what they tried to do is actually register Democrats as Republicans, acknowledging that Democrats were not gonna win elections in Utah, this is just not demographically possible, and so—not yet at least.

And so what they did is they registered enough Democrats that when—and MAGA Republicans in Utah run a lot of their people for their primaries, but they were always running against a less MAGA Republican, a more traditional Republican, let's put it that way—and in such a way that that when the primaries came, only one of those MAGA Republicans won across the state, right.

So I think that there are ways in which you can slice the coalition to protect democracy. Right. Do Democrats like the Republicans that won't—probably, they don't agree on policy at all? Is it better that somebody who disregards democracy? Absolutely.

Quinta Jurecic: Right. And, and so that, that actually gets to the the second point that what you're saying brought up for me, which is just the sheer size of the United States when you were talking about the difficulties of coordination. The U.S. is orders of magnitude bigger in population and in like physical, geographical size than in any of the other countries that, that we've been talking about here. It's just, it's a big place. There are a lot of people, they're very spread out and you know, unlike some, though not all, of the countries that we've been talking to you about here, there is a very decentralized system of government.

And so I'm curious how that might affect your analysis of democratic backsliding here. Because on the one hand you could say, well, that means that you could have sort of you know, areas of, of local control, areas of pushback like you're, you're talking about there with Utahans who sort of supporting more traditional Republicans, pro-democracy Republicans. On the other hand, one thing I've been wondering about is, you know, does that make it harder to organize? Does it make it harder to make sure that people can, you know, come out and protest in big groups if people are so spread out? Do we have any sense of how that might affect things?

Laura Gamboa: That's a really good question. The first thing that I will say is that although the countries that I am an expert on are smaller, we have seen democratic backsliding in, in a fairly big federal country like Brazil. Right? And in Brazil, between institutions and, and some mobilization from civil society, they were able to, to not only defeat Bolsonaro, but also kind of prevent a coup after the election, right, like, and, and, and can protect institutions enough that when they got to the elections, the elections were minimally free and fair, and you know, they actually had a shot to defeat Bolsonaro. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Brazil to be able to talk at a, a length at it.

The only thing that I will say is that I think it, it provides opportunities, but I also think it provides risks. So I think the opportunities is the fact that you have localized—like, like you have, other institutions you control. You have governorships, you have mayorships, you have, you know, legislatures that you can function with.

I think my main concern about sort of the federal nature of, of the U.S. in particular is, is how elections are run. And on the one hand, I'm kind of glad that there isn't a centralized body controlling all the elections because my guess is that that would have been a target already.

On the other hand, I think that because elections are run locally and because for some reason in in the U.S., these seem to be like very easily modifiable, very sort of not very well structured, not very well regulated bodies, organizations, then there are easy targets in particular states, right? And so one of my main concerns for November is, are we going to observe a, a relentless attacks against this kind of weaker organizations?

Let me give you an example. So, Mexico has also seen a, a significant attack to their democracy, and they have a centralized electoral system. Highly respected too, like, like INE is one of the most popular institutions in Mexico. And when the president tried to co-opt it, when the president tried to reform it and, and, and kind of take the teeth out of it, there were massive mobilizations in protection of, of, of INE. But it was also harder, right, like you needed to reform the constitution to be able to take over this body. Whereas in the U.S., because—I know this is a podcast about law, so I'm gonna apologize with all the lawyers, but to me it, this feels very ad hoc, like.

Quinta Jurecic: think, I think that's totally fair. I mean, it's one of the things about the U.S. electoral system is like there are a lot of parts and it's very decentralized and a lot of it is, you know, a person who is coming in on the weekends and is doing absolutely everything they can, but this is not their main job, right?

Laura Gamboa: Right, right. And so for me, because this feels like, like this, this, this, like not as a structure for me, this is easier to target, right? And of course you can do it at a smaller scale because you only need to target Michigan and you only need to target Georgia like smaller states.

Quinta Jurecic: I mean, I, I feel like this is, this is what I find so interesting about the comparative examples is that they are helpful in some ways and then in others it's just so difficult to kind of get your hands around what we see and, and what we don't see.

So one thing that I wanted to make sure that I asked you about was the Hungary comparison, which I feel like is something that comes up a lot. And I think in some ways it can, in some ways it can be helpful and in some ways it can actually obscure more than it reveals.

So one of the main differences between Hungary and the U.S. is that Hungary is a parliamentary system, and Viktor Orban was able to really consolidate control early on because he had this parliamentary super majority. Their constitution is very easy to amend, and so all of those things are, are different and I think that is worth keeping in mind.

On the other hand, Hungary is also a bit of a cautionary tale because you write about how, you know, the opposition sort of does some of the things that, that you would recommend in terms of opposition strategy and tactics, and yet democratic backsliding has really progressed there and hasn't been stopped in a very concerning way. So is Hungary kind of a, a cautionary tale? What can we learn from that?

Laura Gamboa: I think both Hungary and El Salvador. I think El Salvador would fall in this category as well. As political scientists, I would say they are the cases that defy my theory because I think positions did everything right in these particular cases.

I think there are a couple of things at play in Hungary and in El Salvador; I am not sure that they're not at play in the U.S. so this is not a very happy note. The first thing is the speed with which they can do it. Like so sort of Orban started this process controlling parliament. So, so the executive and the legislative, he only needed to co-opt the courts. And then he had the numbers in parliament to be able to reform the Constitution and pretty much take over the courts very, very quickly, like, there, there was no time for the opposition to react.

I think the same is true for El Salvador, I mean, in a different way. So, Nayib Bukele did not come with majorities in Congress, but he was lucky because very soon after he became president, like six months into his presidency as Congress was literally obstructing his, his attempts to expand his powers—there was even that show off at the legislature in, in, in February, and you know, that's, that's part of the story too—but six, seven months into his presidency, COVID happens. And so COVID immediately demobilizes everybody. Right, and so Congress and the courts did their best to prevent him from expanding his powers, but without the support of people willing to mobilize, this was really hard. So a COVID, demobilized people, and then Nayib Bukele was just incredibly popular, right.

And so I think the opposition did everything right, but it was just not enough, which is why I say I think A) more and more I think about sort of the use of institutional strategies with mother goals, this, this kind of legislating and, and, and, and litigation and elections in, in conjunction with, with movements. But I, I, I, I, I stress this—I think they need to happen. Like they need to work, I think they need to work together. It's not like they happen in parallel, it's that they're working together like one on top of the other one to put it that way.

But the other thing that I was gonna say is I think there all are differences, right? First, I think Donald Trump is not as popular as Nayib Bukele. I think he's not as popular as Viktor Orban either.

Quinta Jurecic: And Bukele, Bukele’s approval numbers are in like the nineties. It's, yeah. Pretty astonishing.

Laura Gamboa: Yeah. We'll need another podcast to discuss that and why we shouldn't follow that model.

But then the second thing that I would say is, is I also think that unlike Hungary in the United States, precisely because of that federal structure, but also because it is a presidential system, there are more pockets for the opposition, right? So I think there are lessons to be learned from these cases, and I think the pace at which the democratic erosion has happened in the U.S. is incredibly, incredibly concerning, and I will emphasize again, the fact that there are things that are very new about the U.S.'s case, like this takeover of data, which I think is, is absolutely frightening. But then I also think that the United States opposition has more resources just because it's a bigger country with with more pockets of institutional, more money in general, like more resources for opposition members

Quinta Jurecic: On that mixed note of optimism and pessimism, let's leave it there. Laura Gamboa, thank you so much for joining.

Laura Gamboa: Thank you so much, Quinta, for inviting me.

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