Name: To fight authoritarianism, America should look to Brazil
Uploaded: 2026-03-05T16:27:14.000Z
Duration: 11 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

On the left, rioters breach the U.S. capitol.

On the right, a mob storms Brazil's highest court.

Two capitals, two insurrections, similar playbooks, Chaos in Brazil as thousands storm the country's capital protesting October's election results.

This is an incredibly dangerous situation that's unfolding here in the United States.

Two years after the January 6th attack in the US thousands of supporters of right wing former President Jair Bolsonaro smash their way into Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidential palace.

The parallels are an insurrection, mob violence, and a losing candidate who refused to concede.

Jair Bolsonaro refuses to say he lost his country's presidential election, despite the fact that he lost his country's presidential election.

You don't concede when there's theft involved.

Yet today, one leader sits in prison with a 27 year sentence, while the other.

So how do two democracies facing similar threats end up here?

And what can the US Learn from Brazil about how to stop the rise of authoritarianism in Trump's second term?

Jair Bolsonaro is known as the Trump of the tropics.

Both presidents denied all responsibility for the insurrections.

Bolsonaro, who landed back in Brazil at the end of March after three months in the US has denied any involvement.

Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?

But their two governments responded very differently.

In the US The Democratic led House moved quickly tonight.

The historic moment in the House voting along party lines to impeach President Trump.

But while many Republican senators spoke out in the immediate aftermath, they tried to disrupt our democracy.

We saw a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol.

It was an assault on the citadel of democracy.

And in the end, the Senate fell short of the 67 votes needed for a conviction.

And in Brazil, Congress didn't provide an effective check against the former president either.

When impeachment against Bolsonaro was never really in the cards, that left just one institution with the power and the will to hold Bolsonaro accountable.

At first glance, Brazil's Supreme Court looks a lot like America's justices, robes, class photos.

But its court's powers are slightly more broad in a way that's pivotal to the story.

Brazil's constitution was written in the wake of a military dictatorship that ran the country from 1964 to 1985.

Its authors included extra protection against potential abuses of power.

So they gave the Supreme Court an authority America's does not.

The ability to try criminal cases involving high ranking officials, including the President.

Brazil also has another powerful federal body that doesn't exist in America.

The Superior electoral court, or TSE, which enforces election law and regulates campaigns.

And in 2023, the same man sat at the top of both courts.

Moraes had been a longtime adversary of Bolsonaro and his supporters since 2019, when the court launched an investigation to crack down on election misinformation spreading online that made him the sort of antagonist to the Bolsonadista movement and made lightning rod for far right vitriol.

So when the insurrection happened on January 8, Moraes and the Court were very well positioned to act quickly and forcefully.

Within hours of the attack on the Capitol, the Supreme Court began an investigation into efforts to undermine democracy.

And by the next day, the Court and Federal Police were already issuing mass detentions and search warrants.

Bolsonaro was quickly put formally under investigation for inciting the riots.

Meanwhile, the Electoral Court banned Bolsonaro from holding office again for eight years.

The Supreme Electoral Court found Mr. Bolsonaro guilty of abuse of power.

And months later, the Federal Police made a huge discovery that Bolsonaro wasn't just inciting an insurrection, he was actually planning a full on military coup.

Investigators found throngs of documents and even one plan to assassinate Moraes.

To assassinate then President elect Lula and his Vice president Jeddah Aldo.

Alchemy was printed out in a computer within the Presidential palace by a former military aide of Bolsonaro.

Everything was very well documented and poorly disguised.

It was that evidence that allowed Brazil's Attorney General to bring criminal charges against Bolsonaro and his co conspirators.

The Supreme Court tried the case with Mraes presiding judge.

The trial took five days and was broadcast nationwide.

And in September 2025, in a 4 to 1 vote, former President Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to more than 27 years in prison.

So what Modais did was change completely the way to handle Bolsonaro.

And many of his critics say that he was overreaching.

But many of them recognized that at that particular moment, the goal of saving democracy was far more important than anything else.

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Now, back to the video, but let's slow down for a moment because this part is important.

We can't give the Supreme Court all the credit here.

If you say they played a crucial role, I think that's undeniable.

Moraes may have led the charges against Bolsonaro, but

he needed the backing of his fellow justices every step of the way.

And those justices didn't get there by chance.

They were appointed by presidents and confirmed by the Senate.

So why weren't the other justices more loyal to Bolsonaro or the ideological right?

That's in part because Brazil's political system isn't divided into two opposing camps the way that America's is.

The dynamics of Brazilian politics are not as clearly left versus right, and

we have more than a dozen parties represented in Congress.

The sheer volume of parties in Brazil encourages negotiation and constant coalition building over rigid loyalty to one party or one president.

In the US if you are a member of Congress, either in the House or the Senate, and

you get kicked out of your party, there's essentially nowhere else to go.

So any Republican politician, if they go against Trump, they are essentially risking political death.

That same logic applies to Brazil's supreme court.

We have 11 justices, and they don't necessarily vote across party lines.

And actually, what history has proven is that the more they are on the bench, the less attached they are to the parties that put them on the bench in the first place.

supreme Court, judges are incentivized to act as proxies for political camps, even though they're supposed to be nonpartisan.

When the criminal case against Trump reached the Supreme Court, the six justices who were appointed by Republican presidents voted to increase presidential immunity, while the three appointed by Democratic presidents voted against it.

So all of the charges against Trump were dropped.

I think that can only be understood through the pretty inarguable fact at this point that Supreme Court justices are partisan players.

That's the ultimate difference between the two outcomes.

Brazil's court constrained presidential power, while America's court actually expanded it.

Brazil's response to Bolsonaro didn't come out of nowhere.

It was shaped by the experience of living under a military dictatorship that didn't end that long ago.

And that recent history meant the warning signs of authoritarianism were easier to recognize because they'd seen them before.

Americans often take democracy for granted and think that authoritarianism is something that cannot happen to them.