Zach Beacham (2:42)

You're listening to TODAY Explained. My name is Zach Beacham. I'm a senior correspondent at Vox where my primary interests are democracy, the political right and the future of Liberalism, you know, little stuff.

Noel King (2:54)

Little stuff. You recently spent a week in Brazil. I spent a week in Poland, where it was 8 degrees below zero. So you got the better assignment, and I hate you for that. But we both had the same assignment. Right? Tell me what we're doing.

Zach Beacham (3:06)

So we have this big package that we're working on at VOX that I maneuvered such that I get to go to the nice weather place, and Noel and Miles were banished to the frigid wasteland of my ancestral homeland of Eastern Europe. But, no, it was great. The package is about primarily America after Trump. Right. But not in the sense of, like, what does the US look like? In the sense of how do we think about democracy after we've experienced something that is objectively a real shock to our democratic system? How do we think about repairing it? How do we think about preventing the kind of authoritarian overreach that we saw from Trump from ever happening again? And so we wanted to investigate some countries that have had at least reasonable amounts of success at dealing with elected authoritarian governments. And Poland and Brazil are two of the most interesting examples. So that's why we went to those two.

Noel King (3:58)

All right, let's talk about what's been going on in Brazil.

Zach Beacham (4:00)

The Brazilian case is. Is, I think, one of the most relevant parallels to understanding what happened in the US they elected a president who's very much like Donald Trump. His name is Jared Bolsonaro, was elected back in 2018. So much so like Trump that people would commonly call him the Trump of the tropics. Notorious prior to the election for homophobic, misogynist, and racist comments. Bolsonaro rose to the rank army captain during Brazil's military dictatorship. The truth will liberate this country, and it will turn us into a great nation. He did a lot of similar stuff to what Trump has done in this term. It's very interesting. Right. Back then, Bolsonaro was seen as the more aggressive of the two of them in terms of his attacks on democracies. Right. They were both in office at the same time for a little bit. Now Trump has. Has become even more aggressive, but in a way, Bolsonaro presaged him. Right. This Bolsonaro's term being the prelude to Trump, too. Interestingly, when Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election, he did two things right. One, he plotted a military coup. Like an actual armed military coup, old school. The only reason there wasn't a military coup is because two of the heads of the military, that is the heads of the air force and the army, said no but then that wasn't it for him. On January 8, Bolsonaro's supporters, seemingly with his pre knowledge, launched a very January 6th like attack in the capital of Brasilia.

Noel King (5:36)

Jair Bolsonaro arriving to face questions at the Federal Police headquarters over accusations that he incited the rioters that sought the overthrow of his success successor, Lula da Silva.

Zach Beacham (5:49)

It really did seem, and we know now based on evidence, that it was patterned off of what happened in January 6th in the United States only the end goal was to kind of get the military to reverse its previous stance on a coup. And that didn't happen.

Noel King (6:02)

Right.

Zach Beacham (6:03)

And not only did it not happen, but subsequently Bolsonaro was investigated, arrested, thrown in jail and disqualified from running in the upcoming presidential election, which is in 2026.

Noel King (6:15)

This year, the Supreme Court has ordered Jair Bolsonaro to begin a prison sentence of more than 27 years for plotting a coup attempt. Trump said he's very unhappy with the verdict and called Bolsonaro an outstanding man.

Zach Beacham (6:27)

There's been a lot written, I think, about the investigation into January 8th and the subsequent impressive performance of the Brazilian legal system compared to the American one. What I was more interested in is how he got to that point. Namely, why is it that Brazil's institutions, its Congress and its Supreme Court were so much more resistant than their American peers to sort of power grabs and attempts to rule as an imperial executive than the US ones were? So why.

Noel King (6:56)

Yeah, so why what happened?

Zach Beacham (7:00)

So in 2014, there was this absolutely massive corruption scandal in Brazil.

Noel King (7:05)

Executives at Petrobras, Brazil's state controlled oil company, are accused of conspiring with the country's largest construction firms for much of.

Zach Beacham (7:13)

The past decade to queen billions of dollars off contracts. It's gone hand in hand. Brazil's worst recession in decades. Corruption had long been a problem in Brazil, but this scandal exposed tremendous amounts of malfeasance from the highest levels of society, including top level politicians. It's by one metric the largest political scandal in terms of dollars of any democracy ever in a world. It was bad. The wide scope of the corruption scandal combined with the economic downturn basically created a sense among Brazilians that the elite couldn't be trusted. They were corrupt, they were poor students, stewards of the economy. It's time to throw the bums out and replace them with someone new. So who emerged as the champion of this anti incumbent sentiment? Well, it was Jared Bolsonaro. He was, I mean, to be blunt, he's a weirdo, right? Bolsonaro had been at the fringes of Brazilian politics for a long time. He'd been in Congress for. For quite a bit, but he never really passed any legislation because he was so strange that nobody really wanted to work with him. And by strange, I mean not just like personally unpleasant, but ideolog, very extreme. So he's an open admirer of the military dictatorship. He once told a fellow female legislature that I wouldn't rape you because you aren't worth it. Oh, good Lord. Really is an extreme guy. Even things that it would be kind of shocking to hear Trump say. Bolsonaro said, I spoke in Brazil to Ana Clara Costa, who's a Brazilian journalist who spent about two months, she said, on the campaign trail with him during this campaign.

Noel King (8:52)

Maybe I can start a bit earlier than his victory.

Zach Beacham (8:57)

And, you know, I met her at a bookstore cafe in Rio. It's a nice part of the city. And she's sitting there recalling these moments, and she looks at me and she.

Noel King (9:06)

Just says, for me, he was insane.

Zach Beacham (9:08)

She just genuinely couldn't understand why people liked this guy at first, because he didn't understand anything that he was saying. His understanding of politics was so shallow, so ideological, so extreme, conspiracy theories or.

Noel King (9:25)

Things that were trans on Facebook at the time.

Zach Beacham (9:29)

But truly, it turns out that he ended up embodying the spirit of the times in Brazil and. And the sense of frustration with the establishment. I got this sense really clearly during another part of my Rio trip. So I went to the neighborhood that Bolsonaro is from because he was a congressman from Rio, ran into a guy named Paolo, who's a longtime resident of this community and was actually Bolsonaro's neighbor.

Noel King (9:56)

Bolsonaro is not what the people say.

Zach Beacham (10:00)

Media, for instance, say about so. So what's the real Bolsonaro? What is he really like?

Noel King (10:07)

Bolsonaro is a kind of, say, nationalist and patriotic people, but it really was warning about the condition of the people in Brazil.

Zach Beacham (10:17)

In the situation around Brazil, Paulo was really convinced that Brazil was beset by the demon of corruption. And he's not wrong about that, by the way. But his belief is that Bolsonaro was the only person who could stand credibly independent from that system.

Noel King (10:31)

And that sounds somewhat like what happened in the United States. You have frustration with the system, frustration with the elites, a sense that, you know, the people in the capital are not on your side. And then you've got this one guy who some people say, for me, he's insane, and other people say, no, he tells the truth. It reminds me a little bit of us of a where does the Brazilian narrative, if it does diverge from the one here in the US here's one.

Zach Beacham (10:57)

Big difference, one that was really foundational in determining why these two countries diverged. And it's that Brazil has a multi party system. And not just like any multi party system. There aren't just a handful of different parties. It is a super fragmented multi party system, one of the most fragmented in the world, by which I mean it has one of the greatest numbers of parties represented in the National Congress of any country in the world.

Noel King (11:22)

How many?

Zach Beacham (11:22)

Around 20, I believe. Right now it changes a lot, right. Between elections, legislators will jump between different ones, but I believe the current counts around 20. And this is, this is a real difference between the United States. Right, because when you've got 20 parties, that means that no president can ever, ever have an outright majority in Congress. It's just basically mathematically impossible given the number of parties and the president only represent party. So what do they do? Well, they, they end up making laws and passing laws in a very different way than in the US system where basically what you get right now is a, you need, your party needs a congressional majority and then you pass bills on party line votes. No, no, in Brazil you have to wheel and deal. You have to give cabinet spots to other parties in order to get them into a legislative coalition with you. And even that's often not enough. You've got parties out of your coalition who you need votes from. And you kind of buy them off basically by promising legislators from specific states money for projects in their states. And then they go and they vote for you. And in exchange they get deliverables for their constituents that ensure they can keep getting reelected over and over and over again. I was talking to a Brazilian journalist, another one, his name's Pedro Doria, and he was explaining that if Congress gives up power over lawmaking and over budgeting to the president, then they lose the ability to give themselves some of these pragmatic, concrete goods that they need to get reelected that the whole system really runs on. How do you get the votes in Congress?

Noel King (13:04)

You give them money so they can take it to our cities to build whatever, to buy ambulances and put street.

Zach Beacham (13:13)

Lightning or whatever projects those are, are. It's a very stable system, right?

Noel King (13:20)

There's no interest in the parliament in a dictator.

Zach Beacham (13:26)

It's not just that these guys in Congress are doing pork barrel stuff that might be inefficient but is still within the bounds of legal policy. Some of them are just straight up corrupt. We know from all the corruption scandals of the 2010s that there is this real culture of corruption in the Brazilian elite and there's a lot that goes on that we don't know about, and pretty credible allegations about it being concentrated to a significant degree among the dominant center right bloc in Congress. And so these people have an extra incentive to protect legislative power because it's not just you want to keep getting reelected, it's that you want to keep using your position to make yourself rich. Right? And if you lose authority over policy making, you have fewer levers to pull to get grant favors to people that might be exchanged for some private benefits. And ironically, the failure to get rid of corruption might end up being one of the reasons why its legislature in particular was so resilient to a would be dictator. In a certain sense, our strength comes from the fact that our institutions are weaker.

Noel King (14:47)

Coming up next, what the USA can learn from Brazil. Why not Zach's coming back.

Zach Beacham (14:59)

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Noel King (15:04)

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Zach Beacham (15:06)

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Noel King (16:03)

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Zach Beacham (18:41)

Explained.

Noel King (18:44)

It's Today Explained. I'm Noel King, back with Zach Beacham. All right, so Zach, you were talking us through this reporting that you did on how Brazil prevented itself from losing its democracy. And what I think I heard you say is the big lesson for us in the United States is we just need our Congress to be more corrupt and to and to be more divided and to line up less behind President Trump and we will all be fine. Yes, yes. Corruption.

Zach Beacham (19:11)

Pork barrel politics. No to corruption Qualified yes to pork barrel politics. Corruption's bad. The lesson of Brazil is not that you should just have corruption, it's that it is very good when there are incentives for legislators to behave independently from the president, right. When they have motivations to protect their own prerogatives from a president who might try to take them. Now, it is a problem in Brazil that that's bound up with a kind of corrupt style of politics, right. That ideally those two things would be disentangled. What I do want to extract from Brazil is this sort of general point about incentives that we can change systems to give legislators more reason to act independently, better reasons to be jealous of their own power. And I think there's a few of them that are compatible with the American system. That can be done easily. Think about partisan primaries. That's not a thing that other countries do, right? It's a really uniquely American system. And the end result of these primaries that everybody has to go through is that you are subject to the most ideologically disciplined faction of your party. And that's really not a great incentive. And so what we can do when we're thinking about reforms, one of them is to get rid of congressional primary elections, huh? Another one that I really like, and I think this one's obvious and doesn't really need any explanation, is a national ban on partisan gerrymandering, right? That could happen anytime Congress wanted it to happen. There are proposals literally in Congress right now that are going nowhere because Republicans are stonewalling them. But here's a sort of more direct lesson from Brazil, and you'll see how it relates in a second. But it's to change the way executive orders work. So in the U.S. president issues executive orders, and they just take effect. And maybe there's some legal fighting about it, but that's it, right? There's. There's no other input. In Brazil, their sort of rough equivalent of an executive order requires congressional input. It expires actually without full approval after a certain period of time from Congress. So we could do a version of that in the US I've talked to a law professor about this. There is. It's. It's kind of tortured, but you could do it legally. That would force executive orders to expire without affirmative congressional approval. Now, not only is that good just for giving Congress more power over the presidency, it's good because it would then force individual legislators to be accountable for executive actions if they approve them. Right now, you hear this from Republicans in Congress all the time. They'll say, oh, what Trump is doing, it's out of my hands. It's the president's decision. I don't have anything to do with that. But if they have to actually vote to approve those decisions, and they won't take effect or won't continue to take effect without their approval. They can be held very literally accountable for those choices by voters, and that might shift the way that they act in certain cases.

Noel King (22:01)

A lot of what you're talking about, a lot of these fixes would take time. Is there anything. And time we. We may not have the luxury of time. Is there anything that can be done now, today, tomorrow, next week?

Zach Beacham (22:13)

Yeah, look, this is a really pressing question because there isn't an obvious democratic playbook to counter the playbook that authoritarians around the world have developed for weakening democracy. You know, they concentrate power in the executive, weaken checks on their authority, start monkeying with the way that elections are administered, go after the free press. It's a pretty well established playbook at this point.

Noel King (22:34)

Venezuela in crisis. On just its second day in session, Venezuela's Constitutional assembly votes to oust the nation's chief prosecutor in a national referendum. The Kremlin secured a change to term limit rules. It would allow Putin to potentially stay in power until 2036. They came out in their thousands to.

Zach Beacham (22:55)

Voice their anger at what they say.

Noel King (22:57)

Is the latest silencing of Hungary's press.

Zach Beacham (23:01)

And we don't have a sort of set of rules that work for democratic oppositions who small d here who want to be stopping that from attacking democracy. So I've been doing a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, and as part of that, I convened a bunch of experts on democracy from around the world to try and talk about the specific question. We sat down, we spent a day locked in a conference room discussing lessons from Braz and other places. And one of the big takeaways that I got is that the conventional wisdom about fighting for democracy is wrong.

Noel King (23:33)

Huh?

Zach Beacham (23:33)

The conventional wisdom is that you shouldn't talk about democracy. People don't care about it. It's too abstract, and the voters are going to tune out. And so you get this postmortem of Kamala Harris's 2024 bid where it's like, well, the problem is that she stopped talking about affordability and started talking about democracy.

Noel King (23:49)

Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him.

Zach Beacham (23:59)

I just think that's completely wrong, just completely wrong. And so there are a few examples, right? Brazil is one of them. Another similar case is South Korea in 2024. There, the President declared martial law in decade and, like, within hours, like, probably minutes, really, there had been a mass of protesters in Seoul who were blocking security services that had been deployed outside Congress.

Noel King (24:32)

Mass protests in South Korea, including outside the national assembly, demanded the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol. People are gathering now.

Zach Beacham (24:41)

That action, according to some Korean scholarship I've read, might actually have been decisive in saving democracy. The reason being the security services were ordered to arrest leaders of the legislature, Right. And they were physically obstructed by protesters. And that allowed. I don't. You've probably seen this famous video of the Korean legislator jumping over the fence in order to cast a vote ending the declaration of martial law, right? Well, part of the reason that the legislators could sneak in and get around is because the protesters were there, right? Obstructing what happened and why did the protesters show up? Because a declaration of martial law is so obvious as a threat to democracy that, you know, you need to do.

Noel King (25:23)

All right, so after all of these months, if not years of reporting and research that you've done on democracy, what would you say to Americans who say, look, we believe our democracy is under threat and we want to fight for it and we want to win?

Zach Beacham (25:38)

The first thing I would say is don't listen to people who tell you to stop talking about democracy. Right? Is don't do that. Right. You should be vocally talking about there being a threat to democracy and you should be openly tying it, not to just sort of like some general vague concept of democracy. I think that's where the critics have a point, right? If you just sort of generally talk about some kind of democratic principle, it might not register with people as much. But when you tie it to a specific abuse by the government or a specific policy, that that resonates with. And now here we have concrete proof of that happening. Right? Look at what's happened in Minneapolis.

Noel King (26:18)

Tonight. Despite the brutal cold, a massive crowd of anti ICE protesters flooding downtown Minneapolis.

Zach Beacham (26:26)

There it is. This idea of ICE going after people indiscriminately and basically imposing a form of martial law on the city, I don't think that's too strong given the events that's going on there. We've seen agents pull people from their homes and their vehicles, but also stop them on the sidewalk demanding identification and asking what country they were born in.

Noel King (26:45)

They say after ICE agents told them to leave, tear gas was thrown under their car, detonating the airbags and trapping their family inside, including their six month old baby.

Zach Beacham (26:56)

And the brutality and the lawlessness of ICE people has mobilized one of the most extraordinary resistance movements in American history. And you know, a lot of the rhetoric they use about it is about neighborliness, you know, protecting your neighbor. But it's also about freedom and standing for American democracy as we understand it, the vision of the founders. This kind of stuff is really connected with normies. And that, I mean that resistance seems to be incredibly effective. I have proposed and President Trump has concurred that this surge operation conclude and that to me shows why standing up, even if it's not the issue that seems like optimally primed for campaign rhetoric by a politician in a purple state, standing up matters. What matters right now is being willing to stand for democracy and having faith in citizens that if you can tie it to something that matters, something that's specific, concrete and real, that they'll be willing to do the same.

Noel King (28:03)

That was vox's zach beacham. Miles bryan produced today's show and jolie myers edited andrea lopez cruzado checked the facts patrick boyd and david tadashore engineered I'm noel king. It's today explained. Support for this show comes from Odoo.

Zach Beacham (28:36)

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Noel King (29:04)

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