How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks
On January 8, 2023, supporters of Jair Bolsonaro marched on Brasília, Brazil’s capital, with the goal of overturning the election their standard-bearer just lost. That attempted insurrection was swiftly put down, and the plotters ended up being caught and sentenced. To find out how Brazil’s democracy succeeded where America failed, Zack Beauchamp traveled to Brazil to explore its political system. His reporting paints a complicated picture, one that avoids facile analogies but that nonetheless suggests some ways out of the anti-democracy cul-de-sac.
Bonus: Zack also spoke with our Today, Explained team to discuss what he saw in Brazil; listen here!
What American democracy can learn from 1930s Finland 🎥
For another story about a democratic near-miss, our video team dove into the archives to tell the story of Finland’s own flirtation with fascism in the 1930s. At the center of it was a radical far-right faction called the Lapua movement, which gradually gained power over the years and threatened to overthrow the republic. But Finland staved it off, and the experience — both how the movement gained power, but also how they lost it at a crucial moment — suggests lessons for liberal democracies in the 21st century.
The pro-gun case liberals don’t want to hear 🎧🎥
The Gray Area — our podcast featuring Sean Illing in conversation with some of the most interesting thinkers and writers out there — is leveling up! Starting today, The Gray Area comes to your earbuds twice a week, Mondays and Fridays. The inaugural Friday show features Tyler Austin Harper, a man of the left who has a problem with how his side talks and thinks about guns. Calling what’s happening in Minneapolis a “Second Amendment wake-up call,” he invites liberals to reconsider their anti-gun posture, especially in a time when the authoritarian threat seems increasingly harder to dismiss.
Americans spend less of their income on food than almost ever. Why doesn’t it feel that way?
One thing that our Future Perfect section does especially well is tell the story of progress, with all its nuances and caveats. Here’s one from Senior Editorial Director Bryan Walsh: In 1901, the average American family spent more than 40 percent of its budget on food. Today, that figure is 10 percent — a testament to how much richer Americans have gotten over the decades. That drop may surprise many who have been inundated with stories about affordability as the defining issue of our time.
Certainly the affordability concerns are real: Households in the lowest income quintile spend 32 percent of their budget on food, compared to 8 percent for the highest quintile. And let’s not forget that cheap food is cheap because the costs that don’t show up on the price tag show up elsewhere instead — in our environment, in hospital bills, in the suffering of animals. But even with those to-be-sures, this story is a hidden-in-plain-sight achievement — one that reminds us of the distance we’ve traveled, even as we acknowledge how much farther we have to go.
The House of Representatives is too small 🎥
There are 435 lawmakers in the House of Representatives. That number hasn’t changed in a century — even as the US population has tripled over that time. That growing ratio between a lawmaker and their constituents may well be one reason why Americans increasingly feel disconnected from politics and unheard by their representatives.
This video, part of our “America After Trump” project, explores the idea of expanding the House. Will it make our democracy more responsive? Or will it just add more voices to the clamor? As we look to revive the democratic spirit in the months and years ahead, it’s reform ideas like these that we’ll want to hold up to the light and consider when reimagining the American future.
