Lisa Miller persuasively debunks the myth that “checks and balances” will stop democracy’s demise. I’d put it even more simply: against a chainsaw, the icon of today’s global far right, no institutional solution will work. The question is, what will?

“Mass politics” is the right kind of answer, but it needs spelling out. Miller’s vision assumes a direct line from mass mobilization to institutional reform and then a responsive, more equitable democracy. Reducing the Senate’s veto power, abolishing the Electoral College, introducing citizens’ assemblies: all these changes might well help secure higher wages, gun control, and universal health care. But mass mobilization should not be just an instrumental means to achieve predetermined reforms; it’s a source of creativity and energy in itself. It is hard to imagine constitutional reforms themselves gaining popular traction, and even harder to imagine they wouldn’t be captured and coopted if they miraculously got approved. Appeals to mass politics in the abstract often overlook what movements really want and the agency they bring—the practices, ideas, and inspiration that have always been the true sources of democratic renewal and innovation.

Taking mass mobilization seriously starts with a sharper diagnosis of obstacles to solidarity. The biggest divide in this country is not between Republicans and Democrats, or even between urban and suburban voters. It’s between those who are mourning democratic institutions and those who never believed them in the first place—which is to say, we need to name the gulf between those for whom institutions have by and large worked and those who have always been left out or oppressed by them. The former group can’t believe authoritarianism is “happening here,” and the latter, not at all surprised, thinks there’s not much that can be done. The mourners can’t see why any Black, Latino, or immigrant voters would choose Trump, but the skeptics lack a credible way forward.

This divide mirrors the predicament in much of the world, providing fertile ground for the far right. In Latin America and Europe, for example, social-democratic parties have moved steadily rightward in search of an elusive vital “center,” only to see their base eroded by right-wing movements that aren’t afraid to rage against the machine. The electorate must choose between the least bad option, and the far right at least seems to voice popular discontent and speak for some of the dispossessed. The center left’s typical defensive posture—in favor of a system that has failed so many—only makes things worse. Addressing people’s disaffection requires acknowledging realities that at first might appear to strengthen the right’s case or undermine the opposition’s credibility. After all, center-left parties can’t condemn the influence of the wealthy in politics, the way real estate speculation has shaped housing policy, or the ills of free trade when they are as responsible for these things as anyone else.

To find a way out of this chokehold, we must look beyond establishment liberalism to models of successful resistance. The international far right has been busy learning from each other—Brazil’s coup attempt on January 8, 2023, borrowed from the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, while Trump takes cues from Javier Milei and Recep Erdoğan—and the left should do the same. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of global models of movement-based politics that fight the right simultaneously on institutional terrains—including electoral politics and structural reforms—and in legal realms. These radically democratic and left-wing populisms are legitimately bottom-up, criticize the failure of institutions even while competing in them, and put the needs and concerns of the most excluded—unorganized workers, the landless and houseless, immigrants, indigenous people and people of color—at their center.

La France Insoumise, for example, has emerged as a vehicle for social movements on the left to combat the far-right nationalism of Le Pen. Its radically democratic platform calls for popular assemblies to rewrite the constitution, direct citizen engagement in policymaking, and workers’ rights, all anchored in an anti-fascist and anti-xenophobic campaign. In similar fashion, Spain’s Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common), with the support of Podemos, has helped to contain the ultranationalism of Vox.

Latin America offers inspiration too. At thirty-eight, Juan Grabois, leader of the Movement of Excluded Workers in Argentina, helped the center-left Union for the Homeland coalition come within a hair’s breadth of winning the 2023 presidential primary with a movement-led campaign centered on Pope Francis’s slogan of “Tierra, Techo y Trabajo” (land, housing, and labor). In Chile, Gabriel Boric won the presidency in 2021 with a platform that included rewriting the constitution through popular assemblies—a demand raised by street protests that centered feminist mobilizations, indigenous movements, and unorganized workers. And in Colombia in 2022, where the electoral left has been virtually nonexistent in recent years, Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez defeated the far-right regime. Their exciting campaign drew energy from urban social movements to develop an antiracist, feminist, ecological, and redistributive platform for creating new kinds of democratic institutions—for example, by integrating longstanding indigenous and Afro-Colombian forms of collective governance into national politics.

Perhaps the most dramatic victory was the social movement coalition that returned Lula to power in Brazil in late 2022. His opponent, the far right’s Jair Bolsonaro, had accomplished little in his presidency in legislative terms, but via executive order he had weakened many of Brazil’s institutions—its science and technology infrastructure, robust public health system, public universities, and environmental protections. He also criminalized dissent, sowing distrust and encouraging police violence. While Lula’s Workers’ Party had been increasingly at odds with social movements—which thought that the party had fallen short of its promises in past administrations—the grassroots mobilization against Brazil’s far-right populism brought together working-class, student, feminist, indigenous, Afro-Brazilian, and environmental justice movements. The mobilization campaign was so successful that it drew movements long skeptical of electoral politics, including the MTST (a radical housing movement) and the MST (landless workers). 

Lula immediately reversed some of Bolsonaro’s measures attacking indigenous rights, environmental protections, and social programs, but he has not yet achieved the larger goals of reforming the political system itself or systematically addressing the country’s housing shortages. This, of course, is the reality of national politics everywhere: transformative proposals are hard to bring to fruition, even with stunning electoral victories. But to keep fighting, it’s crucial that the movements that propel new leaders to power maintain their vitality and independence from the system even as they work to change it. This inside-outside strategy is the most important lesson of Lulism.

Is there any opening for such politics in the United States?

Bernie Sanders and AOC’s recent anti-oligarchy barnstorming is an important start. They offer a truly transformative agenda, including a call for massive investment in social housing and building permanent organizing networks beyond electoral politics. In the same vein, Kshama Sawant’s victories in the Seattle City Council have directly challenged neoliberal austerity and far-right populism, explicitly connecting movements around rent control, taxing Amazon, minimum wage increases, and policing. In New York, the Democratic Socialists of America has emerged as a significant electoral force, winning victories in city council and state assemblies while explicitly connecting street-level organizing around housing, policing, health care, and environmental justice to electoral strategy. The electrifying mayoral campaign of DSA member Zohran Mamdani has ignited left creativity. Rooted in movement organizing around tenant struggles, immigrants’ rights, and racial justice, it offers a radically new policy platform while emphasizing deep community engagement and resisting the right’s xenophobia.

There’s no lack of social movement energy and creativity to draw on in the United States, from campus pro-Palestine protests to new union organizing and Land Back, food sovereignty, climate justice, and abolitionist movements. What we desperately need—not just to defeat the right, but to govern for all—are ways to translate those demands, ideas, and practices into institutional struggles. We can’t fight authoritarianism with top-down ideas and bottom-up foot soldiers. We need a transformative project of popular power and radical democratic creativity, rooted in mass mobilization and sustained collective action.