Dogged litigation and tenacious federal court judges have heroically slowed Donald Trump’s rampage through democracy. But the most critical pushback against authoritarianism and biggest opportunity to rescue democracy is taking place elsewhere.

Historian Thomas Zimmer wrote that “being lawless, immoral, and violent does not make the Trumpists omnipotent…. There remains a vast gulf between Trump’s authoritarian aspirations on the one hand and the realities of a complex modern state and society on the other.

What is happening? Historian Ruth Ben Ghiat sees the United States as joining a worldwide protest movement against autocratic regimes in defense of “dignity, bodily autonomy, the ability to earn a living wage, and basic human rights.” She explained:

Other protests take place in countries where democracy has been severely damaged due to autocratic power grabs that shred constitutional rights, engage in blatant corruption and human rights abuses, and may also militarize civil society by deploying state security forces and allied gangs as enforcers. The United States is now among these examples.

She posited that authoritarian regimes are inherently brittle and unstable, in large part because they “are not built to navigate a future in which survival of climate-change, disasters, resource scarcity, a shrinking labor force, and armed conflict will require fact-based communications, community, care, altruism, and other things such states work hard to suppress.”