The first play in the authoritarian playbook is not to attack everyone at once.

Rather, it’s to go after one. One law firm. One judge. One university. One journalist. The strategy isn’t just to silence the immediate target — it’s to make others watch and learn. To convince them that resistance is dangerous, costly, and futile. To make them believe that if they just keep their head down, it’ll happen to someone else instead.

But the strategy fails — and it has failed — when societies recognize the game early enough and refuse to play along. When institutions that would normally compete or stay in their lane realize that they rise and fall together. That’s what collective action is. And that’s why it’s so dangerous to autocrats.

Under the second Trump administration, major law firms, universities, and media outlets are under pressure in the United States in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The good news is that we also know how this story can end differently. History teaches us how collective action works, why it works, and why it’s the only defense that has ever stopped the rise of autocracy.

What is collective action? 

Collective action is a strategy through which a group of individuals or institutions act together to achieve a common goal in a way none of them could have done alone. In this case, that goal is resistance to the pressures of a nascent authoritarian movement. 

There’s a reason collective action is so difficult — and why it tends to emerge only under extreme duress. 

If one institution — say, a media outlet — comes under political or legal attack, their competitors might have a temporary advantage in standing back and doing nothing. Other publications might reason that they are better off distancing themselves — protecting their reputation, avoiding scrutiny, and even picking up the readers that the autocrat’s target lost. 

This is precisely why autocrats attack institutions one at a time. It exploits this self-interest calculation, encouraging institutions to defect from each other rather than defend each other.

But history shows that this calculation is shortsighted — and ultimately self-destructive. Because once the first institution falls, the next one becomes more vulnerable. The cost of resistance rises after the first defeat because the autocrat now knows that the strategy works. The incentives shift, and what seemed like a rational choice to stay quiet quickly becomes a trap.

🛑 The Hungarian media collapse

Orbán’s consolidation of the Hungarian media was a textbook case. When the news organization Népszabadság was targeted, other outlets refused to come to its defense — hoping to avoid similar treatment. Orbán’s government learned that it could silence critical media without consequences. Within five years, the entire Hungarian media landscape was either directly controlled by the state or dominated by Orbán-friendly private owners. What seemed like rational self-interest turned out to be suicidal.

✅ Polish judges’ resistance

By contrast, when Poland’s government tried to purge the judiciary in 2017, the response was collective and immediate. Judges within Poland and across Europe mobilized in defense of their Polish colleagues. Public protests reinforced this solidarity, and the European Court of Justice raised the diplomatic and political costs of continuing the purge.

The Polish government backed down, still weakening judicial independence but pulling back from its most aggressive assaults — not because it was persuaded by moral arguments, but because the cost of continuing the attack had become politically unsustainable. The logic of collective action worked.

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Why collective action raises political costs

Autocrats rely on a fundamental asymmetry: They have a centralized source of authority and a powerful platform. The institutions they attack — media, universities, law firms — are fragmented. That gives the autocrat a structural advantage in the contest for public opinion.

But collective action changes the balance of power by raising political costs in three key ways:

1. It creates social proof. Public opinion is not formed by facts alone — it’s shaped by social cues. When a single institution speaks out, it can be ignored or written off. But when dozens of institutions deliver the same message, it signals to the public that there’s a consensus — that the attack is illegitimate, dangerous, and unacceptable. This is how social movements work. It’s how public opinion on civil rights, marriage equality, and even environmental issues shifted over time. When enough voices say the same thing, it becomes harder for the public to dismiss the message — and harder for the autocrat to claim they are merely facing isolated critics.

2. It creates a defensive shield. When law firms, universities, or media organizations defend each other, they create a collective shield that raises the cost of targeting any one institution. If attacking a single law firm means provoking a coordinated defense from the entire legal community, it’s no longer an easy win — it’s a complicated, high-cost fight.

3. It forces public officials to pick sides. Politicians are risk-averse. When one institution is attacked, most political figures will avoid taking a stand. But when an entire sector mobilizes — when law firms, universities, and media outlets issue coordinated statements and legal challenges — it raises the political stakes. Staying silent becomes politically costly. Politicians are forced to either back the autocrat or defend the institutions — and that polarization strengthens the resistance.

The stakes are higher than just saving institutions

This is where the lesson from history becomes clear. The real goal of collective action isn’t just to protect individual institutions — it’s to protect democracy itself.

The societies that survived authoritarian threats didn’t just rely on internal solidarity within the press, the courts, or academia. They succeeded because those institutions linked arms across sectors — forming a broad, popular front that transcended professional and even political boundaries.

During the rise of fascism in Europe, the countries that resisted early — like Belgium and Finland — saw labor unions, political parties, and the press form coalitions to resist authoritarianism.

During the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, independent press, labor unions, and the church supported each other — even when they disagreed on broader social issues.

In South Korea’s 2016 “Candlelight Revolution,” the media, labor unions, and student groups worked together to force the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye.

If there’s one clear dividing line between democracies that have survived recent illiberal populist autocratic movements (Poland, Brazil, Czech Republic) and those that have not (Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela), it’s whether a broad pro-democracy coalition came together across pre-existing divides to stand for the most foundational elements of democracy. In the first set of countries, people of different policy preferences and institutional affiliations and backgrounds formed functional coalitions that worked together to shift the broader public away from illiberalism and back towards liberal democratic systems; in the latter set of countries, the opposition to autocracy fragmented and fell into infighting, allowing the autocratic movement to consolidate power and entrench itself.

That’s why the next step required here is clear: After institutions learn to defend themselves within their own sector, they need to defend each other across sectors and form a broad coalition on the side of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. That’s how democratic resilience is built.

An attack on a law firm must provoke a response from universities and media outlets. An attack on a journalist must be met with legal action from the bar and peaceful protests from students. Labor unions – consistently a key piece of each of the successful anti-authoritarian movements noted above — must be protected and strengthened by others. This is how you raise the cost of autocracy — not by waiting for the next attack, but by forcing the autocrat to fight on every front at once.

So that is what is needed: a broad, cross-ideological and cross-sectoral popular front coalition in opposition to autocratic governance and in support of democracy. An effective coalition would: (1) align on what issues and fights to prioritize; (2) coordinate its strategy for advancing democratic values and practices; (3) elevate key leaders; and (4) advance a clear narrative about democracy’s importance and autocracy’s failures.

The only way out is together.