Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinions

There’s more. Even before Bolsonaro was caught plotting a real coup, which led to him losing his passport, the Superior Electoral Court — charged with overseeing election law — convicted the former president last year for falsely alleging that Brazil’s electronic voting system was rigged.

The United States lacks such a court because elections are a collection of efforts managed by the states. The Supreme Court weighs in only when voting rules and electoral laws run afoul of federal statute or the Constitution. That burdens its decisions with the weight of constitutional precedent. And it can get entangled with conundrums such as “maybe he did incite an insurrection and maybe that should bar him from office, but what would happen if we let Colorado do that?”

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Brazil’s most critical difference with the United States is not about its political institutions, though. It was able to move on from its attempted insurrection and reestablish a more sedate political equilibrium largely because it lacked America’s Republican Party.

Picking through the evidence of those volcanic months following Election Day in 2020, Princeton political scientist Frances Lee found much to commend in America’s checks and balances. Despite the chaos that Trump wrought after he lost, the system stood up rather well for a while — and was bolstered by Republicans’ sense of political self-preservation.

No matter what Rudy Giuliani and the lawyer with the Kraken threw at them, state courts rejected the miscellaneous allegations of electoral malfeasance from Trump’s camp. GOP state legislatures and attorneys general resisted invitations to find extra votes; none refused to certify the election. GOP leaders unambiguously affirmed the legitimacy of Biden’s election. When it mattered, Vice President Mike Pence behaved.

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After Trump was impeached by the House, Republicans in the Senate did vote against conviction. But “that was a miscalculation,” Lee told me. “Republicans thought he was no longer a threat.” But when his poll numbers recovered, Republicans clung to their instinct for political survival and caved, offering him the unswerving loyalty of half of America’s two-party system.

All but 9 GOP representatives and all but one GOP senator (Susan Collins of Maine) elected to the 117th Congress in 2020 came from districts carried by Trump. As Lee wrote: “Members needed to maintain the trust and support of constituents who lacked confidence in the outcome of the 2020 elections and who, given the opportunity, might want to elect Trump to the presidency a second time.”

Brazil’s political ecosystem would never have fallen into line like this simply because it doesn’t have........

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