The will to resist.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: COMMENT - President Donald Trump, democracy and human rights activists - Column

Sitting around the kitchen table with a bunch of female family members in pink knit hats after the Women's March on Washington, D.C., my cousin, a human-rights attorney, began talking about her work in other countries where people are suffering under tyrannical, authoritarian regimes.

We have a lot to learn from pro-democracy activists in Africa and the Middle East, she said, and particularly in Latin America, where civil societies have managed to recover from hostile takeovers of their democratic governments. The scruffy street protesters in other countries could teach us a thing or two about what it takes to survive Donald Trump, my cousin declared. And human rights, she said, should be the organizing principle of the new resistance.

No doubt we are witnessing a new kind of American politics, in which people at the highest levels of government express outright contempt for the institutions of our democracy, the Constitution, the press, and human rights.

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Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, co-director of the U.S. program for Human Rights Watch, who grew up in Peru under President Alberto Fujimori, sees parallels, including the Trump White House propaganda campaign and the current effort to discredit the media and undermine the public's sense of the truth.

In Peru under Fujimori, she recalls, independent media withered and news organizations were corrupted and hollowed out. Fujimori ran on the fear of terrorism. Violence by the Shining Path as well as the military fed "a sense of chaos and disorder that led people to want a strongman," she says.

Now, in the United States, McFarland says, "language like Trump is using--all this talk of 'carnage' and violence in the inner cities--raises real concerns about what he might try to justify."

Trump's claims that refugees pose a threat to public safety are belied by actual data. But a terrorist attack inside the United States could give him cover for broad repression.

Trump's lack of transparency--his continued refusal to release his tax returns, and the way his family members are entwined in his businesses--may turn out to be the most significant parallel with foreign despots.

Corruption was Fujimori's downfall, McFarland notes. "People who liked the repression did not like it when they found out that he was stealing," she says.

McFarland sees hope for civil society to overcome Trump.

"In all countries, when you have dark, dark periods, and then a transition back, civil society played a key role," she says. "Organizations insisted on documenting and getting the truth out. In some countries, they eventually prevailed."

Latin American countries including Peru and Chile offer a hopeful example. The dirty wars throughout the region are, for the most part, over.

Russia, on the other hand, seems hopelessly mired in the cynicism bred by pervasive corruption and repression.

And the putting down of the Arab Spring pro-democracy movements is truly discouraging.

Closer to home, in Madison, Wisconsin, mass protests that looked a lot like the humorous, joyful, irrepressible Women's March of January 21, have not succeeded in ending any of Governor Scott Walker's crackdown on unions, the public sector, women's health, and a once-progressive state government.

"Well, people need to be very, very realistic about how things move," McFarland says. Brave bureaucrats, dedicated civil...