Politics has high enough stakes without the losers being sent to prison — or losing their heads.

Jailing opponents or condemning them to death is what dictatorships do, not democracies.

But times are changing, rapidly — and democracy isn’t what it used to be, thanks to a vengeful spirit that’s taken hold from Brazil to South Korea.

And we’ve had a taste of it as well.

As Americans think about what’s in store for the next two years after a new Congress is sworn in next January, with the 2028 presidential election now on the horizon, we should take heed of just how far “lawfare” is going in other parts of the world. 

In Seoul, former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has literally been on trial for his life.

Prosecutors last week renewed demands that Yoon be put to death for his attempt to impose martial law in late 2024.

Prosperous as South Korea is, its democracy is still young, less than 40 years old, and three of the country’s last five presidents have wound up being sent to prison. 

But prosecutors are not satisfied with the life sentence (and additional time) already imposed on Yoon: They want him dead, despite the farcical nature of his attempt at martial law, which lasted barely six hours.

President Donald Trump’s critics have at times invoked South Korea as a precedent for how they’d like him to be treated.

The idea is sheer madness, not only because of the differences between Trump and South Korea’s imprisoned presidents but even more important, because the South Korean example illustrates how escalatory these episodes can be. 

The threat of winding up in prison like some of his predecessors only made Yoon more determined to stay in office at any cost.

Killing him risks making the next leader — who fears for his life as well as his freedom — even more desperate to survive by whatever means he can muster.

This was the predicament Julius Caesar found himself in 2,000 years ago.

His political enemies were waiting for his military command outside Rome to expire, so they could prosecute him when he returned to the city.

Caesar didn’t give them the chance.

Instead he took his army with him to Rome, and that was the beginning of the final chapter for the Roman Republic.

The end had been a long time coming, in truth: Prosecutions had become so politically weaponized that practically every Roman leader was vulnerable and had to fear for his own safety.

Even the great champion of liberty Cicero, a man who was morally Caesar’s opposite, was accused of breaking the law and putting Roman citizens to death without due process in the course of stopping a conspiracy against the republic.

The law was a weapon that could be used against the just as well as the unjust.

“Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” was reputed to be the motto of Josef Stalin’s secret-policy chief, Lavrentiy Beria. 

If prosecutors are ambitious enough, they can find a law under which to charge anyone.

That’s as true in democracies where the law has become politicized as it is in openly authoritarian states — and this abuse of prosecutorial power is one thing that marks the turn from freedom to tyranny.

Flavio Bolsonaro, the conservative candidate who lost Brazil’s second-round election last month, was warned he wouldn’t remain a free man with his rival, the leftist incumbent President Lula da Silva, reconfirmed in power — so he took no chances: He fled into exile here in America.

Poland in recent days has provided a fresh warning to the world of what happens when law ceases to be seen as protecting everyone in politics equally.

Police took over the country’s Constitutional Tribunal as part of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s campaign to purge government institutions of holdovers from the previous administration.

Poland’s president — who is one of those holdovers — showed up to protest the police action.

Tusk and his right-wing opponents each claim the other side is corrupt, and the opposition says they are being subjected to legal abuse and intimidation: in effect, outlawed for their anti-European Union — and anti-Tusk — politics.

When Trump was put before America’s voters after years of legal battles, the people acquitted him, making him president once more, and in effect canceling most of the setbacks he’d suffered in court.

That was the American people’s verdict on lawfare: They would not stand for it.

The next Congress, and eventually the next president, should remember that.

Americans do not want our democracy to become like Brazil’s, South Korea’s or Poland’s — or our republic to end like Rome’s.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.