Supporters of the "Trump of the Tropics" attack the Brazilian government.
The first rule of successful insurrecting is winning the ironclad support of the military. That's what Trump supporters learned in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. And it's what the supporters of the defeated Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro learned on Jan. 8, 2023, when hundreds of people stormed and ransacked their country's Congress, presidential palace and supreme court. That's not to say that both failed insurrections didn't have their supporters in uniform. But when the time came, both mobs found themselves on their own. |
Now there's a price to be paid. More than 900 people who attacked the U.S. Capitol have been arrested and charged over the past two years. More than 1,200 Brazilians have been detained in the past two days. |
Perhaps the immune system of democracies is getting better at handling right-wing mobs that don't believe in self-government. |
And yet, as the São Paulo-based contributing writer Vanessa Barbara writes in a guest essay this week, it's unclear if this latest failed insurrection "is the end of a political movement or just the beginning of more division and chaos." |
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro at the ballot box and took office on Jan. 1, already faced a difficult challenge to unite his country, Barbara writes, "even without a bombastic former president just offstage and many of his supporters now prone to violence." |
Bolsonaro wasn't just offstage, he was out of the country, in Florida. But his supporters back home didn't need explicit marching orders. Fed a steady diet of lies for months about a stolen election, they simply took matters into their own hands as their defeated leader fled to the Sunshine State. History sometimes echoes and rhymes. |
Failed insurrection notwithstanding, Lula and his nation are in for a turbulent time, notes Peter Coy in his newsletter. Not only do many in the business community oppose the new government, markets might not like it either: "On the spending side, investors who worry about deficit spending will rebel if the government increases social spending or puts through a big increase in the minimum wage. Conversely, the public will rebel if he attempts to roll back subsidies on fuel that Bolsonaro put in place." |
Even if Lula is able to steer the economy away from the shoals, he is still president of a divided country. Which is why it is so important that the insurrection failed because of a lack of support from key groups. |
Ross Douthat hits these themes in his latest column. "You can look at Brazil's Jan. 8 and see two tendencies of contemporary populism confirmed," he writes. "First is the way that today's populist movements and politicians tend to alienate and alarm the stakeholder groups whose support they would need for any true regime change or revolution. This was clearly true on Jan. 6 in the United States, where every major institution was against the Trumpists, leading to populist philippics against not only the news media and the courts but also the F.B.I. and the military." Yet even in Brazil, with a history of military rule, he writes, "the movement to overturn Lula's election has ended up isolated and impotent." |
Let's hope the next group of insurrectionists is equally unwilling to learn the lessons of the past. |
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