For two years we have debated whether the essential feature
of the January 6 riot, the mob stirred up to storm the Capitol in frustration
over the 2020 election, was the ambition in the background or the futility and
unreality up front.
اضافة اعلان
The ambition, which belonged to Donald Trump and his
shrunken inner circle, aimed to provoke a constitutional crisis, which was
supposed to begin with Mike Pence’s intervention and culminate, somehow, with
the House of Representatives voting Trump into a second term. The futility
belonged to the rioters, whose violence and vandalism was an expression of
dreampolitik rather than a coup — its plan for success nonexistent, its end in
mass arrests and imprisonment foreordained. And the challenge of analyzing
January 6 is that these elements existed together, in an unstable mixture that
could theoretically inspire all kinds of imitations — some empty and grifting
and fantastical, some destabilizing and deadly serious.
Now we have the first major international imitation of our
Capitol riot — the riots that took over government buildings in the Brazilian
capital last weekend in the name of the defeated populist president Jair
Bolsonaro. And whatever you make of the original, so far the imitation falls
decisively into the unreal-and-futile category.
The rioters wanted Bolsonaro back in office as the January 6
protesters wanted Trump to continue in the White House. They believed that the
Brazilian presidential election had been stolen much as Trump’s supporters
believed that Joe Biden had stolen the 2020 election. Their rhetoric echoed the
language of American Trumpists.
But their homage to January 6 was just that: an act of pure
performance unmoored from the realities of power.
In Brasília as in America, you can see the reliable tendency of today’s populists to seek the showy confrontation, the grand and futile act of protest, over the grinding work of politics and policy.
The timing was the tell. Instead of attempting to halt the
work of government or disrupt a transfer of power, the Brazilian rioters
stormed into Brasília Three Powers Square at a time when its crucial buildings
— the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace — were largely
empty. The Congress was not in session, the already-invested President Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva was away touring flood damage; Bolsonaro himself was
hanging out in Florida, not hovering nearby. There was no handover of power to
forestall, no government to seize, no leader to restore. The only reason to
mount such a protest now, it seemed, was the date: January 8 is close enough to
January 6 to provide the necessary imitative frisson.
Even writers who make it their business to be alarmed by the
perils of populism seemed a bit baffled by all this. “Today’s riot makes more
sense if the point was to create a visual echo of what happened in Washington,”
wrote Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, as opposed to actually blocking Lula
“from exercising power”. In the same publication, Yascha Mounk called the scene
“surreal,” featuring rioters who “seemed almost to be cosplaying American
insurrectionists”.
And since the January 6 experience was itself thick with
forms of cosplay — the QAnon Shaman and the people snapping selfies were
engaged in a lark, not a serious political intervention — the Brazilian
imitation felt even more distant from reality, a LARP (live action role play)
of a LARP.
Since Bolsonaro, like Trump, really was elected president,
you cannot dismiss all of his populism as simple unreality, any more than you
can dismiss the violence that accompanied both of the January protests. (Though
the rising violence in Peru, which has been roiled by protests on behalf of a
left-wing president who was forced out after attempting to rule by decree,
probably deserves more attention than the Brazilian riots at the moment.)
But you can look at Brazil’s January 8 and see two
tendencies of contemporary populism confirmed. 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 January 6 in the US, where every major institution was
against the Trumpists, leading to populist philippics against not only the news
media and the courts but also the FBI and the military.
But, cable news and the internet have magnified the opportunities for unreal gestures, pure performativity, fan bases built on an unremitting series of glorious defeats. It does not matter if the revolution is ever real; so long as it is on television — that is enough.
Yet even in Brazil, with a history of military rule and
armed forces clearly favorable to Bolsonaro’s populism, the movement to overturn
Lula’s election has ended up isolated and impotent.
Second, in Brasília as in America, you can see the reliable
tendency of today’s populists to seek the showy confrontation, the grand and
futile act of protest, over the grinding work of politics and policy. This is a
quality they have in common with right-wing radicals (and other radicals) of
the past. But cable news and the internet have magnified the opportunities for
unreal gestures, pure performativity, fan bases built on an unremitting series of
glorious defeats. It does not matter if the revolution is ever real; so long as
it is on television — that is enough.
For populism’s enemies, center-left and liberal, this
combination of attributes has saved them more than once from the consequences
of their own hubris or mistakes. Blunder as our elite institutions might, the
populist rebels and their avatars are usually ready with a greater
fecklessness, a stumblebum anti-politics, a toxic mix of the authoritarian and
the incompetent — and then, as in the new Republican House of Representatives
or Liz Truss’ ill-fated Tory government, cycling back to the unpopular agendas
that provoked populist rebellion in the first place.
This leaves those who cannot rally to liberalism, who are
stuck for one reason or another on the right (or on the left-wing fringe), with
two main options. They can look hopefully in the chaos for hints of a more
constructive populism — the sort that exists in theory but not in Trumpian or
Bolsonaran practice, the sort that various intellectuals spent the Trump era
trying to import into his movement, the sort of new right or even newer
left-right fusion that’s always just around the corner.
Alternatively, they can try to look beyond populism
entirely, treating it as a failed experiment, as fundamentally unreal in both
its plans and its effects as January 8’s bizarre Latin American imitation of
America’s January 6.
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