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Opinion | Brazil’s Homage to Jan. 6 Was an Act of Pure Performance [1]

['Ross Douthat']

Date: 2023-01-11

For two years we have debated whether the essential feature of the Jan. 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.

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 Jan. 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 Jan. 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.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/opinion/brazil-jan-6-populism.html

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