Opinion – Ross Douthat: The imitation of the 6th of January in Brazil and the futility of populism

Two years ago we debated whether the essential feature of the January 6 riot in Washington, the crowd incited to storm the Capitol out of frustration with the 2020 election, was ambition in the background or futility and unreality at the forefront.

The ambition, which belonged to Donald Trump and his small inner circle, was aimed at provoking a constitutional crisis, which was supposed to begin with the intervention of Mike Pence and culminate, somehow, with Trump’s vote for a second term in the House of Representatives. .

The futility belonged to the rioters, whose violence and vandalism were an expression of “dreampolitik” (dream politics) more than a coup – their non-existent success plan, their end in mass arrests and predetermined imprisonment. And the challenge of analyzing 6th January is that these elements existed together, in an unstable mix that theoretically could inspire all sorts of imitations – some hollow, dishonest and fantastical, others destabilizing and deadly serious.

Now we have the first major international imitation of our Capitol rebellion — the riots that seized government buildings in the Brazilian capital last weekend in the name of defeated populist former president Jair Bolsonaro. And whatever one thinks of the original, the imitation so far falls decisively into the unreal and futile category.

The rebels wanted Bolsonaro back in office, like the January 6th protesters wanted Trump to remain in the White House. They believed that the Brazilian presidential election had been stolen, much as Trump supporters believed that Joe Biden had stolen the 2020 election. His rhetoric echoed the language of American Trumpists. But his homage to the 6th of January was just that: an act of pure staging disconnected from the realities of power.

The moment was revealing. Rather than trying to interrupt the government’s work or disturb the transfer of power, Brazilian rioters invaded Praça dos Três Poderes at a time when its vital buildings – the Congress, the Federal Supreme Court and the presidential palace – were empty.

Congress was not in session, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was checking the damage caused by floods; Bolsonaro was in Florida. There was no transfer of power to stop, no government to take, no leader to restore. The only reason to do such an act now, it seems, was the date: January 8 is close enough to January 6 to provide the necessary imitative frisson.

Even journalists who are concerned with being alarmed by the dangers of populism seemed a little baffled by it all. “Today’s turmoil makes more sense if the aim is to create a visual echo of what happened in Washington,” wrote Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic magazine, rather than actually preventing Lula “from wielding power.” In the same publication, Yascha Mounk called the scene “surreal”, with protesters who “looked almost cosplaying as American rebels”.

And as the experience of 6 de Janeiro was full of forms of cosplay –the QAnon Shaman and the people taking selfies were engaged in a joke, not a serious political intervention–, the Brazilian imitation seemed even more distant from reality, a LARP (role live play) from a LARP.

Once Bolsonaro, like Trump, was actually elected president, one cannot dismiss all of his populism as simple unreality, any more than one can dismiss the violence that accompanied the two January protests. (Although the rising violence in Peru, which has been rocked by protests on behalf of a leftist president who was forced out after trying to rule by decree, probably deserves more attention than the Brazilian riots right now.)

But we can look at January 8th in Brazil and see confirmation of two trends in contemporary populism. The first is the way in which populist movements and politicians today tend to alienate and alarm the interest groups whose support they would need for any real regime change or revolution. This was clearly true on January 6th in the United States, where all major institutions were against the Trumpists, leading to populist denunciations not only against the media and the courts, but also the FBI and the military.

However, even in Brazil, with a history of military rule and its Armed Forces clearly favorable to Bolsonaro, the movement to overthrow Lula’s election ended up isolated and impotent.

Second, in Brasilia, as in the US, one can see the credible tendency of today’s populists to seek ostensible confrontation, the grand and futile act of protest, above the hard work of politics and policy making. 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 amplified opportunities for unrealistic gestures, pure activism, fan bases built on a relentless series of glorious defeats. It doesn’t matter if the revolution is real; as long as it’s on television, that’s enough.

For the haters of populism, the center-left and progressives, this combination of attributes has saved them more than once from the consequences of their own arrogance or mistakes. As much as our elite institutions may err, populist rebels and their avatars are usually ready with greater irresponsibility, a staggering anti-politics, a toxic mix of authoritarian and incompetent – ​​and then, as in the new Republican House of Representatives or the ill-fated government by Liz Truss, a return to the unpopular agendas that sparked the populist rebellion.

This leaves those who cannot join progressivism, trapped for one reason or another on the right (or on the margins of the left), with two options. They can look hopefully to the chaos for signs of a more constructive populism – the kind that exists in theory but not in Trumpian or Bolsonarist practice, the kind that intellectuals spent the Trump era trying to import into their movement, the kind of new right or even more new left-right fusion that is just around the corner.

Alternatively, they might try to look beyond populism altogether, treating it as a failed experiment, as fundamentally unrealistic in both its plans and its effects, like the bizarre Latin American imitation of the 6th of January in the United States.