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For those who remember the brazillian election last year, today pro-bolsonaro supporters have invaded the supreme court, congress and presidential palace (easier here since all are close to each other). I don't expect any politician to die, since they all leave on the weekend, but there will be probably more deaths than in january 6th.
For those interested in shenanigans like the shaman QAnon shaman, one particularly disliked judge (Alexandre de Moraes) had his door stolen.
What is the point of these delayed action pseudocoup/farce operations?
From the point of view of the organized strategic putschist, surely it makes the most sense to strike as soon as you lose the election. Announce that there were irregularities, arrest the other guy and launch a crackdown while you're still in control. Strategically speaking, that's what Trump should have done if he truly was interested in overthrowing democracy (which he clearly wasn't), if he even had strong loyalists in the military (which he likely didn't). You don't wait around, you strike as quickly as possible. He should've called for his supporters in November, not January. Many more would've come, I imagine. Why didn't Bolsonaro get rid of Lula on election night? Similar reasoning, I assume. He didn't think he had sufficient support or didn't want to overturn the election.
From the point of view of the man in the street, why would you wait months to have your big rally? Surely your emotions are hottest on election night? What is the delayed action mechanism that brought people to the Capitol on Jan 6, what is going on here?
The only thing I can think of is that weak leaders don't want to look like they're actually launching a coup by moving just after the election, so they do what Trump did and call for a rally much later when it's obviously pointless. That way they get to look like they're doing something to stand up for their supporters. Trump also made a tweet at one point urging for his supporters to be peaceful. But Bolsonaro himself condemned 'pillaging of public buildings' and denied he had anything to do with this incident. So what is the cause here?
I don't know enough about the Brazilian situation to confirm if it is the same, but calling his supporters out for a riot was Trump's plan D after his plans to overturn the election before January 6th failed.
Plan A was the plan announced at Four Seasons Total Landscaping focused on changing the results in the swing states by state-level political action including trying to get lawsuits in front of sympathetic state-court judges, jawboning Republican secretaries of state, and lobbying Republican-controlled state legislatures to intervene in the certification process. I don't know how surprising it should have been that Republican state-court judges and Republican secretaries of state were completely uncooperative with the plan, but they were.
Plan B was a more conventional military autogolpe - the plan proposed by Gen Flynn to declare the Dominion hack/fraud a foreign attack on US democracy and rerun the election with hand-counting under military supervision. Assuming the Jan 6 committee report is accurate, this plan was being taken seriously until it became clear that there was no way the military would co-operate.
Plan C was the plan to get Pence to overturn the election based on the legal theories in the Eastman memo. I don't know what the plan was to consolidate power after Pence announces Trump's re-election and Nancy Pelosi orders the House Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest him for couping. Pence refused to co-operate.
Plan D was to use the mob to carry out Plan C over Pence's objections, either by intimidating him or by causing enough chaos that the Secret Service removed him to an undisclosed location and someone else (probably President pro tem Chuck Grassley) could be convinced to do it.
This is consistent with my theory (which appears to be shared by most Mottizens) of how American conservatives feel about the use of power. Plan A is to do things legally, plan B is organised violence, and plan C (probably) and D (definitely) are disorganised violence. At any point before January 6th, getting his supporters to riot makes plans A-C harder.
I don’t know anyone who supported a violence coup on Jan 6 versus just letting Biden rule. Even the proud boys just wanted new elections.
I do think medium term the right is beginning to build justification for rule by force but we haven’t crossed that bridge yet. And we won’t cross that bridge provided their is still a belief that they have a voice in Democracy.
And I strongly support Jan 6. We needed a large loud and poorly behaved riot after the events on 2020. The casus bellus for a riot wing riot had long since occurred.
The argument for the right to eventually use force (or other norm breaking) is a feeling that the PMC and institutions are aligned against them but that they still have the people. And that the left doesn’t just want to share governance but that they want to crush them. We are not at this point yet. The right is at a point of thinking about how they can regain control from a narrow PMC that currently controls a lot of key institutions. That’s why we are having a Church Commission. It’s why Desantis is attacking Disney. It’s why we are thinking about BlackRock and their huge corporate voting power as Etf managers and thus insulated and voting with woke corporates. Most rich people are old white men and they own the majority of stocks but the PMC have control.
Perhaps violence some day. For today it’s figure out how to regain a semblance of an institutional counterattack.
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Which is why he repeatedly told them to go home in peace upon learning the police line was breached?
Organizing protests at places of government in an attempt to convince decision makers a particular position has large popular support is like the whole purpose of a protest. Suggesting that Trump organized that rally with the intent of it going violent is highly uncharitable.
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These things act as a pressure valve perhaps?
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I’ll be honest I would love to see bigger write ups on wtf is going on in Brazil from someone whose not msm to indoctrinated.
The crowds do seem quite large especially since isn’t their capital far from population centers?
My only hot take is the obvious if it were left wing protestors then these people would be participating in Democracy and getting their voices heard. But since the color coded red tribe they are fascists destroying Democracy.
I guess I ally with Bolsonaro because I’m told he is my tribe. So I hope e these protests work out.
I don't know if he only tweets about it or has written something longer, but your best bet is probably Glenn Greenwald
He gets too culture warry. I like him but something like the Palladium article shared is aimed far more for people trying to understand what’s going. Greenwald gets into the team sports bits of politics.
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I think you are correct, although it seems too simple, no?
Most news websites I know in Latam have a left bias, example:
In Italy, when the Meloni won as new prime minister, the news articles repeatedly used keywords as 'right-wing', 'fascists', 'extreme right-wing', 'neofascists', adding a sense of preoccupation, danger and explaining how minorities will be in trouble. Only a couple of articles noticed that this was the first woman in power in Italy but still not leaving aside she is neofascist.
Contrast this when Chile had a new president, no 'extreme left-wing' or 'comunist' keywords and despite the new president is a very young 'white' male, minorities are safe.
Going back to the protests context, a particular episode in Bolivia happened in 2019, big waves of people started protesting -Wikipedia link-, because among other things, it was unconstitutional for the president to run again. Despite the big numbers of people on the streets, the president was left tribe, so a lot of coverage had the word 'coup' in it.
Obviously different context, but in red coded Brazil there were a lot of protests in 2020 and 2021, both in favor and against Bolsonaro. But even when Comunist political parties call for destitution of the president, the description of the events is watered down. Wikipedia doesn't have much information on the events Brazilian protests 2020
Relevant context in the south of the continent is the organization of left political parties. Nowadays the organization is called Grupo de Puebla (sorry only ES in wiki), which is an update on the former São Paulo Forum.
I realized it's not easy to argue that 'news' companies have a strong bias without compiling a lot of events, links and run a very extensive analysis. Even then I wonder what kind of conclusions can be drawn. I guess anecdotal evidence is all we have for now.
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I found this article to be somewhat informative.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/11/11/what-everyone-got-wrong-on-the-brazilian-elections/
Interesting article indeed. A pity that so many rightish leaders don't have any constructive ambitions, ways to create strong networks of support. I get the sense that when they're talking about the Brazilian left being 'patrimonial' and using 'cordiality', the right would just be corrupt for money's sake.
The mechanics are the same, though. It's an irregular verb. I am 'patrimonial', you are known for financial irregularities, he is in prison for corruption!
The left finds ways to fund all kinds of lobby groups, protestors, civil society organizations, academics:
I'm sure this is one of the many things that Lee Kuan Yew did excellently, he could find ways to ensure his electoral opponents were suppressed, even legal ways.
Or Lee Kuan Yew governed a largely Han Chinese society that is high trust, high IQ, and obedient. And Brazil isn’t that.
Eh, the West is also fairly high trust and high IQ, if less obedient. Yet the paragraph I quoted also rings true here. We have the state-sponsored or state-supported Blob of NGOs, intellectuals, media and so on. The left finds ways to create jobs for their supporters, ways to give them influence so they can support their patrons. And they face ostensively right-wing classical liberals who don't patronize their supporters in the same way.
I suppose I was thinking of times Lee Kuan Yew found some legal issues with his opponents, lawfaring them into the ground. That's not quite the same thing of course, though I'm confident he enjoyed the 'cordiality' of Singaporean judges. Meanwhile, the right in the West is regularly rebuked by the judiciary, the cordiality is on the other side.
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A year and a day, and a year and a day....
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I do find it amusing that people on social media are acting like Jan 6th invented the storming of the capitol.
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What's the Brazilian security forces likely to do when Lula orders them to clear out the protestors?
The police are already trying to clear the protestors, though there have been accusations that they were lenient with protestors early, allowing the situation to devolve. The army is a mystery, they did nothing even when there were people calling for their intervention at millitary barracks (There is a common joke in Brazil that the only function of the army is to cut the grass and paint the sidewalk). By and large, the security forces are pro-Bolsonaro, but that does not mean they would disobey orders, and resistance from protestors may make then ill-disponed to help.
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How likely is it to actually degenerate into wider scale conflict?
Hopefully nothing bigger happens, however, more incidents are likely to happen. Lula declared an intervention in the federal district, which shall probably lead to orders to remove the protesters's camps that were there since the election. However, that would still leave many willing to take action, and unless the government sucessfully destroys their organization capacity (mainly done in Telegram and Whatsapp), they will still have power to do this again, and I don't believe the state has enough power to do so, even if it resorted to authoritarian means.
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