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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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