Existential crisis
The scenes in Brasilia looked eerily similar to events at the US Capitol on 6 January two years ago – and there are deeper connections as well.
“The whole thing smells,” said a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, one day after the first round of voting in the Brazilian election in October last year.
The race was heading towards a run-off and the final result was not even close to being known. Yet Mr Bannon, as he had been doing for weeks, spread baseless rumours about election fraud.
It’s a bizarre hobby.
Along with other prominent Trump advisers who spread fraud rumours, Mr Bannon was unrepentant on Sunday, even as footage emerged of widespread destruction in Brazil.
“Lula stole the Election… Brazilians know this,” he wrote repeatedly on the social media site Gettr. He called the people who stormed the buildings “Freedom Fighters”.
…
Bolsonaro supporters railed online about an existential crisis and a supposed “communist takeover” – exactly the same type of rhetoric that drove the rioters in Washington two years ago.
Little Nazi Germanys everywhere.
Makes me think more of the Soviet Union in the early days, fomenting constant revolutions in other countries (in Eastern Europe and, I think, elsewhere).
GW: thanks. I really struggle to define Trump rightists as conservative in any way. they are reactionary radicals, revolutionaries. which riffs off an early point: not every popular movement, protest, insurrections so on, what ever is a good thing. After 90 years, the New Deal is the conservative structure liberals want to conserve.
Well said!
Trumpists are neither conservative nor liberal; they want to break things. Conservatives don’t want to break things, they want to keep them intact the way they are. They also don’t want change to their own lives; liberals want to make changes to the overall system.
I actually think Trumpists are confused about what they want and about how possible it is for a society to work the way they want. Most of them are the ones who failed seventh grade civics and think the teacher had it in for them because of some sort of liberal bias that kept her from seeing their brilliance.
They don’t understand government; they don’t know what it does. They just know they hate it. They know they hate paying for it. They have been convinced that it does nothing for them, and does everything for the people they hate.
And they perceive that everyone has it better than they do. That’s not really the case, though some of the working class could claim a lot of people have it better than they do…just often not the people they think it is. The ones who have it better than they do are often the ones they vote for, believing them to be just like the “average American” voter – in short, themselves. The rich gaudiness of a Trump merely indicates he has reached what they want to attain, and he is the one to help them attain it.
iknklst: excellent points, paralleling my thoughts on the “reactionary radicalism” of the American right. To a certain extent, they are foot soldiers, cannon fodder, for some quite scary forces that reflect deep economic interests but also can be tied to the nastier side of the human psyche. Given how religious,unthinking some of these thoughts are, I am not sure they can be reasoned with. I hope I am wrong.
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I was gp-ing it just as you said that.