Vox says 'To fight authoritarianism, America should look to Brazil'

Yesterday, I told my readers to "stay tuned for something educational, evergreen, and SHORT!" I have just the video, Vox saying To fight authoritarianism, America should look to Brazil.

On January 8, 2023, thousands of supporters of Brazil’s right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed federal buildings in the country’s capital. Their goal? Overthrow the results of an election they claimed was rigged, despite no credible evidence of fraud.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Brazil’s January 8 looked a lot like the January 6 attack on the US capital, just two years earlier: mob violence, an insurrection, and a defeated leader who refused to concede.

But the aftermath could not be more different. Jair Bolsonaro is now serving a 27-year prison sentence, while Donald Trump is president, again.

So how did two democracies, facing similar threats, end up with such different outcomes? This video explains how Brazil’s democratic system worked to hold “the Trump of the Tropics” accountable and what the US could learn from the aftermath.

Laws and constitutions don't enforce themselves; people have to enforce them. That happened in Brazil. It's not happening, not enough yet, here in the U.S. Time to recycle what I wrote in A meme and a song for Trump's sentencing.

Like Donald Trump's whitewashing and inversion of the attack on the Capitol, the new Big Lie, enough people bought it that Trump got re-elected and he avoided any actual punishment. That jammed "the wheels of justice," dashing my hope that I repeated most recently in Colbert and Kimmel examine Jack Smith's filing: "'The wheels of justice are grinding slowly in this case, but I expect they will indeed grind exceedingly fine.' May they also grind exceedingly fine for Trump and his seditious supporters, if not as slowly." Trump escaped before the wheels finished their work. Sigh.

Unless something extraordinary happens, like the 25th Amendment successfully being invoked, our next opportunity will be the midterm elections in November and a new Congress in January. May we and our democracy survive that long.