I agree with the second part. I don't agree that a mob of thousands storming the capital will be treated more leniently or given more sway the next time around.
I don't think we can say that. We don't know enough about how police and the military rank and file are attached to the rule of law (as opposed to a given candidate's idea of law and order). I'm mindful of the more than grain of truth in the assertion that a failed coup is practice for a successful one.
Practice may not make for perfect but coup-plotters aren't known for letting perfect be the enemy of maybe-good-enough.
Bolsonaro, for instance, has been working away at the potential need to retain power the hard way for quite awhile already. Nieman Lab just ran an interview with the award-winning Brazilian journo and elections researcher Patricia Campos Mello. The discussion was pretty eye-opening in terms of the Bolsonaro crew's willingness to threaten journalists asking about election transparency when Bolsonaro talks about how he won't put up with a rigged election. What's perhaps more alarming is that the social media platforms seem to remain lukewarm about the idea of adequately curbing election-period shenanigans that may attempt to provoke mass violence and so justify a military response that essentially underwrites a coup.
"I think about January 6, and the fact that Brazil is a much younger democracy. I’m really worried. Everybody knows this is going to happen, because every single day [President Jair Bolsonaro] says these things."
www.niemanlab.org
At this point, we [in Brazil] have a president that says every day that the elections are going to be rigged. He says he’s going to hire a private auditing company to audit the elections and that he’s going to have a parallel vote counting by the army. It’s like a slow-motion coup. When we ask the internet platforms, how are you preparing for this? What are you going to do if you have the president or one of his allies hosting a live video on Facebook saying, “You should go confront poll workers because they are stealing the election”? They don’t seem to have a plan.
Much like us in the USA, ordinary Brazilians now see that their usual approach to rule of law seems to be having trouble dealing with willingness of political groups --those who are fearful of defeat at the polls and also willing to retain power at any cost-- to set about peddling disnformation provocative enough to invite chaos (and then a military crackdown) during an election period.
It's sort of like we've shrugged off for way too long the idea that "all pols tell lies" and we've never stopped to weigh what that means, to debunk the corrolary that "so it doesn't matter if what they say is true or not". We don't have any effective way right now to insist that this or that lie is a bridge way too far. We might say that --for instance about Trump's false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen-- but the pols spreading such lies just shrug and double down on the BS, and their followers remain persuaded.
The whole point of the effort of those pols is to make facts (and votes) irrelevant. It's the traditional path to a strongman's government, and it depends on effectively cowing journalists and devaluing their work.
As far as lessons learned from the January 6th insurrection, surely they remain to be seen. Yes, some of the Americans now doing time on criminal charges might be quite bitter that Trump betrayed them in the end, i.e. he said he'd be with them as they marched upon the Capitol, but of course he was not, and he's not in the slam, and not likely to go there either.
But plenty of those who went there and have not been charged still think of the 1/6/21 event as a beginning, not an end to such antics. And why not? One of the two major parties in the USA still has leaders and candidates and elected officials who are signed up to that idea. And that party's honchos, the leaders of the Republican National Committee, formally censured the two Republicans who agreed to serve on the House's January 6th Committee. One is not standing for re-election and the other was driven from her leadership post in the House for her stance on the insurrection.
www.documentcloud.org
What are we to make of that? What are Trump's followers to make of that? That the GOP approved of an attempt to overturn a sitting US government, and disapproves of congressional hearings to unravel the impetus, leadership and execution of that plan which resulted in a violent breach of the Capitol. Why shouldn't interested individuals figure that's a green light to get it right the next time around?
