For two years now, we’ve been debating whether the mafia’s attempt to take over the Capitol on January 6 after their anger over the 2020 election results was a necessary condition of lurking ambition or futility and denial of reality. It was obvious.

The ambition that belonged to Donald Trump and his inner circle was to provoke a constitutional crisis that would begin with the intervention of Mike Pence and somehow culminate in a House vote to elect Trump to a second term. Futility belonged to the rioters, whose violence and vandalism was the expression of a “dream politics” rather than a coup – with no blueprint for its success and its outcome in mass arrests and imprisonment. And the problem with analyzing the events of January 6 is that these elements coexisted in a fluid mixture that could theoretically inspire all sorts of imitations—some empty and bizarre, others destabilizing and dramatic in their brutality.

We now have the first international simulation of US capital events, the riots and takeover of government buildings in the Brazilian capital over the weekend on behalf of recently defeated populist President Jair Bolsonaro. And whatever conclusion may be drawn from the original event, imitation still belongs decisively in the category of unreal and useless.

The rebels wanted Bolsonaro back in power, just as the January 6 protesters wanted Trump to stay in the White House. They believed that the Brazilian presidential election was “stolen” in the same way that Trump supporters believed that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election. Their rhetoric sounded like an antidote to American Trumpists.

But their reference to the events of January 6 was just that: an act clearly ostentatious, divorced from the reality of power.

Timing was key. Instead of trying to disrupt the government or impede the transfer of power, Brazilian rioters stormed the Trio de Trio square in Brasilia at a time when its important buildings – the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace – were mostly empty. Congress was not in session, the incumbent President Lula da Silva was away on a trip to the flood-affected areas, and Bolsonaro himself was vacationing in Florida and not loitering around. There was no transfer of power that could be thwarted, no government that could be attacked, no leader that could be returned to power. The only reason for holding such a protest at this time seems to have been the date: January 8th is close enough to the 6th to provide sufficient proof of imitation.

Even analysts, who have always worried about the dangers of populism, seemed a little bewildered by all this. “Today’s uprising would make more sense if its purpose was to create an image reminiscent of what is happening in Washington,” wrote Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, rather than an uprising aimed at actually preventing Lula from “exercising power.” In the same publication, Jascha Munch described the setting as “surreal”, with rebel protagonists who “almost seemed to impersonate” American “anti-establishment”.

And because the January 6 experience itself was filled with many elements of theatricality — the QAnon shaman and the selfie-takers were involved in the action, not a major political intervention — the Brazilian imitation seemed even more distant from reality and was a live role. -game, which, in turn, is a live role-playing game.

Since Bolsonaro, like Trump, was indeed President-elect, you cannot dismiss all of his populism as simply unreal, just as you cannot dismiss the violence associated with both protests that took place in January. (Although the rise in violence in Peru sparked by protests in support of a leftist president who was ousted after trying to rule by decree probably deserves more attention than the events in Brazil right now.)

But looking at the events of January 8 in Brazil, one can see confirmation of two trends in contemporary populism. First, the way in which today’s populist movements tend to alienate and oppose interest groups that would be necessary for any regime change or revolution. This was clearly true on January 6th in the US, when all major institutions were anti-Trumpists, leading to populist rantings not only in the media and courts, but also against the FBI and the military.

However, even in Brazil, with its historical precedent of military intervention in politics and the military clearly supporting Bolsonaro’s populism, the movement to oust Lula has proved isolated and powerless.

Second, in Brasilia, as in Washington, one can discern the defining tendency of contemporary populists to seek spectacular head-on confrontation, pompous and useless protest, rather than laborious policymaking and policymaking. This is a characteristic similar to the right-wing radicals (and other radicals) of the past. But television news and the Internet have exponentially increased the scope for unrealistic gestures, for direct amplification of the theatrics, for fan bases built on a streak of glorious defeat. It doesn’t matter if the revolution will ever be real as long as it’s on TV.

For the enemies of populism, the centre-left and progressive liberals, this combination of characteristics has saved lives more than once, as they avoided the consequences of their pride and mistakes. Whatever blunders our mainstream institutions may have committed, the radical insurgents and their personifications are usually ready with more hostility, anti-politics, a poisonous mixture of authoritarianism and incompetence, and then, as in the new Republican House of Representatives or Liz Truss’s die-hard conservative government, they themselves return to the unpopular the policy packages that sparked the populist uprising in the first place.

This fact leaves non-libertarians, those stuck on the right (or far left) for one reason or another, with two main options. They can either search the chaos for signs of a more constructive populism — one that exists in theory but does not exist in practice in Trumpism or Bolsonarianism, something that various intellectuals have been trying to inject into this movement throughout the Trump administration; a mix of neo-right or even neo-left that is always very close.

Alternatively, they may try to transcend populism altogether by viewing it as a failed experiment, as fundamentally non-transgender both in its plans and in its results, as was the case with the bizarre Brazilian simulation of January 6th in the US and January 8th in Brazil.