Why Brazil Stopped Its Bolsonaro and We Didn't Stop Ours

Summary

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The Gist: "Why Brazil Stopped Its Bolsonaro and We Didn't Stop Ours"

Date: March 31, 2026
Host: Mike Pesca
Guest: Zach Beecham (Vox journalist, author of The Reactionary Spirit)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Mike Pesca engages Zach Beecham in a probing, comparative examination of why Brazil successfully restrained its would-be authoritarian president, Jair Bolsonaro, while the U.S. failed to check Donald Trump's attempts to subvert democracy. Through stories, firsthand reporting, and spirited analysis, Pesca and Beecham dissect differences in institutional structures, party systems, legal traditions, and national histories that meaningfully shaped these outcomes. The conversation tackles not just what happened, but why—and considers what lessons (if any) the American system can glean from Brazil's recent experience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Bolsonaro in Brazil: Authoritarian Ambitions Checked

[05:23 – 09:21]

• Bolsonaro’s Background:
  Bolsonaro was a longtime admirer of Brazil’s 1980s military dictatorship. Upon being elected in 2018, he immediately began power consolidation efforts—issuing executive orders targeting human rights NGOs, stacking his cabinet with military officers, and attempting to use sedition laws against critics.

• Failed Coup Attempt:
  After losing re-election to Lula in 2022, Bolsonaro held multiple meetings with military chiefs to overturn election results. Only the Navy was sympathetic; the Army and Air Force refused.

  "The Navy guy agrees. Right. But the thing is, you can't do a coup with just boats." – Zach Beecham [07:07]

• January 8th, 2023, Uprising:
  Pro-Bolsonaro mobs stormed Congress, the Executive Office, and the Supreme Court—hoping to spark Army intervention, which never materialized. Bolsonaro and key plotters have since been jailed and barred from running.

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2. Institutional Responses: Brazil vs. United States

[09:21 – 16:16]

A. The Power of a Multiparty System

• Brazilian presidents rarely command Congressional majorities. The “Centrão” centrist bloc prioritizes self-preservation, not ideology.

• This self-interest paradoxically fortified Brazil against power grabs—Centrão refused to cede more power to Bolsonaro.

  “Congress had its own interests to defend in very personal terms...so they ended up repeatedly overruling him.” – Zach Beecham [10:42]

• In the U.S.’s entrenched two-party system, such self-interested independence was absent. Republican senators, faced with Trump’s actions, did not break ranks.

  “This would be the equivalent of the Republican senators...just standing up and saying, no, you’re not our guy anymore. And that dynamic didn’t exist in the United States.” – Guest [10:42]

B. The Role of Judicial Institutions

• Brazilian Supreme Court:
  Unified against the authoritarian threat, actively intervening to protect democracy—even at the risk of overstepping legal bounds.

  “Once Bolsonaro took office, they immediately groked that he was this really significant threat to the democratic order...they had this crazy group chat...One of them says, basically...we don’t want to be remembered that way in Brazil [as enablers of authoritarianism].” – Zach Beecham [12:28]

• Notably, the court quickly ordered the end of Bolsonaro’s election-day road blockades, ensuring poor, opposition-leaning voters could access polls—while also avoiding extending voting hours, thus not handing Bolsonaro pretexts to claim fraud.

  “This...care about the following the rules and about perceptions of their actions ended up...playing an important role in ensuring that the election was fair.” – Zach Beecham [14:21]

• U.S. Comparison:
  While Supreme Court proved less resilient against executive overreach, lower federal courts acted independently to resist some presidential abuses. Federalism (state-run elections) created additional barriers to authoritarian consolidation.

  “The Supreme Court has been very poor at checking Trump’s power grabs...but the US has this robust system of lower courts...that have been a really powerful check...” – Zach Beecham [15:05]

C. Federalism and Nationalization

• Brazil has a centralized body (the TSE) running elections; the U.S. system relies on states, which proved beneficial against Trump’s attempts to subvert election results.

  “We’ve seen that federalism has been a pretty profound bulwark.” – Zach Beecham [17:16]

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3. Democracy, Memory, and Political Culture

[19:00 – 24:41]

• Recency of Authoritarianism:
  Most Brazilian voters remember military rule firsthand; this memory made guarding against a dictatorship visceral. By contrast, Americans—never having experienced national authoritarian rule in modern memory—lacked similar urgency.

  “They didn’t have the ‘it can’t happen here’ conversation because it had happened there.” – Mike Pesca [19:00]

• Pesca notes much of the American South has an authoritarian past—subnationally, not nationally—so it’s not alien to U.S. political DNA, just perceived differently.

  “Authoritarianism has always been a political tradition in the U.S.—we just don’t talk about it in those terms.” – Mike Pesca [21:08]

• In Brazil:
  For younger generations, the memory of dictatorship is less vivid; class and religiosity explain political divides (evangelicals and the nouveau riche supporting Bolsonaro, poorer Brazilians favoring the left).

  “The key divisions I found were based on class and religiosity more than anything else.” – Zach Beecham [23:26]

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4. Takeaways & Prescriptions

[16:16 – 17:16], [24:41 – 25:29]

• While the U.S. should not copy Brazilian institutions wholesale, Beecham recommends considering a more multiparty system and requiring Congressional approval for executive orders to limit presidential overreach—achievable by statute, not necessarily requiring a constitutional amendment.

• The main “what if” for Trump: the lack of lived experience with dictatorship in the U.S.—and the willingness of key figures (e.g., Mitch McConnell) to “run the show” rather than act to prevent future authoritarianism—shifted history.

  “That was a decisive moment...I think a lot of it was [McConnell] just thought that they could run the show.” – Mike Pesca [24:41]

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5. Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On Institutional Self-Preservation:
  “Ironically, the corruption ended up enabling significant amounts of pushback because Congress had its own interests to defend...” — Zach Beecham [11:00]

• Court Group Chats:
  “[The] Supreme Court...they like, share ideas and stuff. Yeah, but that’s what happened here, right?” — Mike Pesca [12:19]

• Brazil’s Navy Chief and the Coup:
  “You can’t do a coup with just boats. They’re not really helpful. So you need guys on the ground. And the army guy said no. So the coup didn’t happen.” — Zach Beecham [07:07]

• Comparison with Mitch McConnell’s Choice:
  “It was something like Mitch McConnell as an individual deciding whether to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, which would have barred him from office.” — Guest [19:00]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [05:23] Introduction to Brazil’s Bolsonaro and authoritarian tactics
• [07:07] The failed 2022 coup and the crucial role of the military
• [09:21] Why Brazil’s Congress checked Bolsonaro vs. U.S. Congress with Trump
• [12:28] The Brazilian Supreme Court’s activist role
• [14:21] Election Day interventions and detailed recounting of Supreme Court actions
• [16:16] Federalism in the U.S. vs. centralized election authority in Brazil
• [19:00] Memory of dictatorship—Brazil, South Korea, and U.S. historical memory
• [21:08] Pesca’s analogy: Southern subnational authoritarianism
• [23:26] Demographic and sociological division in Brazil's electorate
• [24:41] The Mitch McConnell inflection point and lessons for U.S. democracy

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Conclusion

This episode of The Gist offers a rich, nuanced case study in democratic resilience (and its failures), asking why Brazil’s institutions resisted an aspiring autocrat while America’s proved shockingly vulnerable. Through history, structure, and psychology, Pesca and Beecham reveal that the answers are neither simple nor easily transferrable—yet there are meaningful lessons for those determined to guard democracy, both here and abroad.

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Notable Quotes Recap

• “You can’t do a coup with just boats.” – Zach Beecham [07:07]
• “[Congress shut him down] because it just suited them to hold more power.” – Zach Beecham [10:42]
• “There’s nothing intrinsic to the American psyche...that prevents us from having an authoritarian system.” – Mike Pesca [21:08]
• “Authoritarianism has always been a political tradition in the U.S.—we just don’t talk about it in those terms.” – Mike Pesca [21:08]
• “If you were hired by Trump to be an evil adviser...I would abolish ICE.” — Mike Pesca [25:08] (on how to cloak authoritarian intentions)

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This summary skips ad reads, social shout-outs, and material unrelated to the core episode discussion.

Transcript

[Mike Pesca]

Foreign.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

It's Tuesday, March 31, 2026, from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca, and for some reason that I can't quite explain, or maybe a different kind of person might start by saying, not for nothing, I was looking up the etymology of the word bimbo. Been very interested in finding out about bimbos. Bimbos first appeared as the name of an alcoholic punch in the 19th century, and then, you know, from 1900 around, bimbos became the names of horses. There was a famous elephant circus and a gorilla named Bimbo. In 1919, Damon Runyon of Guys and Dolls fame quoted a boxer calling an opponent a bimbo. What's a bimbo? Somebody asked Tiny Maxwell on the assumption that Tiny ought to be familiar with the Philadelphia lingo. A bimbo, said tiny. It's a 2 degrees lower than a cuckoo cootie. Okay? According to Google Engram, there was a spike in the use of the word Bimbo in the 1920s, and this is the period when the sense of the word seeming to conjure a floozy may have arisen. My Little Bimbo down on Bamboo Aisle was a popular 1920s song. We also have this song from a little later by the cowboy crooner Jim Reeves.

[Mike Pesca]

Bimbo, bimbo, where you gonna go? We old bimbo Bimbo, what you gonna do? We old bimbo Bimbo does your mommy know?

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Sometime around the 1920s, the sense that a flapper or vamp might be a bimbo. Mae west, sexually aggressive diamond little character was called a Bowery bimbo. But, you know, as I started reading the popular press of the twenties, bimbo usually just meant baby. Bimbo likes raw carrots is the issue that a Room Daily Sentinel advice columnist was asked to grapple with. Answer if I had a bimbo, I train him to eat carrots raw and go barefoot in all weather. That's what he would do with a bimbo. By the 1980s, I found this column in a review in the Waterloo region Record, a review of the television show Lavert and Shirley. And by the way, Bonnie Malik, who writes the review, if she wasn't taken exactly from the Onions list of television reviewers, I do not know who was. Here is how the column starts. The biggest fear in life for Laverne and Shirley, next to becoming old maids, is to be thought of as bimbos. A bimbo, youthful readers, is a 1950s euphemism for a bad girl who seldom needs her shoes resold. Huh? Huh? No. Why?

[Mike Pesca]

Why?

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

So there we get the Bimbo by the 80s, it was firmly ensconced as the bimbo we know and love today. Etymology.com says the diminutive bimbet was coined in 83. And then of course, the himbo came in 1988. But who really knows when the himbo will present himself once again?

[Mike Pesca]

I wonder.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Not for nothing, oh, by the way, on how to today, you know that show how to that I also host, we have on Nate Silver. Brilliant guy, but I found when he talks, he often says, or I do too. Right. You know, so we had an expert on who could talk about filler words. Here is me reacting to a lesson that our expert gave Nate. That was so good. I didn't see your fingers, but you were doing it. Yeah, we. They were below camera. Yes. Yes.

[Mike Pesca]

Mike, why didn't you say that was so good? It was so good. I want to know why do you

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

say it was so good to find out what was so great and how we got there. Listen to how to how not to say. On this show today, a spiel about Donald Trump and being okay with the straight of Hormuz being closed. But first, Zach Beecham has written the Revolutionary Spirit, which examines the global rise of authoritarian leaning far right politics. His research these days focuses on democratic resilience, how to stop would be dictators. Now I know we maybe have a would be dictator in this country. Does he seem poised to grasp the helm, to grasp the reins of a dictatorship? Seems a little weak. And I'm not saying take your eyes off the ball. I'm definitely not saying don't listen to Zach. But no kings. Couldn't we go for half kings? Because it doesn't seem like the king wasn't going to stay or plant himself as the king. He'd make the memes. He do the memes of the plane and the duty and the former. No kings protesters. I don't know if there's going to be a king. There definitely won't if we listen to the lessons of Zach Beacham. Up next, Zach Beacham writes for Vox. He worries a lot about dictatorship, but he does more than worry about it. He worries very much about it. No, he studies it. He even goes to the places where there were almost dictatorships and does some reporting. So, Zack, start by telling me about your ultimate example. You're reporting in Brazil.

[Mike Pesca]

So Brazil, I thought was a really fascinating parallel to the United States. It was in 2018, they elected a guy named Jared Bolsonaro to the presidency. He's kind of a wild person. He had spent years in Congress openly pining for the military dictatorship of the 1980s. He also said some pretty offensive stuff. There's a wild interview with a very famous actress, actually, or actor now, I should say, about LGBT rights and the things that he said about how parents of gay children should have beaten their kids more. So they got out of it like a real extremist in a lot of different ways. Ways. And he wins based on largely but entirely a corruption scandal in an economic downturn, and proceeds to come into office and start trying to consolidate power immediately in his own hands. There are a number of different markers of this, but I think one of the most notable ones is that on day one, he issued an executive order putting NGOs, human rights NGOs, particularly, under government surveillance or attempting to do that. That's one of the first things that he did. And also populated his government with officers. About half of the cabinet were military officers, which is extremely unusual in Brazil and extremely troubling coming from somebody who not only pined for the military dictatorship, but ultimately would attempt a coup in 2022. So fears about authoritarianism in the case of Bolsonaro were really not misplaced. Not. No, it was. It was really. And so 2022 is his re election bid. I'm jumping forward in time. I will go back a bit, but this is important for setting the table. He loses to the left wing candidate Lula, who had been the president before in Brazil, and he then starts plotting a coup.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Right.

[Mike Pesca]

He has multiple meetings with the heads of the army, the Air Force and the Navy to try to get the military to declare the election null and void and keep him in office. And the Navy guy agrees. Right. But the thing is, you can't do a coup with just boats. They're not really helpful. So you need the guys on the ground. And the army guy said no. So the coup didn't happen. Then on January 8th, there's, you know.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Yeah, it's called boots on the ground, not fins.

[Mike Pesca]

The Navy guy can't really hear us mocking him because he's in jail now. But the. Yeah, there's. On January 8th of 2023, there's an event very much like January 6th in the United States, only instead of just attacking the Congress Building, they also attacked the Executive Office Building and the Supreme Court rampage. These protesters, pro Bolsonaro protesters, rampage through this. Their hope is to incite elements of the army to come join them and ultimately cause a coup. It doesn't work out, and then there's a massive investigation into all of this. They get arrested. Bolsonaro is now in jail on something like a 27 year sentence and he's disqualified from running in this year's presidential election. So that often gets cited as, hey, the US should have put Trump in jail after doing January 6th. And if we had, then we'd have an outcome like Brazil, where the would be dictator is not able to run in the next election. And that's part of the story. Part of it is what happened after. But the part I was more interested in is what happened during his presidency when he tries these executive power grabs, like putting the NGOs under surveillance, or he tries to make some unilateral changes to gun laws that seem to exceed presidential authority. He uses sedition laws to try to arrest a bunch of people who are critical of his Covid era policy. There are a lot of examples like this, but they don't work in the US A lot of what Trump tried in terms of executive power grabs he got away with early on in Brazil. The institutions that failed to stop a lot of stuff in the US and here I'm thinking specifically of Congress and the Supreme Court actually did their job. And so the question I came into when I got to Brazil in January was what was the difference? Like why what happened?

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

And your answer? Because I have some ideas. I read your conclusion. We agree and disagree some.

[Mike Pesca]

The story is very complicated in Brazil, I think, and it's not as simple as, you know, everyone was really united against Bolsonaro. In fact, Congress cooperated with him when their interests aligned mind. But I think there were two things that were really important and they're different in Congress and the Supreme Court in the Brazilian Congress. Brazil has an extreme multi party system. So no president ever has a majority in Congress. And there's this big block in the center of Brazilian politics called the Central. And the Central is basically just interested in staying in office and getting more favors to their constituents. And honestly, a significant amount of personal corruption, like that's just what they want. They are nominally center, right, but mostly they're in it for themselves. And so their view was, we're not going to let this guy accrue a bunch of power because if he gets a lot of power, then he has control over us. He can determine whether we get our corrupt payments or whether we can pay our constituents. And we don't like that. So they ended up repeatedly overruling him when he tried to do executive power grabs. Even though they would work with him on issues where they had shared ideological affinity, they shut him down on the specific issue of congressional executive power balance, because it just suited them to hold more power.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

So this would be the equivalent of the Republican senators who didn't believe that the election was stolen though now, now maybe they have to make noises that they do at the time, just standing up and saying, no, you're not our guy anymore. And that dynamic didn't exist in the United States. Correct. We have a strict two party system.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, yeah, it was really. The multi party system was huge here. Huge. And that. And ironically, the corruption ended up enabling significant amounts of pushback because Congress had its own interests to defend in very personal terms, the Supreme Court, which also has. There's a current scandal right now if it's corruption problems. But that wasn't what really came up with the court. Then. The court, you know, you talk to a lot of Brazilians about this, they didn't believe it at first, but the court was actually sincerely concerned with democracy in Brazil. They had been pretty divided beforehand. They fought a lot in the 2000 and tens amongst themselves. There's a crazy video of two justices yelling at each other on camera and calling each other names, because that's how deep the divisions ran. But once Bolsonaro took office, they immediately groked that he was this really significant threat to the democratic order. And the Brazilian Supreme Court, for reasons running deep in the country's history, sees itself as being the guarantor, the last resort of democracy. And so there's this crazy text message exchange that got leaked to The Press in 2020. It's. It's a what's up? Group message between Brazilian Supreme Court justices. It's really funny to think about Supreme Court justices of having the group chat where they like, share ideas and stuff. Yeah, but that's what happened here, right?

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

And one of you know, if we had that, Alito would be hitting those flag emojis hard punch, flag, boom.

[Mike Pesca]

And one of them says, basically, I'm going to paraphrase here because I don't have the quote in front of me says, look, remember what happened in the 1930s when people allowed Hitler to accrue a lot of power. We don't want to be those guys, we don't want to be remembered that way in Brazil. And so the Supreme Court was extremely aggressive in pushing back against anything that smacked of a coup attempt and often overstepped its authority in doing so. By the way, there are some very, very, very legitimate critiques of Brazil's Supreme Court and the way that it handled this. And a lot of very well intentioned Brazilians think they went way too far. But there were also moments where their vigilance about democracy were absolutely critical. So on election day in 2022, Bolsonaro sent Highway patrol to blockade basically the roads that went into polling stations, because in Brazil you have to bus people around to get to the voting station because of the remoteness of where certain people live relative to where the polling stations are. And he did this specifically in the northeast of Brazil, which tends to be poorer and a real stronghold for the Workers Party, which is the left wing opposition. And so he just basically said that if we can stop them from voting and the election there is national for the president, so it's just like every vote counts, then maybe he'll be able to win. And the Supreme Court acted within hours. It ordered the blockades to be ended, ensured that they were, and then, in a very interesting move, did not extend voting hours because they didn't want to give Bolsonaro a pretext to say that the election was rigged against him. And so this, this care about the following the rules and about the perceptions of how of their actions ended up, I think, playing an important role in ensuring that the election actually was fair and preventing what was a pretty immediate threat to free and fair elections from taking place.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Right. So let me stop you there. So one of the things they did a big important thing, acted decisively when the actual vote was being threatened. And the idea is there in the United States, it's unlikely that that would happen.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. I don't, I don't think there will be an analogous situation directly.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Well, not with the Supreme Court, but that gets me to one of my overall critiques of this comparison.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Which is on the local level, stuff like this happens all the time. They usually do it by ordering the polls open for longer hours. So that wasn't the exact solution there. But courts consider these complain day of, and then they enter and then they act and their rulings are followed.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. I think that one important difference, or rather point of resilience in the US that made it closer to the Brazilian case has been the ability of lower courts to act independently. Like, the Supreme Court has been very poor at checking Trump's power grabs. Right. The best example is the tariffs case, which happened after I did the study, but is notable. Right. Maybe the court will go more in that direction. But even then, it's kind of an imperfect check. Trump maybe has some workarounds. I think it was a huge loss for him. But the court should have been doing more of that earlier and did some Highly unusual things to avoid doing it.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

We might get another data point with immigration.

[Mike Pesca]

Right. We'll see how those final rulings work out. It's the temporary stuff where the Supreme Court said, oh yeah, keep doing what you're doing, whatever. Even though they had good reasons to believe that what he was doing was exceeding his authority. And in the tariffs case ultimately ruled that it was overruling the lower court stays was a real problem and has been a real problem. That didn't happen in Brazil. But also the US has this robust system of lower courts. The Supreme Court doesn't rule on everything. And the lower courts have been a really powerful check on the administration in a lot of ways that are not widely appreciated. So that's good, right? That's like a good, in some ways a happy. We're similar to the Brazilian case just through a different mechanism.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

But also the United States has federalism when it comes to elections. And so states run our elections. And in Brazil they have this extremely powerful court, right, the TSC and this extremely powerful and Lex Luthor looking guy de Maraes who is the, who was essentially the judge in charge of voting. And just based on the power and authority of this guy who stood athwart Bolsonaro's ambitions and said no, you could stop a lot of it. Now, if we were to say this is the solution for us, we'd actually be buying into a recent Trump theory that we need to nationalize elections because he doesn't like the fact that a lot of states aren't buying his crazy election theory. So this is a huge difference from Brazil. I wouldn't want Brazil's solutions, not even in the short term, but in the long term. And then I'll get to another, another one of these big differences. But I'll pause and ask for your analysis of that.

[Mike Pesca]

No, I have, I have no disagreement with that.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Right.

[Mike Pesca]

Like I don't. I think that Brazil and the United States are different countries. What I found impressive about the Brazilian institutions is that how on the national level they perform differently from their US peers. And that is not to say we should adopt every version of the Brazilian constitution. Everything that's in there. I think we should consider moving towards a more multi party system. I think that that is a good. If I'm talking about direct one to one takeaways, that one I'm actually pretty comfortable saying, but it's very, very hard in the short term. There's a lot of stuff. There are some things that you can do that can copy the Brazilian system. So for Instance, they have a system of executive orders that's a little bit different from ours. The President can make a temporary law in their system, but it's temporary and Congress has to approve it. And so requiring congressional approval for executive orders. I talked to some lawyers about this. It would be doable just through a statute. You don't need a constitutional amendment to do it. And that would be a pretty significant way of reining in presidential power. And we could do that. We could do versions of that. But I don't think that that means every aspect of their system is better than the US or even the better is the right way of conceptualizing it. Sometimes some things that are appropriate in one country aren't appropriate in another. And I don't think a national elections administration in the US is a good idea. We've seen why that's a bad idea under current circumstances. We've seen that federalism has been a pretty profound bulwark. That is also, by the way, you asked earlier about dissimilarities with Hungary. That's an important point of difference. Hungary is a very small country that has fully nationalized everything. There's no federal system at all. Brazil is a large federal democracy that has some institutions that are somewhat different. And the us America's federalism has been just a huge point of difference between. Between Hungary.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

The other giant difference is, as you know, Brazil was until quite recently ruled by a military junta and then before then ruled by some periods of democracy, some periods of quasi democracy since the 1930s, some periods under one dictator. So people who are over 35 years old didn't have to imagine what a dictator would look like or how a dictator would act. They didn't have the it can't happen here conversation because it had happened there. Same with, same with South Korea. They're full on dictatorships for many decades. So there it might have been people who were over 40. And then we get to Hungary and communism. But my point is, in the United States, it can happen here. And you know, it goes back to the famous tract and it's usually used as a cautionary tale, like, we think it can happen here, but the fact that it hasn't happened here does mean it can't. But it says something. It says something about maybe there is something within the resilience of the people or the institutions are just making the choice about what's the best for the functioning of the capitalists who run the country. However you want to see it, when there is a country where it has happened there so recently, it's easier, I think, to, if you have decent enough institutions to rally around this idea and act pretty decisively. And in the United States, though, it wasn't our. Our checkpoint wasn't the same checkpoint as it is in Brazil. It wasn't this Constitutional Court, but it was something like Mitch McConnell as an individual deciding whether to vote for Trump's second impeachment, which would have barred him from office. And I do think that he and therefore others in his coalition made the calculation, no will be fine. You know, maybe if they looked ahead, they would have made a different calculation because they live in a country where dictatorship is unknown to everyone who has ever lived. And I think that's a giant factor psychologically, but also structurally.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. This is why I like to emphasize that point about much of the south being authoritarian for a long period of time. Right. Because it's not that it can't happen here. It did happen here. It just happened here in a different version, subnational authoritarianism rather than national authoritarianism. And so there's nothing intrinsic to the American psyche, personality, political traditions that prevents us from having an authoritarian system. It's people fought against it. Honestly, in some ways this is a little revisionist, but I think it's mostly right. That's what the Civil War is about. And I say it's mostly right because Lincoln himself understood the south to be an extension and slavery to be a kind of neo aristocracy, an attempt, and the slaveholders themselves believe this too, an attempt to build a European style nobility system in the New World. And that slaveholding was, in effect, an authoritarian holdover, a kind of despotism, which makes a lot of sense when you think about what it means to be a slave and what a subject is. So I think authoritarianism has always been a political tradition in the U.S. we just don't talk about it in those terms. And that prevented us from having the same level of recognition of the threat that a country that lived over an overt and national form of authoritarianism like Brazil or South Korea did. And now I also do want to attenuate that because I went into Brazil thinking, oh, everyone's going to tell me that they remembered living under the dictatorship and that that played a really important role. And that was true for older Brazilians, but for younger Brazilians, it just was not the case that they were processing Bolsonaro through the lens of, well, we lived under a military dictatorship. We had one recently. It was really, we don't want to do it again, the effect of memory culture there. And this is also Because Brazil was very resistant to the kind of prosecution that you happen at other post dictatorial Latin American countries. Right. There was not any accountability for the

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

dictatorship or South Korea where they assassinated some or executed some. Yeah.

[Mike Pesca]

There was really a very weak memory culture in Brazil relative to other places. So it didn't promote the same as much authoritarian resilience as resilience.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

But the old remembered it and the younger more likely to be anti authoritarian and anti Bolsonaro. Naturally, if it worked the other way, that would be challenging the age thing.

[Mike Pesca]

It's complicated in Brazilian politics. Right. The key divisions I found were based on class and religiosity more than anything else. So evangelicals in Brazil were Bolsonaro's biggest supporters, as were people who were wealthier. Not necessarily the super rich, but people who are poor tended to vote for the Workers Party and the sort of new rich. The people who had gotten wealthy in Brazil in the past 10, 20 years of economic development tended to be big Bolsonaro supporters.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

So I just want to say, and I absolutely do take your point, and I know you've studied this and you've written the book the Reactionary Spirit about the reactionary spirit in America, and I'm glad you made that case. I do think that it's really quite different, taking into account everything you said to have live most voters. I think this is right. Most voters have lived under dictatorships in those countries versus the United States example, which is a few hundred years ago. This applies. Or if you really think about it, some of our states can plausibly be considered dictatorships. Those are two very different things, very different lived experience.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, I think that's true. And I really do think in the U.S. i mean, setting aside the question of memory culture in Brazil, in the U.S. the lack of an ability to conceive of there being democratic collapse at the national level had much the effect that you described. Right. I think McConnell example is a really good one. Right. That was a decisive moment. I really believe that. Right. It was a decisive moment for American democracy. And I think a lot of it was. He just thought that they could run the show.

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

Yeah. If you were hired by Trump to be an evil adviser and you had to do it, what advice would you give to him about how to become a dictator? But also, I guess, based on what you found to convince the people that you aren't becoming a dictator, I would abolish ice.

[Mike Pesca]

I'm only. I'm only sort of kidding. Right. Is like if you stopped the aggressive

[Guest Expert (likely Zach Beecham or a co-host)]

immigration enforcement man and we have more of Zach. I mean, there's so much dictatorship to study for our Peska plus subscribers. Additional Insights Would it be just the thing if the stuff behind the paywall is the stuff that saves our democracy? Don't you want to be in a position to do that for the very low, low price of 999amonth discount on the full year? Or listen to the show without advertisements? Go to subscribe.mike pesca.com to support the show in the best way and hear fully about this anti Dictatorship Initiative. Subscribe.mike pesca.com. And now the spiel President Trump told aides he is willing to end the US Military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Donald Trump is, in other words, eager to lose the war. What his 15 point plan said open the Strait of Hormuz. But according to that reporting in the Wall Street Journal, he is okay with it. Closed. So a worse, let's actually say much worse situation than before the war started. Maybe. Here's an idea. He could trade the Iranians back some dead ayatollahs for a reopening. Wait, that won't work. He would like to go back to the situation before the war, but he's okay with the situation now. Which is to emphasize clearly, a much worse situation than before things started. And if the report is accurate, the annoying thing, well, more than annoying, somewhat crippling to the finances of many Americans. But the annoying thing to those who monitored Donald Trump and one day hope for him ever to evolve in any way, is that none of this will register as a regret to him or a mistake. He doesn't make mistakes. He can't make mistakes. He crafts his own reality. There's just another good thing that happened that he thought would happen, even though he didn't think this would happen. So I've been quite hesitant to call the war a disaster. It was called that from the moment the first bomb dropped. Really, Bombs don't drop anymore when they're from the United States. They're guided. Precision guided. And by the way, as news reporting comes out today, it was a precision guided instrument that smashed into that girls school. It clearly was a mistake. Old maps still show the school to be part of a military installation. But if you haven't seen the still of the precision guidance ordinance about to strike the school, I would say maybe don't look at the still. It's pretty depressing. Depressing as an act of war, an act of planning, an act of American righteousness, really an act of anything other than photography. It's a good photograph. The same people who called the June bombings a failure, which they weren't, immediately jumped to calling this war a mistake. Now, I knew that Donald Trump usually doesn't make things better. And I knew that Donald Trump had, shall we say, poor follow through and little strategy. He has cunning, he has some instincts, but longer term thinking, no. But I was persuaded that the early decapitation successes could run down an already frazzled Iranian military, could run them down to the point of powerlessness. And maybe it would have if given the time, maybe it would have if the obvious Iranian tactic of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would have been priced in. Though I know Donald Trump isn't a tactical thinker, I thought for sure he would say, all right, we do this and oil prices are going to spike. And also that he would know that spiking oil prices was bad. He did put out a couple of truths saying, no, no, this is good for American oil companies, but, you know, to undertake a massive air war against Iran is to know that oil prices will spike. But apparently Donald Trump didn't know this. He honestly didn't know this. And he didn't anticipate that consumers wouldn't like rising oil prices. Maybe he thought he'd break the Iranian military easily, immediately. It would be maybe a two week blip and then the oil prices would come down. Now, a note on the Iranian military. They are actually extremely degraded. They are a shambles of their former self. They cannot really threaten the Israelis, can't really threaten the Americans, can't really threaten their rivals in the Gulf. The death count is not nothing. They have amassed a few dozen deaths, maybe 50 people in Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Two to three dozen Israelis, 13 US military members, though half dozen, were refueling, supporting the war, not because of anything the Iranians directly did. It doesn't matter. It still counts. It's still tragic. And also, the Iranians haven't amassed any terrorist attacks and you know they would if they could. They don't have the capacity to do so. They haven't avoided their own personnel being killed en masse. They haven't avoided the erasure of the upper echelon of their own military command. Important positions like head of the Navy, a bunch of different IRGC commanders, head of security, defense chief, all gone. And they couldn't stop it. But what they could do was pretty obviously fire not terribly sophisticated rockets on lumbering, nearly defenseless tankers that could put mines, dumb mines, in the water or on the sea floor. And they did and we didn't anticipate it. They could also fire on their neighboring Gulf states. Then they did and we stupid, some of us stupidly assumed that they wouldn't. But they're a cornered beast and don't let their lack of terrorism fool you. That is only because of, as I said, not desire but capacity. They can't get here to hurt us. It doesn't seem this is important to keep in mind when we think about why this entire undertaking was started in the first place or you know, supposedly or hopefully finished nuclear weapons. What a country that attacks third parties who has who have purposefully stayed neutral be trusted to not use nuclear weapons on the big Satan and the little Satan that they have been promising to destroy since their foundation as the raisin d' etre or really even the causes belli of their foundation Iran is these things are true. Greatly weakened but strong enough to survive. Donald Trump, commander in chief of the US Armed forces is unbelievably strong but weak enough to accept as a condition of cease fire a much more disfavorable state ex post as compared to ex ante. And he's weak enough to cover it all by thinking he's tough sounding when he says this to the New York Post quote well I think it the Gulf will automatically open but my attitude is I've obliterated the country. They have no strength left. And let the countries that are using the strait let them go and open it because I would imagine whoever controlling the oil will be happy to open the straight Donald Trump tough talking, dumb sounding, weak acting. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist, Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list, Jeff Craig produces How To Ben Astaire is our booking producer and Michelle Peska, CBSO of Peachfish Productions, Umpuru G Peru Duparu and thanks for listening.