As Brazil moves toward trying former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup against democracy, the United States grapples with constitutional challenges from the new administration as well. Are these two cases of democratic backsliding comparable? 

In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with José Maurício Domingues, Professor of Social and Political Science at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, about the resilience of democratic institutions, the role of the judiciary, and the evolving strategies of authoritarian leaders. Domingues unpacks the historical and institutional factors that shaped Bolsonaro’s failed power grab and contrasts them with Trump’s approach to executive power. What can these cases tell us about the future of democracy in both countries? Tune in for a deep dive into the politics of resistance, accountability, and the shifting nature of authoritarianism in the 21st century.

Below, a slightly edited version of the transcript.

Transcript

John Torpey 

The Brazilian government recently announced that it may seek to try its former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup against Brazilian democracy. The United States tried to impeach now President Donald Trump, not once, but twice for unconstitutional actions. Are there parallels between Brazil and the United States that it would be worth exploring? Welcome to International Horizons a podcast or the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and we’re fortunate to have with us today José Mauricio Domingues, I think I’m pronouncing that roughly correctly, who’s a Professor of Social and Political Science at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and recently received the Anneliese Maier Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and completed a multi year research stay at the Institute for Social Research in Hamburg, or Hamburg. His latest book is called Political Modernity and Social Theory. Thanks so much for being with us today, Mauricio Dominguez.

José Maurício Domingues 

Thank you, John, for the invitation.

John Torpey 

Thanks for coming on. So as you know, I wanted to invite you to be on this podcast after reading in the New York Times that the Brazilian government was reported to be on the brink of trying former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup against Brazilian democracy, which struck me as an impressive step for Brazil to take. Can you tell us where all that stands?

José Maurício Domingues 

Well, Brazil had a very deep political crisis. It started in 2013 with huge demonstrations, and then the impeachment or president, Dilma Rousseff, in the midst of a very complicated prosecution of several congressmen and and politicians in general, due to corruption, and that facilitated the rise of Jair Bolsonaro. Nobody really expected that, but he managed to break through as if he were an outsider, which was not really. He was, he had been a congressman for a long time, representing the military very often the low ranks of the military concerned with fending off the accusations of torture and misdemeanor during the dictatorship, and also tending for the corporatist interests. And suddenly he became president of an extremely ranked agenda. I think he moved very slowly. They wanted to consolidate power and then make change, but he had to deal with a very complicated pandemic, and he dealt it with the worst possible way. He imitated Donald Trump, was president of the US at the time, and massive fix up. That’s what I think led to his defeat against Lula, who was in jail and was freed by the Supreme Court, because he was seemingly the only one capable of defeating Bolsonaro, which he did. And then Bolsonaro tried to stage a coup in the most traditional way, taking power along with the military. Although he was not at the top ranks of the military, he probably wanted to install a sort of of political regime which would be similar to what you had had before in Latin America. What is your modern used to call bureaucratic authoritarianism, which held the army at its core, but he failed Brazil. I mean, Brazil is an extreme example of the oligarchic and in this case, also extremely patrimonialist regime, which is liberal democracy everywhere to some extent, I think liberal democracy a sort of mixed regime. It’s democratic because you have this polyarchic elements that Robert Dahl describes very aptly, with elections, free opinion, but you have the politics control by a small group of people, congressmen, presidents, governors and so on so forth. And in Brazil, this is extremely strong, so most of them at the core of the system, fought back against Bolsonaro, and so the most right wing people and extremely patrimonious people in Congress joined Bolsonaro, but they shift alliance,  allegiance very easily. So when Lula was elected, they sort of shifted, and the Supreme Court in particular in Brazil was already during Bolsonaro government in during the pandemic, a bulwark against his most extreme initiatives and his power grabbed attempts during the pandemic, they blocked him, and that when Bolsonaro lost election. It wasn’t entirely clear. It’s it was more or less clear that they had tried the mobilization of the supporters. They invaded Congress and the Supreme Court and mess everything up broke, uh, physically, objects, and… But it was not clear that a systematic coup was being attempted. It slowly became clear that everything had been very clearly articulated, consistently articulated. They wanted to kill Lula the president elect. They wanted to kill Alckmin the vice president elect. They wanted to kill some judge that the Supreme Court, especially Alexandre de Moraes, and now we have that they had been indicted by the State Attorney General, attorney at the federal level, and they’re going to stand trial. And I’m low likely, if you do bit contend in this regard, it’s very different from the US where, strangely enough, the Courts didn’t really go after Trump, which allowed him to be re elected. I think Bolsonaro won’t be able to run for the next elections, although they trying some sort of amnesty, I think you won’t be able to circumvent the Supreme Court. It’s going to be charted there, and it will be condemned there as well. So, but it doesn’t mean that the extreme right is not very strong.

John Torpey 

Let me, let me ask you something, which is, you know, well, Brazilian democracy is not very old, shall we say, it’s 50 years old, or something like that. Why was it, in your estimation that these various forces stood up against Bolsonaro and thisattempt to take over the government?

José Maurício Domingues 

I think there are probably two elements. The first is that we had a very bad and strong experience with extremely right, authoritarian, tactical governments, and that was relatively recent, and the generation who is in power in the Supreme Court and and many professional politicians, they fought against it. They rejected it. So they stuck to the perspective which developed during the 70s and the early 80s. Basically so, and they are part of the core of the political system. So they rejected that. On the other hand, I think Bolsonaro was very anachronic in his attempt to set up a more authoritarian government. He really tried a traditional coup instead of building a more isolated, something that was autocratic in but in a different way, more contemporary. He sort of lost in the past. He cherishes the military dictatorship. He’s very outspoken about that, and I think he wanted to start something very similar, disorganized administration, but wanted to be like the old generals. And that’s not really possible. Doesn’t make much sense in Brazil, and I think that’s very different from what Trump is trying to do in the US, which is a power grab, but that doesn’t look like a military dictatorship or bureaucratic authoritarianism. I think something new more akin to pushing than to the generals in Latin America, and that’s why maybe he’s more successful.

John Torpey 

Yes, I’ve been trying to think of a term for this, and haven’t really come up with anything, but I think, as you say, there’s it’s not obvious, in a certain sense, what’s going on. They’re breaking the law or at least abrogating norms that it was taken for granted American presidents would respect, perhaps with the exception of Richard Nixon. But you know, he basically seems to go over, go overboard, and let people take him to court. And then maybe the you know, the judges will say, well, some of it’s okay, or I can only make this, you know, stop temporarily, or whatever, and so it doesn’t appear exactly like what it, in fact, is. So to talk a little bit more about how you see that difference between, you know, what’s going on here in the United States and what you’ve experienced in Brazil.

José Maurício Domingues 

Well. So as I said, Guillermo O’Donnell developed, I think, which is the best interpretation of sort of political regime we had all over Latin America during the 1960s, 1970s and sometimes even the 1980s which is bureaucratic authoritarianism in which the Army as a bureaucratic body was in control of politics. In Brazil, they didn’t close Congress. You had elections, very limited controls, but at the core of the system, you had the army. Basically, Bolsonaro thinks of that. He dreamed of that being some of these old generals who would be in power and vertically control society with the help of the army and a lot of repression and with the necessary torture, and I think he really had managed to take power with a putsch that would be dramatic, because you’d have to use a lot of repression, kill people, because he hadn’t, he didn’t really have a large social basis. The businessman, part of them was supporting him. The press was not supporting him. So it should be a very unstable situation, which would require a lot of violence to stabilize. I think in the US, you have a sort of different development. I wrote a number of things, and in this last book you mentioned, I developed the idea that political regimes today not all over the place, because China is different or Vietnamese different, but you have this two source of development, what I’ve been calling advanced oligarchy, which is the consolidation of the oligarchy core of liberal democracy against its democratic elements. But also, I think what we have been seeing special with Trump is the development of some sort of advanced autocracy, which preserves the trappings of liberal democracy, but in the end, may be very different. This has a lot of to do with the increased power of the executive. I think this is a rather a relatively old trend in US liberal democracy. I’ve been reading Bruce Ackerman, for instance, for the people, who stress that the executive in the US has become more powerful in the last 30 years, and I think Trump is going to radicalize that, and there are some interpretations of the Constitution that would allow him to do. I was reading something the New York Times, I think yesterday, actually. And there was someone speaking about this, how he might use this sort of interpretation of the Constitution, that the courts might go along with that so…

John Torpey 

Well, it had to be, it has to be remembered that John Roberts, as a young lawyer working in the Reagan Administration, was involved in advancing this doctrine that I think you’re talking about, which is known as the unitary executive theory, and it, you know, concentrates power even more than has been the case under the so called imperial presidency in the post World War Two period, it concentrates it even more in the hands of the President. I mean, the President is seen in these in these terms, is kind of beyond, beyond constraint.

José Maurício Domingues 

Yes, I think that’s the difference, because Bolsonaro didn’t really try that. He tried to consolidate his power in a very mild way, to some extent, more organizing the administration, but not really concentrating power. And there was a lot of resistance, especially from the Supreme Court, during the pandemic. And he really messed up with the pandemic. In the US, Trump was against vaccination. He spoke a lot of stupid things, but he backed on the vaccine. Bolsonaro didn’t want to have any vaccination in Brazil. It was crazy. I think his basis on the popular classes, and especially the middle classes or eroded by that. That’s why he lost election. Without the pandemic, he would have won the election, and would be we elected very, very easily, and he lost one two days more in the run up to the election, and Lula would have lost. So it was a very complicated situation. But Bolsonaro doesn’t really have a project to change Brazil in a, in the modernized direction. He’s an achronic person. I think Trump this time is different. I’m not sure that his stuff was going to work with tariffs, and this crazy thing with Elon Musk, this attempt of dismantling the administration and outsourcing, outsourcing everything to big tech. That’s very likely to fail, and this crazy international approach, destroying everything that has been the main thing of US power. What he’s trying to compute issomething different, I think, which has to do with this unitary doctrine of of presidential power. And, but I don’t know if he’s going to try to go further than that, because with the press, he’s having a very complicated relationship, right? And, but what the press in the US is a very, very, very oligopolized  system already, except for the social networks that offer some sort of different channels for people to speak out. But it’s largely controlled by the extreme right and but the traditional press is very much oligopolized and part of it is already aligned with him. Jeff Bezos, with the Washington Post, this sort of thing. So and who’s not aligned with him, he’s going after these people the New York Times. There will be a lot of conflict in the US. How this is going to resolve, I have no idea. But I think it’s trying to extend executive power. Is going to try to undermine the independent states power, the governors, any sort of thing is already going to do that against California regarding electric cars, any sort of green transition. So it’s a different thing from what Bolsonaro wanted to do, and therefore it’s more likely to be successful in political terms, whether economically, in terms of inflation, this other sort of issue, it’s going to succeed. It’s a different issue. But politically I think, has a very clear strategy, which is, I don’t know if it’s likely to work, but it’s more likely to work than what Bolsonaro tried here, although, if he had been reelected, I don’t know how we would be now.

John Torpey 

Right. So I guess one question, you know, you mentioned, before we started recording, that you had been in your youth, a, you know, a student activist against the military dictatorship. And I wonder whether you have any thoughts about what we may have done wrong so far in trying to forestall the developments that you’ve just described. I mean, what should we have done that we didn’t do or what could we still do that we haven’t done yet?

José Maurício Domingues 

Well, I think there is a problem in terms of what liberalism is in the world today. And I think Biden had understood that. He understood that at some point liberalism had become progressive in terms of social rights and cooperation of minorities of women and intervention of the state in the economy. I think Biden tried to be a reconstructive President. He was successful to some extent, economically, but socially he was blocked in Congress. All the social agenda he had was blocked by Republicans. They played this game. They’re doing the same thing with Lula. They don’t allow him to govern properly, so then he’s to blame for the short comes of his government, but that’s Congress that blocked him. So it’s a very complicated thing. I think Kamala Harris didn’t understand that, she made a campaign of her smile, very nice, but she didn’t have any proposal to tackle the social question. I don’t know if she would have been successful had she done that, because the situation with inflation was very bad. And there is a rejection, I think, by large swaths of the population of the traditional liberal political system, they don’t like politicians. And Trump seems to be a disruptive figure in this regard. Actually, he is a disruptive figure in this regard. So no way people want the Democrats to look like the same sort of people who are there, 90 years old, lots of money, no social policies, some sort of very mild redistribution to the very poor, along with Wall Street and neoliberalism and the financial system. If this is not changing, I think it’s very difficult to defeat Trump. Of course, we need a Democratic Front, as we did in Brazil. That’s what really defeated the military dictatorship. But then the social question was at the core of the political agenda in Brazil, and I think if that’s not the case again in the US. If people are not able to mobilize the population on all the problems they really have in daily life, things are not going to work. I read a ridiculous interview by Steven Levitsky saying that people vote for different reasons because mainly basically about material issues, and the elites are the ones who have to defend democracy. I never heard anything so, so bizarre, because the elites are never really concerned with democracy. They’re concerned with their own power, and that’s what people see in them. That’s what happened to the Democrats. So either you change this sort of out and you’re able to address the real grievance of people, of the citizenship, or it’s very difficult to change things and be wise. And even if Trump fails, it will be very difficult to avoid that, because remains in power with with one more term, which I think you try to do, or Vance, or some other extreme right guy being elected. Because what are the Democrats nowadays? So you look at them, they don’t seem really engaged in change things. Sanders was not capable or winning the nomination. Now this with Kamala Harris, that was not even an issue. And I personally think it’s a sort of wild guess. One of the reasons they kicked Biden off the race was, of course, because he was very old, but because he had an agenda, which is not the agenda of the dominance elements in the Democratic Party and Wall Street, Kamala Harris campaign with the Wall Street guys just behind her. That’s, I mean, how you sell that to the American people? That’s the roots of the of the programs.

John Torpey 

Indeed. I mean, you know, the the one question right now is whether the Democrats can figure out who ought to be kind of leading the charge. And then the other issue for the Democrats has been, you know, this kind of reckoning with what happened, with why did they lose, and what were the causes of that? And you’ve spoken to some of that, but it’s not clear, you know, that that’s done, been done successfully by any means yet. And it’s also very unclear, you know, who’s sort of the leader of the party and who’s going to sort of take control. And I think people are looking for that. People are looking for somebody who’s, you know, going to, as you say, sort of articulate their concerns and interests and grievances. And right now it seems, as I guess I said earlier, kind of disorganized, and there’s a bit of shock, shock and awe and inability to respond to what’s happening. So you don’t seem very optimistic about sorting that problem out.

José Maurício Domingues 

Well, it was a big defeat wasn’t that, because having Trump backing in power is something or something almost unimaginable. The guy would be should be in jail, so it’s uh in command. It’s a comeback and but I’m not optimistic about the US. I’m not optimistic about Brazil ei, because the rule of government is really not working. So the situation here, over here is not very nice as well. The extreme right is still very strong. They don’t have a good candidate for the next election. The Democratic force will have rule again. But the situation is very complicated here. So because Congress is very conservative, the Workers Party, at least large parts, of the Workers Party think that Lula is doing a Conservative government, which is true to some extent, but he doesn’t control the budgets. He can’t spend money. They always speak about the debts and this sort of thing, and so he’s really boxed in a proposition which doesn’t allow him to govern properly and respond to the demands of the population. On the other hand, the Workers Party doesn’t understand that Lula was elected not to do a left wing government. He was just a bull like against extremely right in a Democratic Front. And the Workers Party doesn’t like that. They like to govern by themselves and buy people off with… Well, they did that a lot, with money. Now it’s more complicated. And I think, anyway, people don’t like politicians today. I think it’s a global phenomenon. There is a rejection of the political establishment everywhere in the world, and but on the other hand, in Brazil, these things have not really changed. You had all these demonstrations, the Lava Jato operation against corruption. In the end, the guys were a bit crazy, but the political system mainly, I think, reacted and destroyed all possibilities of prosecuting them. In the US, it is a new experience. Trump was elected with this sort of platform against politicians, and now the same thing,. But I’m not sure he’s, he’ll be able to stand up to that, because this, this alliance with big tech, shows a different face from the traditional political establishment. On the other hand, it’s too clear that he’s very much concerned with power. And if the problems that ordinary people have are not really addressed, and I don’t think they’re going to be addressed, he’ll form the same trap that’s all the people fail. The problem is you had a different solution for that, becoming more authoritarian, that did Bolsonaro, so it’s… We have to not wait and see. You have to do something! Not in the short run, but in the middle run. But then the youth over there have to figure out how to respond to that, which is, if I think it right, it’s still shocking. And it will take a while to overcome that.

John Torpey 

Right. So I want to get back to something you just said, which has to do with the point that this antipathy towards political elites is a global phenomenon. I mean, I don’t know global you may have a better take on that than I do, but certainly in the kind of advanced world, or developed world, the rich world, the United States, Europe. You know, everybody has pointed to the fact that the Democrats lost, you know, at a time when all incumbent parties were losing. And you know, it seems to have revolved around inflation and immigration. And you know, those issues may be issues really on people’s minds, but it seems to be part of a broader kind of, if I can use the word epochal change, E-P-O-C-H-A-L, as if we’re going through, you know, a global transformation in, you know, the kind of historical terms that sociologists sometimes talk about, you know, the Industrial Revolution, the shift to a post industrial society, those kinds of things. Do you have a kind of analysis that runs along those lines?

José Maurício Domingues 

I think why we could address that with the idea that liberalism was not Democrat. These are different lines of developments, democracy on the one hand, and liberalism on the other. Liberalism was extremely oligarchic when it appeared originally, and due to social developments, political mobilization. Liberalism became less oligarchic, or better said, it’s added to the liberal republican system, which was very, really active, very strong democratic elements that had to do with participation, and organized participation above all. And this was combined with an application of the agenda towards incorporation of people through participation as such, but also through an agenda of rights. And I think at some point in the sevens, these two elements of what I call the expensive moment of liberalism were paralyzed and actually rolled back because democracy became less important. What was blocked by this oligarch elements of liberal democracy as a mixed regime and political parts became less responsible, absolutely not responsive to the demands of the population. On the other hand, the political participation of most of the citizenry, which was organized through large political machines, political mass parties, unions and this sort of thing once it’s organized, due to changes in the configuration of the economy, this sort of, or the social characteristics of different countries. And so you had since the 97th and 98 you have a different moment. It’s a sort of retraction of liberalism towards a less participatory and a less agenda, rights agenda concerned liberalism. So you have this sort of blockage of the political system and basically a deep disregard for the demands of the population, both in democratic terms and in terms of the social agenda. Is it possible that liberalism resume these expensive moments, which basically was active from the late 19th century up to the 1970s. I doubt that. Because first, political elites are not interested, that they haven’t been interested, that I think Biden were one of the few who understood that. And on the other hand, political participation is more complicated now because this, mass parties, unions, large associations have disappeared or are very much weakened since the 1990s and direct participation in the political system by individuals is very ineffective, especially if the media’s control, if the leadership of political parties are not interested in what people are concerned with, you have the sort of I usually speak of a crocodile mouth. So the political system goes in one direction and the population in another one. The mouth opens up, and it’s very difficult to close this gap. There is no element of mediation between these two universes. You had this discussion about political systems in the 1970s, political sociology, both Marxist and liberal, which were very attentive to that. And this Canadian guy whose name I can never remember, who was president of the American Political Science Association…

John Torpey 

Seymour Martin Lipset.

José Maurício Domingues 

No, no, it’s another one Lipset as well. But there was a Canadian guy who was who I find always very interesting, but I can’t remember his name, I don’t know why. But then this, I had these discussions about politics and how things were organized, especially the idea of mediation between the political system, and what this guy used to call parapolitical system in society, this is gone. There is nothing like that. Social movements are very disorganized, very often they are fleeting. People get to the streets, but nothing remains of that. In the end, and the parties are not interested in opening up to the participation of the population. You have no instruments to doing that. Even if you look at Chile, who had this big crisis between 2019 in 2022 huge numbers of young people on the streets. That new president, very young guy connected to social movements elected, which new institutions did they create for participation, known nothing at all. So it’s very difficult to recreate something also the population as such, is not organized. It’s and the liberal democracy has this oligarchic core, which is not a problem of the desire of politicians, of course. To get there and to stay there, you have really to be power hungry, because otherwise you die in the middle of the process. Politics are very tough venture, you don’t survive if you’re not really tough and intent of having power and but that’s not a matter of what the psychology of politicians. It’s how institutionally liberal democracy is organized. How to change that? Well, I have no idea, but that’s, I think, the problem we face now with democracy across the world.

John Torpey 

I guess that’s going to be the subject of your next book.

José Maurício Domingues 

Well, I think this last book, I wrote a lot about this too, but I have no answer, of course.

John Torpey 

Okay, okay, well, we’ll have to talk about that book some other time, because we’re sort of out of time now. But I really want to thank Mauricio Domingueq of the University of Rio de Janeiro for sharing his insights about the parallels between Brazil and the United States in this difficult time. Look for International Horizons on the New Books Network, and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple Podcast. I want to thank Claire Centofanti for her technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan McKay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.