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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

There's a possibility a free officers' movement would be good for the US, but I'm not banking on it.

The Carnation Revolution in Portugal overthrew the fascist government there and ushered in an improved though not perfect political system.

https://portuguesemuseum.org/?page_id=1808&exhibit=31&event=...

https://jacobin.com/2019/04/portugal-carnation-revolution-na...

I don't really have great faith that there is a set of left leaning military officers in the U.S. though.

Anyway, interesting article. It always striking to me just how significant the military is in formulating policy. There is a strong tension there that is often not acknowledged. Good to see people wrestling with it.

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They don’t need to be left leaning.

Are you sure about that?

You can never be sure, but I don’t think support for Trump’s regime is a left/right issue.

Why?

I didn’t say it was balanced. But look at what happened at SDNY last week. Several conservative prosecutors went against the DOJ.

It shouldn't be, but unfortunately it is, with only a few exceptions.

If you read up-page in some of the other threads you'll find some right/libetarian people who are also against Trump because of how he's pushing us into authoritarianism.

Yes, right libertarians often oppose right authoritarianism, but that doesn't transform support or opposition to right authoritarianism to something that has no left/right valence.

Well yeah, in a consensus-based process you have to accept that not everyone is going to agree with you all the time. But you do have to try to push forward on things where there is consensus. There was a county committee that had a libertarian on it who would often advocate from a libertarian standpoint, whereas the people the committee affected were often more left/collectivist. However, he found himself briefly aligned with the rest of the group when a county official tried to do something that was against the law.

Dude, what is your point? We're pointing out a trend and you keep trying to counter by pointing out exceptions. It's the nature of real-life trends to have exceptions, so their existence doesn't even come close to invalidating the model.

Good for them on actually paying attention to their principles. The overall alignment is still quite clear, though.

"Left/right" is always at best an approximation, because the space of political ideology is multidimensional, and because differences in praxis (how to achieve the goals set by ideology) will often be as signficant in people's support for or opposition to concrete regimes as differences in ideology, but the Trump regime definitely is suppported much more on the right and opposed much more on the left.

fwiw my comment was not solely about trump, the parties are both undemocratic and do not serve the people

We've had 2 military coups in Brazil that immediately implemented a constitutional government and called elections. (One was against an autocratic constitutional monarchy... go figure... but it was on the direction of more democracy so it counts.)

In a total of 5 military coups if I'm not forgetting any...

I have a theory, that the military are only interested enough on democracy after they come back from fighting against some dictatorship. Otherwise they are bad news.

What you say makes a lot of sense. The carnation revolution happened when officers in portugal had been to the colonies and started learning from the people they were colonizing.

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