On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump, instigated by his false claims of election fraud, stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Trump had lost to Joe Biden. The rioters broke into the building and interrupted Congress, which was in the process of certifying the electoral college vote.

On Jan. 8, 2023, a mob of supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro, instigated by his false claims of election fraud, stormed the Brazilian parliament, presidential palace and Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn the 2022 presidential election that had been won by Luiz Inázio Lula da Silva. The rioters broke into buildings and vandalized them.

In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines a French 20th-century author writing his own version of the 17th-century masterpiece by Miguel de Cervantes. Both texts are word-for-word identical, yet, as Borges points out, are at the same time completely different. Cervantes, in creating his Quixote, merely combines language and viewpoints commonplace in 17th-century Spain. Menard, on the other hand, offers in his rendering a sophisticated, anachronistic narration to convey what are very provocative ideas in 20th-century France. As a result, even if it reads exactly the same as Cervantes’s original, Menard’s version is “almost infinitely richer,” says Borges.

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The conventional wisdom among pundits has been that...

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