Psyche: How to interpret historical analogies

Historical analogies can also be invaluable and enlightening, as long as we remain wary of those using them, and of their reasons. If we are conscientious about the past, we want to learn from it, pay respect to our predecessors, and derive proper lessons from how they might have dealt with their own challenges and hard times. One of the intuitive ways we react to a confusing, frightening present is to reach back into the history we know to find ways to render the current moment legible. All this is normal and natural. [...]

Historical analogies are not the same as historical comparisons. A comparison might be more direct or straightforward, between two events that are inherently similar. Natural disasters such as earthquakes can happen at varying moments in history and aren’t necessarily dependent on human activity. But they will interact differently with society given changing social circumstances, political leadership and economic development. In that sense, a hurricane ravaging a medieval landscape will be different from the exact same-sized and same-speed hurricane hitting a modern city. We will be comparing between the effects of, and response to, an otherwise similar pair of events. (Of course, we can also compare between the frequency and strength of hurricanes today and those of hurricanes in the past, establishing a link between natural disasters and anthropogenic global warming.) Likewise, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, the influenza pandemic of 1918 emerged as a tool to help us think through the challenge. The diseases are different, but the human body is pretty much the same, and pandemics, by their nature, have repetitive features. A comparison between the two health crises will focus on the changes in the world – and perhaps specifically in public health policy – that have taken place over the past century. [....]

So historical analogies, done in good faith, can make crucial points about the present and help to clarify where we stand on moral and political issues. The problem begins when we begin to substitute historical analogies for historical analysis – or, even more problematically, when we come to believe that history ‘repeats itself’. This sort of cliché has become a bane of our public discourse, especially regarding the sorry state of the US. [...]

We need to recognise the limitation of all analogising from the past. History does not repeat itself; and this means that everything that happens is new in some fundamental way. Analogies are good in so far as they are useful in helping us begin to think historically, rather than trying to formally define whether, for instance, Trump, or Bolsonaro, or Modi, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, are fascists. If we came to the conclusion that these current-day wannabe autocrats are not fascists, would that mean that the imperative to seek out better leadership would become less urgent? If we conclude that they are fascists, would that make a real difference in terms of how people experience this era or what we can do? In all likelihood, the necessary political action remains the same, either way. Thinking historically is not about finding discrete past events that might resemble things happening today, but rather trying to understand how the world came to be what it is – and how it could be different.

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UnHerd: The obscure mysticism of Steve Bannon

War For Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (published on 21 April) reads a bit like Dan Brown’s pol sci doctoral thesis — standby flights to Washington, 3am Skype calls with Kremlin advisors, mittel European intrigue in Budapest, racists in ashrams, a Black Hand of high-end political operators, all united by their faith in a shadowy paleo-religion.[...]

The simplest way into Traditionalism is to think of it as the fourth quadrant on a political compass where the other three are fascism, liberalism and communism. Traditionalism rejects all three rivals on the same grounds — that they are modernist, they’re competing for the chance to modernise the world; and they’re materialist: communism and liberalism are both obsessed with money, fascism with bodies. [...]

Most influential of all is Aleksandr Dugin, a long-time foreign policy adviser to Vladimir Putin. Though his relationship to the Kremlin has often been informal, it was Dugin’s ‘tanks to Tblisi’ sloganeering that persuaded Putin to seize South Ossetia in 2008, and his dreams of a greater Russia that undergirded both the taking of Crimea in 2014 and the continuing attempts to hack bits off eastern Ukraine. Dugin even wrote a book on Traditionalism: The Fourth Political Theory. [...]

The question of whether Traditionalism is a religious ideal with political dimensions or a political one with religious ones is never quite resolved. At its heart, it takes a sort of gnostic, Unitarian ideal of faith. It hardly matters which faith — but older, more ancestral creeds are prefered, which is why so many Scandinavian neo-Nazis embrace Wodin and Thor, and why Hinduism is considered an acceptable choice for the modish skinhead intellectual. It’s ancient, it’s pantheistic, it’s bafflingly non-linear. Which is why in 2009, two of America’s alt right founding fathers, John B Morgan and Daniel Friberg, ended up living at a Hare Krishna temple near Chennai. [...]

But Bannon is also far more pragmatic than either Dugin or de Carvalho. He seems to draw upon his intellectual tools like a bag of golfing irons. He tells Teitelbaum that “Traditionalism is a total rejection of racism in that it is a brotherhood of the spirit”. What he seems to be, at base, is anti-liberal. Be it in trade, migration, or even education.

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The Outline: Are we all members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement?

Knight also appears to be willing to claim as allies people who remain voluntarily childless as a result of concerns over climate change — although not wanting to have kids because you're worried about your kids’ carbon footprint, or the quality of life they might very well be denied in a rapidly warming world, is not the same as thinking it might be better if the whole human race went extinct. More plausibly, it seems motivated by a concern that the planet should be as liveable as possible for those who do happen to be born. [...]

And into this category of by-fruits-knowners would fall rather a lot of people, especially those people currently in power. Take the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison. Morrison might not explicitly want his country to be reduced to a permanently blazing apocalyptic hell, he might not make speeches openly in favor of bringing death and punishment to Australia. But his actions, and those of his government, are in fact working to make Australia’s complete devastation by climate change a lot more likely. It is a similar situation with Brazil President Jair Bolsanaro, and his enthusiasm for burning down his country’s rainforests. [...]

And perhaps non-existence, in all its finality, has a certain sort of libidinal appeal. Freud, for instance, identified the “death drive” (or “death instincts”) as being one of the fundamental forces shaping our psychic lives — aside from the life instincts (towards survival, sexual pleasure, and so forth), we all share the “urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, i.e. non-existence. In a sense, then, “the aim of all life is death.” Which can be fine, since any living species eventually has older generations die off — but only if the death instincts are properly balanced with their opposites. If the death instincts ever won out completely, there would be no more life left to speak of (interestingly, Freud speaks of the death drive as a fundamentally “conservative” drive, which seems about right). Knight's own essay speaks of his desire for a less cluttered world, where everything beautiful beyond human life could finally thrive — his own life-instincts seem to have been projected onto the non-human.

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The Guardian: 'A bad trip': Jair Bolsonaro's first six months leave even the right dismayed

Opinion polls show Bolsonaro’s approval ratings have plunged since his 1 January inauguration with 32% of Brazilians now considering his government bad or awful compared with 11% when he took power. [...]

“It is the worst start to a presidency since the return of democracy [in 1990],” said Mauro Paulino, the director of Datafolha, one of Brazil’s top pollsters. “A lot would depend on the opponent … but if there was another election today, I don’t think he would be re-elected.” [...]

Bolsonaro still enjoys considerable support, as demonstrated by two recent pro-government rallies. According to polls, 32% of Brazilians believe their leader is on the right track, with supporters crediting Bolsonaro for a fall in the number of homicides and a recently struck trade deal between the EU and the South American trade bloc to which Brazil belongs.[...]

Edson Salomão, a founder of the Direita São Paulo (Rightwing São Paulo) group, gave Bolsonaro an even sunnier report card, though he struggled, when asked, to list the main achievements of his first six months in office.

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openDemocracy: Buffoons are taking over the court: the danger of modern politics as spectacle

Now, it is important to acknowledge that politics and the exercise of political power have always had a theatrical dimension: rites and ceremonials in earlier societies, parades, commemorations, election campaigns and debates or meetings of leaders at international summits in modern times, have all involved elements of a theatrical performance. But these elements (just as was the case with court jesters) played an auxiliary – albeit important – role which consisted in providing the existing order with solemnity and gravity, and, ultimately, with additional legitimacy.

Today, by contrast, these elements are becoming more and more central to the political: it is now all about the image of leaders, their communication skills, the way they dress, speak or shake each other’s hands, they way they manage their Twitter and Instagram accounts. In a way, similar to Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, politics increasingly immerses itself in everyday life and thereby, necessarily, increasingly desacralizes itself. [...]

It is a symptom of a profound social malaise, greatly intensified in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and, in particular, the way it was dealt with: taxpayers first paid for the rescue of those who caused it, and then suffered austerity measures that were presented to them as the only option by those in power and which aggravated the problems of millions of households

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Jacobin Magazine: From the Union Hall to the Church

There’s some truth to this hypothesis, but it underestimates Bolsonaro’s large number of votes from women (41 percent of valid votes), black and mixed race people (41 percent of total votes) and low-income groups concentrated in families that receive between two and five minimum wages (61 percent). In addition, this hypothesis tends to downplay the importance of the support Bolsonaro received from non-denominational evangelical churches (59 percent of the total votes, against only 26 percent of the votes for Haddad, according to Datafolha), without which, according to most political analysts, he would probably have lost the second round to the Workers’ Party candidate.[...]

The political scientist André Singer and sociologist Gustavo Venturi convincingly argue that low-income support for the ultra-right candidate stemmed from his emphasis on public safety –– a real concern in a country that sees constant street crime and over sixty thousand murders a year. [...]

Lulismo was defined by the way it aimed to stabilize social conflict in Brazil. Between 2003 and 2013 it forged two different forms of consensus. First, a form of passive consensus among the subaltern classes who were attracted to the PT’s distributivist public policies, such as the Bolsa Família program and the policy of valorization of the minimum wage. Second, the PT constructed an active consensus among the leaders of the main social movements in the country. Despite the neoliberal macroeconomic policy advocated and sustained by the PT governments, the conjunction of these two forms of consent was able to guarantee the strengthening of certain policies compatible with the project of building a wage society in Brazil. Of course, the limits of Lulismo were revealed when the international economic crisis put an end to the commodity super-cycle that had benefited the Brazilian economy during the PT governments. [...]

The popularity of certain policies, such as Bolsa Família or university racial quotas, strengthened a backlash from those precarious workers who, living in the informal sector or receiving low wages, did not directly benefit. In the eyes of many of these workers, the public policies of the PT era have done nothing more than stimulate laziness and political clientelism, transforming citizens into parasites and objects of electoral exploitation by corrupt politicians. The Brazilian far-right managed to instrumentalize this feeling through the rhetoric of “meritocracy,” appealing to popular resentment against the PT as the crisis deepened and decimated jobs. [...]

Surprisingly, the neo-Pentecostal evangelical movement was the one that benefited the most in organizational terms from the Lulista hegemony. According to data from the 2010 census, its growth went from 15.4 percent in 2000, to 22.2 percent in 2010 (see table below). This is different from what happened in the 1970s, when the flourishing of religiosity in grassroots communities occurred pari-passu with the strengthening of union power. Now a rather different theology is taking root in the sphere of low-income groups: the neo-Pentecostal theology of prosperity — a variant of US televangelism in which achieving grace correlates to the satisfaction of individual desires for protection and material prosperity.

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Haaretz: If Re-elected, Netanyahu's First Order of Business Will Be an Obscenity Against Democracy

The most common complaint about the past 100 days is that this campaign was devoid of substance and content. It occupied itself with the trivial and the sensational, along with displaying an addiction to mudslinging, cheap gimmicks and trashy video clips. We didn’t get to see party leaders sitting opposite one another and talking about their platforms, detailing their worldviews, presenting plans and serious content, confronting the issues.

That’s not only the fault of the politicians and certainly not of all of them. Part of the responsibility lies with the media, which was swept up in an ugly wave of false news and spins at the expense of the “issues.” [...]

But his path won’t be an easy one. Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu, has declared that he won’t support retroactive legislation. He would prefer to have Netanyahu continue in the role of defendant. Kahalon already committed to opposing the proposal. Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked will decide when the time comes. Not even all of Likud’s members will vote in favor: Gilad Erdan said he would vote against such a bill; maybe Yuli Edelstein and Avi Dichter will, too. Here and there, a few islands of sanity remain.[...]

Only Netanyahu, whose status in the global arena is extraordinary, is capable of enlisting the heads of the great powers and “third-party countries” to help him in his election campaign. So it was with U.S. President Donald Trump and the Golan, and so it was with Netanyahu’s trip Thursday to Russia to meet President Vladimir Putin, who instructed his army in Syria to assist in the “intelligence and operational” effort that led to the return of the remains.

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Jacobin Magazine: Fascisms Old and New

The new right is nationalist, racist, and xenophobic. In most Western European countries, at least those where the radical right is in power or has grown significantly stronger, it adopts a democratic and republican rhetoric. It has changed its language, its ideology, and its style. [...]

On the one hand, the new far right is no longer fascist; on the other hand, we cannot define it without comparing it with fascism. The new right is a hybrid thing that might return to fascism, or it could turn into a new form of conservative, authoritarian, populist democracy. The concept of post-fascism tries to capture this.[...]

The National Front is no longer a movement of nostalgic harbingers of French Algeria; it now depicts itself as a defender of French national identity threatened by globalization, mass immigration, and Islamic fundamentalism. This neocolonial posture can include republican and “progressive” habits: on the one hand, they wish to preserve the Christian roots of France and Europe against the Islamic “invasion”; on the other, they pretend to defend human rights (sometimes even of women and gays) against Islamic obscurantism. [...]

For instance, the radical form of neoliberalism endorsed by Bolsonaro is unknown in Europe, where post-fascism is fueled by anger and discontent with the neoliberal policies of the EU. From this point of view, it seems to me that a fundamental premise for the rise of post-fascism lies in the lack of a left-wing alternative to neoliberalism. [...]

As many observers pointed out, Trump exhibits typical fascist features: authoritarian and charismatic leadership, hatred of democracy, contempt for law, exhibitions of force, scorn for human rights, open racism, misogyny, homophobia. But there is no fascist movement behind him. He was elected as the candidate of the Republican Party, which is a pillar of the American political establishment. This paradoxical situation cannot become permanent without putting into question the democratic framework of the United States.

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The Guardian: ‘We the people’: the battle to define populism

But as breathless op-eds and thinktank reports about the populist menace keep piling up, they have provoked a sceptical backlash from critics who wonder aloud if populism even exists. It is now relatively common to encounter the idea that, just as there were no real witches in Salem, there are no real populists in politics – just people, attitudes and movements that the political centre misunderstands and fears, and wants you, reader, to fear too, although without the burden of having to explain exactly why. Populism, in this framing, is a bogeyman: a nonentity invoked for the purpose of stirring up fear. This argument has even made its way to the centrist mainstream. “Let’s do away with the word ‘populist,’” wrote the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in July. “It’s become sloppy to the point of meaninglessness, an overused epithet for multiple manifestations of political anger. Worse, it’s freighted with contempt, applied to all voters who have decided that mainstream political parties have done nothing for their static incomes or disappearing jobs or sense of national decline these past two decades.” [...]

It may be telling that very little of the public discussion of the alleged populist threat to democracy has been devoted to the workings of democracy itself. Perhaps we assume, without much thought, that democracy is such a self-explanatory idea that we already know all there is to know about the subject. Or perhaps we have come to regard democracy in its existing western form – basically liberal democracy – as the only possible endpoint for the evolution of politics. Populism, though it comes in many forms, always reminds us that nothing could be further from the truth. [...]

A populist movement, then, is one that consistently promises to channel the unified will of the people, and by doing so undercut the self-serving schemes of the elite establishment. As the National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen put it in 2007: “I will give voice to the people. Because in democracy only the people can be right, and none can be right against them.” (Note how, in this formulation, there is no disagreement among “the people”.) Or, in the more recent words of Donald Trump, speaking at his inauguration: “We are transferring power from Washington DC and giving it back to you, the people … The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.” (Note how members of “the establishment” are implicitly excluded from “the citizens”.) [...]

In this view, any existing socio-political order (or “hegemony” in Mouffe and Laclau’s preferred formation, borrowed from the Italian Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci) is subject to challenge. Every status quo – however sturdy – is only temporary, and can always be challenged by a movement that seeks to replace it with something new. Political change, in other words, is the result of demands against the existing order, which must be fused together in a movement to change it – a movement that may look a lot like populism. [...]

No one who studies populism seriously – and not even the most opportunistic participants in the cottage industry of anti-populist alarmism – denies that populist movements can raise valid critiques of the status quo, and of the very real anti-democratic power of elites. Many take a viewpoint similar to that of the Mexican political theorist Benjamin Arditi, who described populism as a drunken guest at democracy’s dinner party, one who disrespects the rules of sociability and, along the way, brings up the failure and hypocrisies that everyone else in the room has agreed to ignore. In Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Mudde and his frequent co-author, the Chilean political scientist Cristóbal Kaltwasser, describe contemporary populism as an “illiberal democratic response to an undemocratic liberalism” – one that “asks the right questions but provides the wrong answers”.

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Al Jazeera: Spain's far-right hates not only immigrants, but also women

The party's nationwide goal is to transform Spain's current system of devolved regional power into a single government and parliament for all of Spain. Their slogans, similar to those of other right-wing populist parties across the West, are "España primero" and "Los españoles primero", that is, "Spain first", "Spaniards first". Steve Bannon has obviously endorsed them.[...]

Like the Northern League in Italy, the National Rally in France and the Alternative for Germany, Vox also wants to shut down mosques, erect walls and deport immigrants. While the party's political and economic proposals are similar to those of other extreme parties throughout Europe, they include another alarming feature: hate for gender equality movements.

Vox, like Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro, denounces "gender ideology" as a threat to heteronormative, Christian, and white family values. According to the party programme, men and woman are already equal and so there is no need for specials laws against domestic violence to protect women's rights. Measures to fight gender violence are "ideological" and "discriminatory" against men. These measures - introduced by the Socialist Party government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in 2004 to crack down on gender-based violence - offer free legal aid and established special courts for victims. [...]

But Vox wants not only to repeal these gender measures, but also to eliminate subsidised feminist groups, create a Ministry of the Family and introduce "an organic law protecting the natural family, which shall be recognised as an institution that came before the State". While they also seek to abolish laws protecting abortion and gay marriage, their goal, as veteran Spanish feminist Ana Maria Perez del Campo said, is to "stop in the advance of women's rights". It should not come as a surprise that their regional leader, Francisco Serrano, a former judge, was suspended by the Supreme Court after altering visitation arrangements in a custody case in favour of the father without calling the mother to the hearing. As a radical opponent of feminism, Serrano considers himself "a victim of gender-based jihadism".

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openDemocracy:#EleccionesBrasil: 5 insecurities behind the victory of Jair Messias Bolsonaro

Only Mexico, with its anti-cyclical tendencies, Ecuador and Costa Rica, have managed to buck the trend, and the traditional left in Venezuela and Nicaragua have also adopted repressive and authoritarian traits (Bolivia is a particular case).[...]

The deep crash of the Brazilian economy in 2015/2016 hit the population hard. A country used to strong economic growth suddenly found itself in a state of decline by 7.4%, producing a huge sense of economic insecurity among the population.[...]

The gesture of shooting with both hands has become a symbol of identity of the ‘Bolsominos’. With more than 60000 murders per year and a prison population of more than 725,000, the third largest in the world, fear and violence and the promise to put an end to banditry struck a chord with Brazilian voters.[...]

To these three insecurities two more can be added: identity insecurity, that has seen a battle between civil rights and diversity up against traditional family values and the Bible, and informational insecurity, that has seen attacks on conventional media outlets, writing them off as liars and manipulators.

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Al Jazeera: Bolsonaro, 'gender ideology' and hegemonic masculinity in Brazil

In Brazil, the legal recognition of same-sex unions by the Supreme Court in 2011, was the turning point for "anti-gender crusaders". It was in the aftermath of this groundbreaking decision that the hysteria around "gender ideology" gained momentum and visibility.

Since then the evangelical parliamentary bloc, a key force behind Bolsonaro's successful candidacy, has systematically tried to undermine the expansion of sexual rights, including same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, and particularly the right to abortion. They have regularly submitted proposed legislation, including draft laws to recognise the "rights" of an unborn child, to define the family as a unit consisting of a man, a woman and their children, and to criminalise abortion even in the case of rape.[...]

Bolsonaro's own career as an "anti-gender crusader" also started back in 2011. Then and now, Brazil has been dealing with alarming rates of violent deaths related to homophobia. In 2017, reports registered at least 445 LGBTQI deaths, a 30 percent increase from 2016. In this context, in 2011 then Education Minister Fernando Haddad (now Bolsonaro's former election opponent), launched an initiative to distribute educational materials aimed at combating homophobia and discrimination in schools.[...]

Then in 2018 during his election campaign, Bolsonaro not only embodied and praised this hegemonic form of masculinity but also actively projected himself as a crusader against "gender ideology". "Anti-gender" rhetoric was also generously used even in the fake news campaign aimed at smearing his opponent. One fake story distributed on WhatsApp claimed Haddad supplied schools with erotic baby bottles in public child care centres. Another claimed his running mate, Manuela D'Avila, was an atheist who defiled religious symbols.

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openDemocracy: Attacks on women's ministries are a threat to democracy

This experience is not unique to Brazil. Many countries with women’s ministries face right-wing and religious attempts to eliminate or downgrade their influence – and in some cases, to change their mandates altogether. When this happens, it’s a strong signal that other democratic structures may also be at risk.[...]

Protecting women’s human rights was an issue for new democracies, and more established ones. The United States had legalised abortion in 1973, yet marital rape was exempt from the criminal code, women could be fired for being pregnant, and they couldn’t apply for a credit card. Irish women weren’t allowed to sit in pubs; women In Nigeria didn’t have the right to vote; divorce was illegal in Brazil, Chile, and South Africa.[...]

This was a groundbreaking step and a critical necessity to ensure the health, security, and basic human rights of women and girls. It was also well-received by countries internationally. At the end of the World Decade for Women in 1985, 127 UN member states had some kind of national institution focused on women. By 2010, all but four countries had an office like this.[...]

Rising populist movements with regressive social agendas are widely seen as threats to democracy. They are often defined by their anti-free press, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions, but they also share an open hostility to women’s human rights.

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Vox: “A collapse of the center”: why fringe movements are winning around the world

People from Europe to Latin America are increasingly concerned about their economic well-being and general safety, experts say. The problem is that it seems only fringe movements — especially those on the far-right — are the ones offering new solutions for how to meet those needs.[...]

But the 2008 financial crisis, an uptick in terrorist attacks on the continent, and millions of refugees moving into Europe fueled a backlash to increased globalization. Fringe political parties in Europe that already believed in curbing globalization took advantage of that growing sentiment.[...]

As Vox’s Jen Kirby reports, voters in Brazil have grown frustrated with the status quo due to a slew of political and economic crises. The current center-right president, Michel Temer, is deeply unpopular in the wake of a struggling economy and a massive corruption scandal that has engulfed ministers in his government.[...]

“The post-World War II international order was already fading,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me, “and these developments will only add to the unfortunate momentum.”

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Jacobin Magazine: Bolsonaro’s Conservative Revolution

The reasons for this reactionary wave are diverse. As has been noted elsewhere, since the PT’s narrow victory over the PSDB in 2014 there has been a radicalization of the predominantly white middle to upper classes towards authoritarian solutions. This was the part of the population that dominated the street protests calling for Dilma’s impeachment in 2016, but have become disillusioned by the mainstream right. Not all have authoritarian preferences, of course, and many would prefer it if the PSDB continued to represent a viable option. Many dislike Bolsonaro, but their virulent “antipetismo” (hatred of the PT) leads them towards viewing him as a lesser evil.[...]

The demographic breakdown of first-round voting intentions by pollster Datafolha, a few days before the election, shows that 51 percent of voters earning between five and ten minimum wages ($1,261–2,522 USD per month) and 44 percent earning over ten minimum wages ($2,522) planned to vote for Bolsonaro, compared to 12 percent and 15 percent respectively for Haddad. Meanwhile, 42 percent of those self-defining as white planned to vote for Bolsonaro, compared to 15 percent for Haddad. (That said, the relationship between race and class in Brazil is complex and should be treated with caution. While the middle and upper classes are predominantly white, whites are not predominantly well-off. Furthermore, racial self-classification varies significantly according to both income level and region of the country.)[...]

As with any trend involving large numbers of people, there is no single explanation for “Bolsonarismo popular” — ie. Bolsonaro’s appeal to lower-income people. Some, thanks to the media’s relentless attacks on the PT, have developed antipetista attitudes similar to those of elites, complaining about everything from PT corruption to high taxes to the unfairness of racial quotas in universities. However, in my experience, such attitudes are relatively rare. [...]

It is true that neo-Pentecostal churches have grown precipitously among the poor and built a powerful clientelistic machine. It is also true that Bolsonaro’s agenda fits with a broader popular conservatism among lower-income groups. As shown by a Datafolha survey last year on Brazilians’ social attitudes, poorer people are more likely to think that those who believe in God are better people, that abortion is a crime that should be punished, and that drugs should be prohibited. They respond well to Bolsonaro’s claim to be resisting the “deconstruction of heteronormativity” and to proposals of forced internment for drug addicts.[...]

However, few poor people ever saw the mainstream right as offering a meaningful alternative. I would suggest that their anger about the economic crisis and corruption scandals are fundamentally motivated by a desire for more redistribution, whereas the elite’s embodies indignation about the limited redistribution that already occurred under the PT. In any case, with the mainstream parties all implicated in the crises, both groups became receptive to any candidate who was sufficiently distant from the incumbents to look like an “outsider” and who sounded as angry as they were.

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UnHerd: The surprising supporters of the strongman in Brazil

Plotted against the Left-Right spectrum, the responses form a striking V-shape. People who identify at the extremes of the political spectrum are far more likely to value democracy than those who identify at the centre. While 56.4% of the far-Left and 60% of the far-Right view democracy as “absolutely important”, only 37.5% of the centre agrees.  [...]

Here again, we find that support for democracy caves at the centre. Compared to 67% at the far-Left and 69% at the far-Right, only 46% of the centre believes that free elections are an “essential characteristic of democracy”. [...]

Once more, it is at the centre where authoritarianism finds its strongest support. A total of 76.6% – over three-quarters – of self-identified centrists view “strong” leadership as a “very good” or “fairly good” way to govern their country. In other words, these respondents are not just critical of democracy – they are actively enthusiastic for an authoritarian transition.  [...]

These figures provide an important clue to Bolsonaro’s success and the trends are backed up by more recent evidence. Nostalgia for Brazil’s military dictatorship is on the rise: according to a 2017 poll, 43% of Brazilians support bringing it back, compared with just 35% a year earlier. Their nostalgia heavily favours Bolsonaro, who has long considered himself a torchbearer for Brazil’s dictatorship. “Voting won’t change anything in this country. Nothing!” he screamed back in 1999. “Things will only change, unfortunately, after starting a civil war here, and doing the work the dictatorship didn’t do.”[...]

In other words, he is consolidating precisely the constituency that most commentators in advanced democracies like Britain believe to be the backstop against authoritarianism. This is one of the key takeaways from the Brazilian election: our faith in the middle class is misplaced. Strongmen often find support among middle-class moderates, who trust them to advance middle-class interests against the redistributive preferences of the poor.

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The New York Review of Books: Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Would-be Dictator

These are the events and images often recalled when we talk about what is called, correctly, Brazil’s “military coup,” or “golpe militar.” Often forgotten, though, is that a huge part of Brazil’s political and economic elite supported the golpe at the time. Even before the First Institutional Act, the Congress declared the presidency “vacant” while Goulart was still in the country, in clear violation of the Constitution. Then, after forty of their colleagues had been expelled by the putschists, 361 of the remaining representatives voted to install Marshall Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco—who had been plotting with generals, the United States, and some politicians to remove a legitimate president—as leader of the country. The US ambassador in Rio was certain that Brazil could become “the China of the 1960s” (in other words, turn communist), and wanted Jango out. All the major Brazilian newspapers except one supported the coup. Hundreds of thousands of mostly well-heeled Brazilians, suffering from an economic recession and believing Goulart was too left-wing, had already made known their preference for his removal in a series of marches “of the Family with God for Liberty.” Many of them believed rumors, intentionally spread by conservatives, that it was actually the president who was planning his own, communist coup d’état.[...]

“The Brazilian dictatorship’s body count is relatively low when compared to Chile or Argentina, but it was abroad that it had the most devastating impact,” wrote Tanya Harmer, a historian at the London School of Economics, in a 2012 journal article. “Both through its example, its interference in other countries, and its support for counter-revolutionary coups.” Most notably, Brazil’s military dictatorship helped devise the infamous Operation Condor, an international network of terror and extermination across South America. Born of a fanatical anti-communism, the regimes under Condor murdered political opponents by the tens of thousands. [...]

Bolsonaro’s ideology is best understood as Operation Condor plus the Internet. Recent international reporting has compared him to Donald Trump or seized on his contempt for identity politics, pointing out his record of sexist, racist, and homophobic statements, but these characterizations are insufficient. What Bolsonaro offers is an explicit return to the values that underpinned Brazil’s brutal dictatorship. Bolsonaro did not need to be “red-pilled” to believe that political correctness had gone too far in today’s Brazil; he has been consistent in his views for a long time. [...]

Support for Bolsonaro is highest among rich white Brazilians (especially rich white Brazilian men) and Evangelical Christians, but it’s impossible to win 49 million votes without backing from lots of regular people, too. On Sunday, carwash operator Julio Cesar Alves, thirty-seven, explained why he voted for Bolsonaro, even though he had happily voted twice for Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, Rousseff’s predecessor as leader of the Workers’ Party.

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Haaretz: Is Brazil About to Vote in the Far-right Executioner of Its Democracy?

At the same time, revelations that executives of Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, and other enterprises, had siphoned off millions of dollars in contract manipulations further weakened the Workers’ Party’s image among broad sectors of the middle classes, who, in the current elections, have mostly moved to the far-right.

On-going urban violence, in part linked to the drug trade, but also a result of the worsening economic situation, has also fueled support for Bolsonaro’s law and order discourse. His proposals to arm all citizens, offer impunity for police involved in shootings, and crudely racist language against people of color have alarmed human rights advocates. [...]

Bolsonaro calls for the retraction of legislation that protects battered women. He criticizes affirmative action programs that have allowed tens of thousands of Afro-descendants and indigenous people to enter the country’s universities, diversifying higher education for the first time in the country’s history.

In televised comments he has condemned interracial marriages, defended the rape of women, and called for violence against LGBT people. His opposes teaching the concept of gender in public schools, and decries the influence of the ideas of the late world-renowned and anti-authoritarian Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

Supported by evangelical Christians and conservative sectors of the Catholic Church, he has explicitly condemned minority religions, although Brazil’s constitutions have separated the church and state for the last 140 years.

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The Atlantic: Brazil Turns Its Back on Democracy

Jair Bolsonaro, the former army captain who dominated the first round of Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, talks a lot about killing people—common criminals, political opponents, the organizers of queer-art shows. Promising to cleanse the nation of corruption, he holds up the 1964–85 military dictatorship, when torture was state policy, as “a period of glory for Brazil.” Since Brazil’s return to democracy a generation ago, no major politician has spoken like this. But it turned out to be highly effective in an atmosphere of seemingly unending crisis, both economic and political—and one in which more than 60,000 people were murdered last year.

Bolsonaro still must win the runoff on October 28. But by taking 46 percent of the vote in the first round of elections on Sunday, he nearly claimed an outright majority, which would have prevented a second round altogether for the first time in 20 years. Making a mockery of the latest polls, other right-wing populists edged out established candidates in governor’s races. Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party, which previously had eight seats in Congress, will now have 52, second only to the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT). In São Paulo, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo—who recently tweeted a photo of himself standing beside the former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, a supporter—won the most votes of any congressional deputy in Brazil’s history. [...]

It’s not just the poor and the poorly educated who yearn for a strongman. Business leaders were initially put off by Bolsonaro’s fervor, common in the Brazilian military, for state intervention in the economy. But then he tapped a quasi-libertarian with a doctorate from the University of Chicago as his economic adviser, and the chance to propose cutting pensions and peeling back labor regulations proved too tempting to pass up. Now the stock market rallies when Bolsonaro gains in polls. Luciano Hang, the owner of a chain of department stores that feature towering replicas of the Statue of Liberty, has threatened to fire his 15,000 employees if Bolsonaro doesn’t become president.

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