(Possibly) Illuminating Read: ‘Bigger Than Bolsanaro’

Bolsonaro told his cabinet he does not plan to contest the result of the election, but he also does not plan to congratulate President-elect Lula.

— Raquel Krähenbühl (@Rkrahenbuhl) October 31, 2022

For the New York Review of Books, I wrote about the pre-history of Bolsonarismo, and how a movement originally created by elite campaigns and insider scheming has built a power base that could well outlast the Brazilian president https://t.co/GreJ1PB5US

— Vincent Bevins (@Vinncent) October 28, 2022

This longish article was published in the New York Review just *before* the Brazilian election, but Bevins seems to have a good grip on the both the local history and some disturbing parallels here:

At the beginning of 2013, there was seemingly no one on the right in Brazil’s political system. No one who admitted it, anyway. The Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) was confidently sailing through its third presidential term, and the former guerrilla Dilma Rousseff was enjoying approval ratings only slightly lower than the record set by her predecessor, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who ended his mandate with the support of more than 80 percent of Brazilians. The main opposition party, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), was called right-wing by PT supporters, but denied this vigorously. Like the rest of the most visible actors in the country, they had defined themselves in opposition to Brazil’s brutal, US-backed dictatorship, which ended in the 1980s. Before the 2014 elections The Economist lamented that out of thirty-two registered parties, twenty-six had names with left-wing signifiers. The Brazilian political spectrum, the political scientist Luiz Felipe d’Avila told the magazine, was “fifty shades of pink.”

Five years later the right was out in the open. After mass protests, economic crisis, a reckless anticorruption campaign, President Rousseff’s removal, and Lula’s imprisonment, the country elected Jair Bolsonaro, now probably the most extreme-right leader in the democratic world. He won power in 2018 with the backing of economic elites, and a wave of explicitly conservative politicians—fire-breathing YouTubers, anti-environmentalists, and demagogues—filled the halls of the Congresso Nacional.

Now Lula is back. He solidly beat Bolsonaro in the first round of voting on October 2, with 48 percent of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 43. If he wins again on Sunday [he did], then by law Bolsonaro has to go. Elite support for Bolsonaro is less solid than when he took office, and although he has made it exceedingly clear at every point in his career that he would be happy to carry out a coup and destroy Brazilian democracy, he may actually leave.

But even if he does, voting so far has shown that his movement has taken on a more concrete form since 2018, seizing strategic centers of power. “To speak of ‘Bolsonarismo’ is not the same as speaking of Bolsonaro voters,” the Brazilian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes writes in his recent essay collection, Do Transe à Vertigem (“From Trance to Vertigo”). “Smaller than Bolsonaro’s actual or potential electorate, Bolsonarismo is at the same time bigger than Bolsonaro himself: neither created by nor solely dependent on the individual from whom it borrows its name.”…

Brazil’s pro-democracy forces, now accustomed to living in fear of authoritarian rupture, nervously watch the news and try to convince the country’s few remaining undecided voters to take their side. In this battle they now have an argument many wish they didn’t. Last week I saw a voter named Marina try to convince her father, a former Bolsonaro voter who picked a third-party candidate in the first round, to vote for Lula. “If Bolsonaro gets another term there will be nothing stopping him,” she said. “If Lula wins, he will have to negotiate constantly with conservatives, so you don’t have to worry.” She thinks her father, who owns a small business outside São Paulo, will be reassured that the country won’t turn into Venezuela or Nicaragua, one of the baseless and constant lines of attack by the right. “This is what Lula has always done—build coalitions and govern responsibly,” she said. That is more or less what the Brazilian left hopes they can pull off next year. At best, politics here in 2023 will be a mix of Workers’ Party red and Bolsonarista yellow.

How did the right return to the public sphere? A careful book by Camila Rocha, a political scientist at the Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento, is crucial to understanding the beginning of this story. In Menos Marx, mais Mises: O liberalismo e a nova direita no Brasil (“Less Marx, More Mises: Liberalism and the New Right in Brazil”), she points to the importance of two groups: a set of free-market think tanks and a constellation of right-wing online communities. The think tanks, with names like Instituto Liberal, Instituto Mises, and Instituto Millenium, arose between the 1980s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, usually with ideological or financial supporters in the United States. Almost all Brazilian elites, not just the rightists, look frequently to the north for inspiration, but “liberal” here means something different than it does in the US. These liberais are radical neoliberals, or libertarians, or anarcho-capitalists, and most have gleefully rejected the pieties of progressivism and identity politics…

The dictatorship here had little time for the likes of Hayek and Mises. Neoliberalism, as Gabriel Boric recently put it, had Chile for its cradle—not Brazil. Before the US-backed military coup in 1964, North Americans supported the golpista Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais (IPES), a Brazilian institution linked to those that had created neoliberalism as an intellectual project, like the Mont Pelerin Society. But once the generals took over, the radical liberal project fell by the wayside, in favor of the fanatical anticommunism and corrupt developmentalism favored by economic elites. Starting in the 1980s Brazilians set up institutions with the support of the Atlas Network, based in Arlington, which has been called a “neoliberal Comintern,” Rocha notes approvingly. But the think tanks were by and large happy with the direction the country took under the PSDB’s Fernando Henrique Cardoso between 1995 and 2002, when companies were privatized and private markets expanded for education and healthcare.

The grand return of the free-market think tank came in the second Bush administration and then just after the 2008 financial crisis, when the Koch Brothers began to fund Tea Party actions undermining the Obama administration. Between 2005 and 2010 a number of groups popped up in Brazil, both with local and international support. Rocha reports that one of the founders of Students for Liberty Brazil, a local chapter of the US nonprofit, took part in the Koch Summer Fellow Program in the United States, and that the new Instituto Ordem Livre was connected to the Cato Institute, but she points out that these institutions had many committed Brazilian sponsors, too. Notably, when an economist named Paulo Guedes—who got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, then taught in Pinochet’s Chile—needed someone to help found the new Millenium Institute, he tapped Rodrigo Constantino, who got his start as a prolific poster in the right-wing corners of Orkut…

The rise of the novas direitas—the mostly young, or at least young-presenting, new right—helps explain the rehabilitation of reactionary language in mainstream Brazilian discourse. In 2016, for instance, the respected newspaper Folha de S. Paulo gave a column to the new-right social media star Kim Kataguiri. Bolsonaro’s alliance with Guedes, meanwhile, helps explain why business leaders came to support his candidacy. An editorial in the stuffy, right-leaning Estado de S. Paulo calling the decision between Bolsonaro and his PT opponent, Fernando Haddad, “a very difficult choice” exemplifies ruling-class attitudes in 2018. They affected that they were holding their noses and then got behind the liberal–conservador package likely to suit their material interests.

But Bolsonaro himself was never a liberal of any type. He was a former army captain who spent his career in Congress defending the dictatorship and the interests of security services and the surrounding underworlds, and he rushed into a political crater created by the eruption of antipolitical sentiment in the country from 2013 to 2018. Because he was never important enough to be involved in the corruption scandals investigated by Lava Jato, he was able to present himself as a man opposed to the entire political system. He won the support of a lot of working-class Brazilians in 2018, including many who had voted for Lula. With legions of fake-news phalanxes active across Brazilian social media, he did especially well with white men in the middle class, and with the country’s conservative Christian community…

Then the pandemic arrived. When Bolsonaro took an aggressively irresponsible stance on the virus, he began to lose popularity in rich cities like Rio and São Paulo. At the same time, support grew for his relatively competent health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, whom Bolsonaro forced out of office in April 2020. Over the next year Brazil had three more health ministers, and the country got the worst of both worlds: hundreds of thousands died, and the economy collapsed. Bolsonaro had not become more extremist or more antidemocratic than he always had been; he had simply revealed himself to be bad at governing. Instead of running a country twice the size of the European Union, he picked fights on social media, met constantly with his radical base, and rode around on motorcycles and Jet Skis…

Bolsonaro has made his opposition to the democratic order clear and taken every opportunity to cast doubt, without any evidence, on the voting system that elected him. In September 2021 he expended significant resources to get his base out on the street in an attempt to show that he had the muscle to seize power outside of institutional checks and balances. But in the wake of the disastrous pandemic, and after influential business and media classes have failed to make a “third way” center-right candidacy happen (they tried a lot of people, including Moro, to no avail), crucial sectors, including the military, have signaled that they could probably tolerate the return of the Workers’ Party—or at least that it isn’t worth backing a Bolsonaro coup to keep Lula out of power…

Of course not everything is About Us, but I think y’all can see some parallel paradigms. Read the whole thing — and, please: Those of you with a better grasp on the topics involved, let me know what’s wrong, misleading, and/or in need of expansion!