Brazil's Bolsonaro Has Supercharged Right-Wing Cultural Politics
Brazil’s Bolsonaro Has Supercharged Right-Wing Cultural Politics
The new president-elect is an agent of the world’s most reactionary tendencies, many of them exported from the United States.
By Greg GrandinTwitter TODAY 3:07 PM
Jair Bolsonaro greets supporters as he arrives at the Salgado Filho airport to attend a rally for his presidential campaign in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on August 29, 2018. (Reuters / Diego Vara)
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president-elect, who won Sunday’s second-round vote with a staggering 55 percent of the ballet, is an open fascist, a violent phobe of every decent thing. A misogynist who said he would rather see his son dead than accept him as gay, Bolsonaro is an agent of the world’s most reactionary tendencies, someone who joins fake-news-style social-media manipulation to old-fashioned death-squad repression. The makeup of Brazil’s congress looks grim as well, and the military will have his back—there’s little foreseeable break on what he can do. Markets are soaring. Global proud boys are dancing.
The mega-dozers are revving their engines, and the earth will be pushed to the limits, as Bolsonaro peeled off some of the landless vote by promising he’d remove prohibitions on colonizing the vast Amazon, even as his soy, lumber, mining, and cattle backers will lay waste to far larger swaths than any peasant ax could. “For Canadian business, a Bolsonaro presidency could open new investment opportunities,” the CBC reported last night shortly after the results were announced, “as he has pledged to slash environmental regulations in the Amazon rain forest and privatize some government-owned companies.” “Our Amazon is like a child with chickenpox, every dot you see is an indigenous reservation,” Bolsonaro has said, promising to do away with land set-asides for native peoples.
Brazil is one of the world’s largest economies, so it’s not hyperbole to say the election is a geopolitical Pittsburgh massacre. During the campaign, Bolsonaro’s supporters targeted his opponents for violent hate crimes, including carving a swastika into the skin of a 19-year-old woman carrying an LGBT flag. The crackdown on universities began even before his final victory. Just a week ago, Brazil’s new president-elect pledged that upon winning he would carry out “a cleansing never before seen in the history of Brazil.” Last year, he said he’d “give carte blanche for the police to kill.” Election day wasn’t even over when São Paulo’s new governor said he’d pay for the “best lawyers” to defend police who execute criminals. The targets will be, overwhelmingly, poor urban black boys and men, along with rural land and environmental activists.
There’s a lot to grapple with in Bolsonaro’s win, not least the way it reflects the successful importation of US-style right-wing cultural politics into Latin America, represented by what in this country are often called wedge issues, including abortion, sexual rights, guns, gender equality, prayer in school, and so-called “religious freedom.” Two years ago, when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, there was a lot of talk about how he represented the Latin Americanization of US politics, a kind of populist style associated with Third World dictators. But if one were to look beyond form and rhetoric, and get to the content of politics, what is truly worrying is how the influence flows in the opposite direction. The whole world, or at least a good part of Latin America, is becoming, to use Thomas Frank’s famous metaphor on the topic, Kansas.
More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/brazil-bolsonaro-fascism-right-wing-cultural-politics/
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https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016218873
