My book How Fascism Works was published in September 2018. In it, I discuss many countries—the United States, Germany, and Italy, of course, and India are primary examples. I do not mention Brazil. On October 7, 2018, in the Brazilian elections, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate, shocked the country by winning the first round. The analysis in my book resonated with his candidacy and I found myself interviewed in the Brazilian press about Bolsonaro, a figure about whom I had previously been unaware.
In 2019, I was invited to speak to the Serrote Literary Festival in São Paulo, the annual festival of Revista Serrote. My talk was scheduled for March 14, 2020—and my flight left on March 11th. Covid-19 had long since arrived in the United States, and in my home country its seriousness was sinking in. It was one of those strange moments when mass consciousness was moving from country to country sequentially and had not yet arrived in Brazil. I arrived on March 12th, in a country in which people were still kissing and hugging as a greeting. I left on March 17th, as the city was beginning to shut down. I wrote a version of this piece for Quatro Cinco Um, where it appeared in the May issue.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler rails against parliamentary democracy, as no better than an instrument for corruption:
That institution can only be pleasing or profitable to mendacious crawlers who avoid the light of day, and it must be hateful to any good, straightforward man who is ready to take personal responsibility. Hence this style of Democracy has become the instrument of the race, which, in order to forward its own aims has to avoid the sunlight now and in all future time. None but a Jew can value an institution which is as dirty and false as he is himself.
Hitler contrasts a system involving a Parliament or Congress with “true Germanic Democracy with free choice of the Leader, along with his obligation to assume entire responsibility for all he does and causes to be done.” I was reminded of these passages from Mein Kampf when, on March 15th, I attended a rally in support of Jair Bolsonaro on Paulista Avenue in São Paulo.
Demonstrators at the March 15th event called for Congress to be disbanded, parading a large banner around calling for the imprisonment of the head of Congress. They chanted slogans praising President Bolsonaro. There were large posters expressing support for Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister, Sergio Moro, and expressing solidarity with “our captain,” Bolsonaro. Military symbols abounded; veterans with black berets posed for pictures with flag-wearing Bolsonaro supporters in front of military jeeps. Posters advertised conspiracy theories, including ones involving aliens. The crowd urged for abandoning Democratic institutions—not just Congress, but also the courts—so Bolsonaro could rule as supreme leader.
The rhetoric of democracy has been embraced in the United States for almost two hundred years, though not, of course, the practice. As a result, it is not possible openly to call for shuttering democratic institutions like Congress and the courts—though it is of course easy to circumvent them in less obvious ways.
Brazil is different. In Brazil, there are many people alive who remember the military dictatorship. It is always possible, in the light of significant current challenges, to make many people feel as if the past, when they were in any case younger, was better. It is always possible to create nostalgia for a past that never was. There is an audience for a kind of open fascism in Brazil that is lacking in the United States.
As an outside observer, there seems to be a concerning gap between the rhetoric one hears from Bolsonaro and the way he is represented in the press. Dangerously for Brazil, while its President openly promotes fascism, or what Hitler might call “a true Brazilian Democracy,” the press avoids labeling him as on the extreme right.
At the basis of fascism is a distinction between friend and enemy. A fascist leader is always at war with enemies, internal and external. Every situation is seen through this prism. The Corona virus has been used by politicians in the United States and Brazil against China; in the United States, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has suggested that we take seriously the possibility that China manufactured it as a bioweapon. Similarly, Eduardo Bolsonaro has directed harsh and even warlike rhetoric toward China (this is not to exonerate China’s behavior in the situation; but it is a strange time to pick a fight).
History tells us that totalitarian movements bind together two elements—loyalty and a complete disassociation with reality. “The chief disability of totalitarian propaganda,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote, is that it is “seriously conflicting with common sense.” Repeating the leader’s outrageous behavior and declarations functions as a loyalty oath. Reality does not exert its normal pressure. Fascism views science as merely a weapon for personal or national aggrandizement. As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf, “The national State will look upon Science as a means for increasing national pride.”
We see this attitude toward reality in the initial reactions of the world’s far right leaders toward Covid-19, which was to exhibit skepticism toward science that ran counter to their fantasies. But Bolsonaro has been unique, among the leaders of the world’s democracies, in the lengths to which he has gone in his denial of the actual threat Covid-19 poses. He has doubled down, in the way history tells us some of the worst authoritarian leaders do, by insisting on his infallibility, his power over reality. Bolsonaro’s vindictive policy toward the Amazon, which goes beyond anything that makes economic or practical sense, even for him, also exhibits these tendencies. By this metric, and others, Bolsonaro is the most extreme far-right leader today.
In his book, A Brief History of Fascist Lies, the historian Federico Finchelstein writes:
For Mussolini, reality had to follow mythical imperatives. Too bad if people were not initially convinced; their disbelief also needed to be challenged. The mythical framework of fascism was rooted in the fascist myth of nation. This myth, he declared, “we wish to translate into complete reality.”
In Bolsonaro’s address to the nation on March 24th, on the Covid-19 crisis, we learn that Italy, unlike Brazil, has a “large number of elderly people.” Italy is, in Bolsonaro’s depiction, a weak, elderly nation, in contrast to “this new Brazil, which has everything, yes, everything to be a great Nation.” It is not a novel medical strategy, but rather Brazil’s greatness, its vitality and youth, that supposedly renders it impervious to this global threat.
Fascism raises panic about communists, using this panic to justify its excesses. Here is Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, from his speech “Communism with the Mask off,” delivered to the Annual Congress of the Nazi Party on September 13, 1935:
Bolshevism is explicitly determined on bringing about a revolution among all the nations. In its own essence it has an aggressive and international tendency…. Bolshevism denies religion as a principle, fundamentally and entirely. It recognizes religion only as an “opium for the people.” For the help and support of religious belief, however, National Socialism absolutely places in the foreground of its program a belief in God… But the Bolsheviks carry on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international underworld, against culture as such. Bolshevism is not merely anti-bourgeois; it is against human civilization itself.
In its final consequences it signifies the destruction of all the commercial, social, political and cultural achievements of Western Europe, in favor of a deracinated and nomadic international cabal which has found its representation in Judaism. This grandiose attempt to overthrow the civilized world is so much more dangerous in its effects because the Communist International, which is a past master in the art of misrepresentation, has been able to find its protectors and pioneers among a great part of these intellectual circles in Europe…
The Nazi Party gained the support of religious Christians, by raising panic in their minds about the threat that Bolsheviks supposedly posed, to enforce atheism, and bring decadence and lack of morality. It gained the support of business elites, by raising panic in their minds about the distribution of wealth under a supposedly socialist or communist opposition. In so doing, it represented the ordinary Social Democratic Party as Bolsheviks (or tools of Bolsheviks).
Bolsonaro’s ideology guru, Olavo de Carvalo, like Goebbels and Hitler before him, is obsessed with the threat of communism and Marxism, seeing it everywhere. Bolsonarismo is the fear of an economic and cultural takeover by modern-day Bolsheviks, presented as positive political ideology.
The social basis of the Nazi movement was farmers and agricultural concerns. The “Official Party Statement on Its Attitude towards the Farmers and Agriculture” was published in the National Socialist German Workers Party’s Voelkischer Beobachter in 1930, with Hitler’s signature. It contains a concise statement of the Nazi ideology that the true values of the nation were to be found in the rural population, that National Socialists “see in the farmers the main bearers of a healthy folkish heredity, the fountain of youth of the people, and the backbone of military power.”
In the United States, Donald Trump lavishes praise and resources on farmers, just as his trade wars cause ever greater problems for their business. In Bolsonarismo, too, the farmers are an ideological base. Like in the case of the United States, nationalist saber-rattling and environmental destruction do not seem to sway farmers’ loyalty, despite being obviously harmful to their material interests.
Hitler was obsessed with the notion that Jews dominated the press and used this domination to spread Marxism. “[W]hat marks the difference between the Marxist and our bourgeois press,” according to Mein Kampf, was that the “Marxist press was written by agitators, while the bourgeois press preferred to conduct agitation through its writers.” Hitler claimed that the “Liberal press” dug “a grave for the German nation and the German Reich,” and harshly decries the German state for its failure to “counteract this wholesome poisoning of the nation.” National Socialism focused relentlessly on the press, attacking it as the enemy of the nation, as “Die Luegenpresse”—in modern parlance, “fake news.” Olavo de Carvalo also sees in the press a Marxist conspiracy to destroy the Brazilian nation, a belief central to Bolsonarismo.
Hitler warned against being “led astray by the will o’ the wisp of so-called ‘freedom of the press’” in punishing the press for its perceived failures to laud the nation and its leader. In Brazil, (as in India, and to a lesser extent, the United States), the free press is under harsh attack. A March 12th report by Reporters without Borders decries a “Climate of Hate and Suspicion fed by Bolsonaro,” concluding “Jair Bolsonaro’s election as president in October 2018 after a campaign marked by hate speech, disinformation, violence against journalists and contempt for human rights has ushered in a particularly dark era for democracy and press freedom in Brazil.”
Bolsonaro’s administration is said to have a “hate office” targeting journalists that report damning information about it. Its relentless harassment of journalists in lawsuits and hate speech have achieved large scale international condemnation. In 2019, Patricia Campos Mello, a frequent target of Bolsonaro and his administration, received the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. The case of journalist Glenn Greenwald, subject to legal action from the government intended to silence him, has also received prominent international attention. Brazil’s media is understandably intimidated, fearful of losing advertising dollars, and being targeted by lawsuits from the government, as well as harassment from Bolsonaro’s online supporters, whipped to a frenzy by hate speech directed against journalists. Brazil ranks 105th in the 2019 World Press Freedom Index. Can Brazil be said to have a free press under present circumstances?
Universities are a particular target of contemporary far-right movements. Hungary’s Viktor Orban succeeded in expelling Hungary’s leading university, Central European University, from the country, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the institution. Orban also banned the teaching of gender studies, a particular target of the Catholic Church. Under the far-right Hindu nationalist government of BJP in India, funding for universities has been drastically slashed – as they have been successfully represented as anti-national. So too in Brazil, where, under the guidance of education ministers ideologically channeling Olavo de Carvalo’s hysterical anti-communist conspiracy theories, Brazil’s universities, until recently rapidly rising in academic repute worldwide, have faced enormous cuts to their national research budgets. This attitude to academic expertise is to be expected from those who follow Carvalo’s ideology, such as Brazil’s foreign minister Ernesto Araújo, who famously believes that climate change is a communist plot. In the last five years, Brazil and India are the countries that have fallen most steeply in the Academic Freedom Index.
In my few days in São Paulo, I encountered an extraordinary level of general suspicion. Before going to Brazil, I did not question that Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed in his election campaign. But I was surprised by the number of people who still raise questions about what exactly transpired, which reveals an extraordinary level of distrust with Brazil’s institutions. Such distrust is, sadly, warranted.
Brazil did and does have an extraordinary level of corruption. But in measuring it against other countries, it is noteworthy that it is normal for leaders of democracies, such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, to leave office with extraordinary wealth—of course, not close to the level that leaders of autocracies, such as Erdogen, Putin, and Orban manage to accrue for themselves and family members, but still impressive at tens of millions of dollars. It is, however, not normal for such leaders to face lengthy prison sentences, as former President Lula has, despite leaving with far, far less than these other leaders. Lula’s trial for corruption proceeded at an uncommonly rapid speed, and his punishment for contestable minor charges was extraordinarily lengthy and harsh.
Glenn Greenwald’s journalism has revealed that there were political motivations behind Lula’s prosecutions, with suspicions about the case and its connection to the broader Petrobras conspiracy buried, and interference by Moro. The Intercept has also revealed that the prosecutors investigating Car Wash plotted against Lula and the Worker’s Party in the 2018 elections. The heart of a democracy is exemplified by its independent institutions—its scientific research institutions, universities, schools, media, and, above all, the courts. All of these, in the case of Brazil, are deeply suspect. No wonder it is hard to know what to believe.
Fascist political campaigns are invariably anti-corruption campaigns; Mussolini, after all, famously ran to “drain the swamp.” Russia’s Vladimir Putin runs anti-corruption campaigns. In the United States, Donald Trump ran an anti-corruption campaign against Hilary Clinton in 2016, and he has subsequently run the US government to enrich himself, his corporation, and his associates in hitherto unprecedented ways (a New York Times investigation later revealed that Trump had avoided taxes on over 400 million dollars given to him by his father in the 1980s and 1990s, a crime that falls outside the statute of limitations).
Brazil and the United States have always been corrupt. But it looks like in Brazil’s case, there was a politically motivated campaign of unprecedented efficiency to link endemic corruption to the Worker’s Party, and its popular leader, for politically motivated electoral gain, aided and abetted by Brazil’s central democratic institutions. A rueful lesson of history is that when democracy and the labor movement can be connected to corruption, fascism often emerges victorious. This fact is not unknown to its advocates.
Brazil’s democracy is under threat from multiple sources, including its own recent past of military dictatorship, the pro-Bolsonaro militias, and the legacy and continued presence of right-wing death squads. But there are also reasons to hope. Bolsonaro’s supporters include prominent Jewish communities—and, as the fate of Roberto Alvim demonstrated, there is only so far these communities will go in supporting the most open expressions of fascism. Bolsonaro, unlike Trump and the Republican Party, does not have behind him a unified party with massive control over the institutions of state power. Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro is making enemies of governors who largely share his far-right ideology, and tensions between them could ultimately undermine cooperation against leftist political opponents. And most of all, Brazil has a recent history of leftist political success—which no doubt explains its current tragic situation. Why, after all, was Brazil saddled with Bolsonaro, perhaps the worst of the far-right politicians of the world’s democracies? Perhaps it is because Brazil has come the furthest, and represents the most, in terms of democratic progress. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Brazil’s foremost 20th century intellectual, Paulo Freire, is among the most cited books of all time. Lula, Brazil’s leftist president, was successful in lifting hundreds of thousands out of poverty, empowering labor movements, increasing access to higher education, and raising Brazil’s profile worldwide in the arts, education, and culture, and its reputation as a great democracy. This is impossible to bear for the United States, and the right wing world-wide; it was a success that could not be tolerated. It is because of Brazil’s success under leftism that the world has supported foisting upon it the most extreme of its far-right nationalists, the most obviously suitable candidate for the description, fascist.
Jason Stanley
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and the author, most recently, of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.
