Last Week Tonight had a brief explanation of what's going on in Brazil right now. Since it's so similar with that happened during the american presidential election, I decided to post this here to discuss with you guys.

Here's the video:



Summary: After Trump became president a brazilian candidate got even more popular and he's probably become the next brazilian president by the end of the month. With many similaritires between both presidents, people are calling him Tropical Trump. Problem is, Haddad is the runner up. He's a pawn for Lula, Brasil's ex president. Lula is still loved by many, even though he's currently in prison for crimes related to corruption.
Yesterday (7/10) Bolsonaro won the first part of the election by 47% vs. 27% of Haddad. In Brazil, if the candidate doesn't get over 50% in votes, we have a revote after a month with the two most voted candidates. Considering even if all other voters go for Haddad in the revote and none go Bolsonaro's way they'd only have a 3% lead, so it's basically impossible for Haddad to win. The country is completely divided.

6% lead if all the other voters go Haddad. And you really need to have a sense of first round versus second round turnout dynamics (which I don't) to make a decent analysis / forecast.

This dude Bolsonaro is pretty evil and racist. Also he wants to end crime and violence in Brazil by arming every citizen. The right truly does have "the best people."

Problem is, Haddad is also terrible. He was the mayor of São Paulo and when he tried getting re elected, he got a whooping 16%, probably the worst result ever for a mayor still running. Not to mention, he's just a pawn for Lula, who's accused of creating the "Brazilian Watergate". But that's just one side of Lula though. The reason he's still loved is because he created a lot of social programs to help the poor and was extremely successful in that. So the poorer states in the country are still loyal to him, even after he got arrested. Iirc, Haddad won in all those states that Lula helped the most (the northeastern part of Brazil). Pretty crazy stuff.

So we basically have to decide between '18 Hitler and a guy being controlled by a prisoner.

Is Lula in prison for a good reason or BS politics? Also not a hard choice between Hitler '18 and basically anybody else.

It's pretty evident that Lula is shady and even though his followers claim he's innocent, I don't believe it. The biggest thing they got on him is an apartment that a construction company gave him as bribe.

And yeah, I used to joke that if Bolsonaro and a brick were running for president I'd go with the brick. But I still don't feel good going with Haddad. I just kinda have to.

The worst thing about Bolsonaro is that he gave racist people in Brazil a voice. People now think it's OK to be racist because he is. They think they are entitled to. So even if he loses, I think the damage is already done. People are actually walking on the streets and harassing gay people with things like "when bolsonaro wins you guys are completely ****ed". soccer fans were recorded chanting things like that in a stadium last week.

Ok thanks. So are you from Kansas City, Brazil lol? What gives?

I've actually never been to the USA. My username is from something in the movie Lucky Number Slevin, a favorite of mine. The Kansas City Shuffle. It's too long for most sites though, lol.

We (not like you and I but like the left in general) should come up with an explanation about the ascendancy of right wing populists globally (aside from the US and Brazil, there are notable ascendant right wing and authoritarian movements across Europe and Asia and South America).

I of course have thoughts about this (specifically the failures of technocratic liberalism, income inequality, migration, social media, generational cultural divides, capitalism writ large).

I only use these moments to point out that many in the US will only go as deep as Trump, or Fox News, or American exceptionalism (e.g, we're super racist). Myself included, those are worth talking about. But then we often fail to explain things like similar right wing movements and politicians emerging globally; explanations that square on Trump, Murdoch, and deplorables forget the *why now* questions -- the temporal factors that lead to the appearance (reappearance?) of fascism and authoritarianism, and why they are emerging even in countries and spaces relatively free from Murdoch media.

DVaut, if you haven't already read this it's worth your time:

A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come

My biggest takeaway from it is that it isn't irrational for a currently privileged class to want to end democracy if it stands to lose out under meritocracy.

Netflix has a decent dramatization of Operation Carwash. Brazil at least has the excuse that the country really has had systemic economic anxiety.

You're good at tying stuff to history - does this resemble the rise of Hitler/Mussolini/Franco in the 1930s, or (removing the specific focus on right-wing politics) waves of revolutions in 19th century Europe?

brazil elections campaign slogan of at least if you don't like the other guy you can actually vote him out later.

A scandal ridden party vs a fascist dictator, gjge brazil.

Seeing the demographic vote split, similar to here, except the old remember military dictatorships are bad and the youth don't get it instead of vice versa. Poor/non white women furiously against, white/rich/middle furiously for.

I think he'll win too, he's doing a good job of framing it as me vs venezuela and they border them.

It's really a shame that dude is making no secret of all the bad things he wants to do and they only gain support doing it. I guess that's the point, the more ruthless the more they are supported. (this isn't just a pure right thing, the left also wants this to a lesser degree) Humanity sucks.

The smart people on the other side gonna start fleeing Brazil; but where do they go, it's getting harder by the day to find some country that isn't going that way.

No. I still don't think you can write a coherent story about the fascism in the 1930s without the dual effects of 1) WWI and 2) the Depression and the traumas those enacted on the European and global psyche. The parallels to the present time are of course extent but not that apt.

I think we're closer to the 1870s-1900s in recent historical memory.

You can find a lot in the era of American history that sounds familiar to us. Continued fallout from a huge social upheaval -- the forces of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. A divided, often corrupted, largely inept government resulting from the failure of elites, both in the grip of ideological malaise and regulatory capture. Rapid expansion of huge corporations controlling more resources and the means of production, monopolization and monopsonization of industries. Mechanization/technology of farm equipment especially ending long-standing social and labor positions of people, who migrated to urban areas. Along with a big global migration. Growing strife leading to outright violent clashes between labor and capital, and an increasingly restive white racial majority re-applying authoritarian policies and tactics to racial minorities, Indians. You see a lot of counter-responses and feedback loops with aggrieved populations and social justice movements; consider temperance movements, anti-saloon leagues, women suffrage movements, etc. all flourished in the period. It was a multi-faceted social upheaval and I think *most* of the causative factors can be laid at the feet of industrialization, the introduction of finance capitalism, the concentration of wealth, increasing geographical/spatial stratification and segregation, etc.

Globally, a lot of the same phenomenon were happening; in France, Napoleon III and Bismarck operated as effectively mini-dictators during the early industrialization of Europe in the 1860s-1890s. Later in the 1890s and early 1900s, the British Empire is starting to fail and the global order is starting to be up-ended; the Malthusian/Darwinian paradigms -- which im you cannot divorce from capitalism, industrialization, labor movements -- are influencing social thought and producing strong hierarchical theories about the righteousness of the world (e.g., there are people who should have ****, or natural talents, or wealthy, and they should brutally eliminate and de-humanize lesser orders of humans because it's an incredibly zero-sum world and our survival as a species depends on acting on this mentality, lest inferior humans consume too much and jeopardize our collective well being, etc. etc.).

Think of seemingly random totemic events like the Dreyfus Affair producing social revolutions in France, much like how seemingly minor events cause global fascination, conspiratorial thinking, fit into these growing ideological binary frames. The struggle between nativists and tribalists against the forces of global integration and social justice.

In the UK, the US, really all of Europe, we saw the dawning of the Progressive Era in the US, the Liberal Party ascendancy in the UK in 1905 not hugely different from the re-discovery of a more vibrant left in the US and Europe now (e.g., politicians like Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn having national prominence would have been hard to imagine 10-15 years ago). I realize this is unsatisfying to the extent that I'm using some strong language (fascism, authoritarianism) and yet I'm walking back a comparison to the fascist movements of the 1930s most readily available to our common historical knowledge. But it's worth reiterating we *did* see the aggrandizement of those tendencies during the late 19th century period I'm describing: that US was entirely brutal against blacks, against Indians during this time, and that many blacks, Indians, women, immigrants had in fact seen better and been treated better before, a lot of that poor treatment was either cuased by, aided and abetted or at least ignored by an inept or complicit governments. And that Europeans were exporting a lot of their aggression and bloodthirst and fascist impulses out to their colonial enterprises and their own working class populations.

This was one of the several important lessons we're never taught about the holocaust. Main one being, nazis were regular people.

edit--1890's US is something I've made parallels to here before as well. Tariffs were a big thing back then too.

^ yeah, this is what I've noticed. in these situations, both sides think they are correct and the other is completely evil/wrong. It took me a while to realize that.

smart and rich, you mean. most people don't have the money to just leave the country bare handed.

I'd be really interested to hear you flesh this out a bit more, as I fall squarely into the category you describe. I mostly understand how this could be happening in America, but I am more perplexed by the global trend.

Going through your list, for example, is it really the case that these fascist uprisings are being limited to countries with a history of technocratic liberalism? Or income inequality? Migration? Seems dubious to me based on a few examples, but my knowledge of international history is limited.

As you point out, this also makes me wonder about the U.S. causes you identified. Like, the fact that we're a super racist country doesn't explain why we're seeing a rise in fascism right now. We've always been a super racist country. That might be a requirement, but it can't be explanatory given how many years we went without fascism despite the ever-present racism.

Just spitballing here, but it makes me wonder if perhaps we are undervaluing the social media / internet piece of this. Maybe that is a driving force causing polarization, the idea that "others" are evil or illegitimate, etc... conditions in which fascism and authoritarianism can thrive.

Sure. The most critical thing to remember is that politics is the study of power and precious few people will willingly accede to less of it.

And so things that seem extremely prosaic, acceptable and non-controversial like "science," "facts," "meritocracy" and "democracy" become extremely debatable if not downright undesirable once they become useless to people. Non-religious secular facts, democracy, the scientific method only emerged BECAUSE they served purposes for humans. They're not just part of the human condition. Once they don't serve uses, people will try to dispense of them. I think that gets lost of people who see the modern American landscape and wonder aloud why people are so hostile to modernity, to science, to sober fact-based reporting. Whatever, that type of ****. Well, if those things aren't serving people, what good are they, anyway?

And so I think this is an important recognition that some of the backlash is rational and predictable. The right wing are increasingly and utterly deplorable but you can understand the social forces that make them that way.* Being old enough to remember the 1990s, I think it's important note we sort of all *saw this coming.* I distinctly remember real debates, even like plots of the ****ing West Wing where people are like "hey uhh, free trade, liberalism, global competition, capitalism -- we might produce a pretty strong backlash" and the smarmy liberal types and the chattering capitalist and pundit class would be like "nah it'll be solid, there will be job retraining and everyone is going to be enamored with cheap technology, they won't even notice." What a time to be alive back then, those memes were everywhere, just like some edge tinkering here and a head-pat there and everyone is going to love the emerging global order where significant portions of the population would lose status and privilege and would land somewhere less than they expect and just go along and be happy and not bother anyone too much.

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*A lot of liberals, leftists, etc. don't seem to even want to grant THAT (that meta, collective social forces are taking bad people and making them worse) but I wonder aloud what any of these people would want out of politics if this wasn't true.

Easiest explanation for why its happening now is Obama being a focal point imo. Also the complete failure by the dems and neoliberalism during and after the great recession certainly didn't help. People always blame the president for bad economic situations, so thats standard, but now the President is ALSO BLACK, so that blame gets racialized. People's lives got much worse, didn't really ever recover at all, and they were looking for someone to blame and were directed at the black President who clearly was helping out all of the black and brown people and not good white Americans.

The social media focus that I see discussed is usually about how it puts people in a bubble, which certainly is true. However, there is a lot of research in how social media can make people depressed because you are constantly being exposed to sanitized and exaggerated versions of other people's lives where everyone else is always living the best life, partying with friends, on cool vacations, etc. It is depressing when seemingly all of your "social network" has lives that seem much more awesome and rewarding than yours, because you are not viewing a person's day to day life, merely what they choose to post about themselves. Extrapolate that to society, and you have people constantly seeing how great everyone else's lives are, while their own life is terrible by comparison, which not only causes depression, but also resentment. And given that marginalized groups like POCs, women, LGBTQ, etc have the ability to be more visible through social media than they would have been previously, now its easy to look at those people and their amazingly rewarding social media lives and blame them for your life being bad.

tl;dr white resentment

Right, but to DVaut's point, that doesn't explain the global trend. That only works for America. Brazil and Hungary and Poland didn't all just elect a black President for the first time. Something else is happening.

Also notable: Turkey, Poland, the Czech Republic has their own Trumpy prime minister (Andrej Babis), UKIP/Brexit. increasing vote shares for far right parties in the Nordic region/Netherlands, Le Pen lost in France in 2017 but doubled her vote total from 2012. South Korea's right wing party had a Trump style guy as their Presidential nominee last year, rather than a more orthodox conservative type. The BJP in India (a nationalist, right party) won a majority of seats for the first time in 2014 and there's basically no official opposition party to them at the moment. Duterte in the Philippines. Oh, and Russia.

Lots of examples.

Also interesting is that a lot of these populist right or nationalist parties are rising/ascendant or were recently but are winning without much popular support, if that sounds familiar. The BJP's victories in India were because almost all of their opposition fractured.

I think we're seeing the same phenomenon globally: it's not just that the far right is ascendant but that the moderate right and center right parties are failing everywhere, too, and the nascent liberal/left divide (also playing out similar to the US) is leaving a space open for the far right to operate.

Something to notice about the brazilian elections is that the vote is mandatory. you are fined if you don't vote. even then, 28% of them didn't vote. I was talking about that on reddit and they suggested facultative voting, like in the US. But I think if that was the case it would be even easier for these guys to get elected, just like it happened with Trump.

Can't they just submit blank ballots to avoid the fine?

Yes. but I don't see your point. My point is that people are too lazy to vote even if they are fined if they don't. So that would be increased if they didn't have to.
During election period lots of candidates throw papers on the streets with their names and numbers on them. This is not allowed but they still do it. worse than that, people who wouldn't likely vote if they didn't have to tend to get these papers from the ground and vote for these guys, because they have no idea who to vote for, they just didn't care enough to look them up. So by doing that, they are actually electing the worst candidates possible, those that showed that they don't care about the law and threw papers all around the streets.

This is the entry for one of the voting locations:



So you can only imagine the candidates do it on purpose because they know stupid voters will pick them up.

Brazillian classmates in NYC: that's why we're working so hard to get a job here.

I’d say social media is more an accelerant. The driving force is the totalitarian nature of government and the way it’s interjecting itself into every sphere of our lives.

Take religion for example. In the U.S. the various religious factions along with atheists co-exist in relative peace and harmony, despite the varying views and beliefs. Now imagine what would happen to that harmony and the country if the government were to ban religion or establish a state religion based on one of those sects. I’d argue it would be just as noxious as what we’re currently experiencing between the various political factions.