The virus is spreading
by digby
In Brazil’s presidential contest, the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right Brazilian congressman who defends torture and the country’s former military dictatorship, is getting a boost from former Trump campaign CEO and White House adviser Steve Bannon, as well as Michele Bachmann, the former congresswoman from Minnesota.
Bolsonaro, who is allied with Brazil’s increasingly powerful conservative evangelicals in addition to the moneyed and military elite, is also anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ-equality, and anti-abortion. His platform pledges to combat “gender ideology” in schools.
In 2014, Brazilian-based American journalist Glenn Greenwald called Bolsonaro “the most misogynistic, hateful elected official in the democratic world,” noting that Bolsonaro had more than once had publicly told Congresswoman Maria do Rosário that she wasn’t even worth raping. Bolsonaro once said that he would rather his son die in a car accident than be gay.
Some of the cultural and political forces that helped propel Trump into power could do the same for Bolsonaro. Widespread disgust with crime and legislative corruption and ineptitude create favorable conditions for a law-and-order candidate. Bolsonaro has reportedly promised bonuses to police officers for killing criminals. He has praised Chile’s dictator Pinochet, who killed thousands, for doing “what had to be done.”
In addition, Brazil has been through a period of intense economic and political turmoil. In 2016, the heavily evangelical “Bullets, Beef and Bible” congressional caucus voted to oust President Dilma Rousseff, a move that is widely considered to be “more coup than impeachment—an ideologically driven attempt to impose a conservative evangelical agenda on Brazilian politics,” according to demographer Peter David Arnould Wood, writing in U.S. News and World Report. During the congressional vote to impeach Rousseff, Bolsonaro taunted her by dedicating his impeachment vote to the colonel who ran the unit where she was tortured during the military dictatorship.
This month, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a Brazilian legislator, announced that Bannon would be an advisor to his father’s campaign. He said Bannon would offer suggestions on data analysis and use of the internet, but that the arrangement did not include anything “financial.” Earlier in the month, Eduardo had tweeted a picture of himself with Bannon and declared that they would “join forces” against “cultural Marxism.” Probably not coincidentally, the elder Bolsonaro announced recently that if he is elected he will pull Brazil out of the Paris climate agreement. Brazil has the largest economy in Latin America, and ninth in the world.
It sounds like he would be competing with Trump and Rodrigo Duterte the president of the Philippines, for who can be the crudest, most depraved demagogue on the planet.
Bannon is a dangerous person. It’s not a good idea to dismiss him as a clown or a crank. He’s all over the world rubbing shoulders with the worst right wing tyrants in the world. He hasn’t been secret about his plans. I wrote about this well over a year ago:
“Trump is a ‘blunt instrument for us, I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.’” The “us” to whom he refers? The white nationalist, neofascist movement he helped to popularize at Breitbart News, which he called the “platform for the alt-right.”
Indeed, Bannon wore not one, but two button-down black shirts for that interview. Considering that some of his most important intellectual influences are fascists and white nationalists, that may just be his own personal tribute to the previous blackshirt movement he claims to have studied. One of his favorite philosophers, the fascistic Italian writer Julius Evola, thought Mussolini wasn’t extreme enough.
According to Joshua Green, who wrote “Devil’s Bargain,” the recent book about Bannon, Trump and the 2016 election, Bannon claims to believe that the world is entering a very dark phase which was caused by the Enlightenment and can only be averted by adoption of a belief system called “primordial Traditionalism,” one of the progenitors of fascism. Evola thought it was a pretty darned good system:
There are positive and valuable aspects. Those which I could value are the reconstruction of the authority of the state and the idea of overcoming class conflict toward a hierarchical and corporative formation, to some extent, of a military and disciplined style within the nation, in addition to some of their anti-bourgeois proposals. To me, all of that is positive.
Green says:
[Bannon] is trying to not only take over American politics, but look at what he’s doing in places like the European Union. He’s trying to destroy what he would call these globalist edifices, which he believes [are] a manifestation of the rise of modernity and something that needs to be destroyed to pull us back to a pre-Enlightenment era.
Not that he’s ambitious, mind you.
We can ignore this global trend if we choose. But it doesn’t seem wise.
Oh, and look who’s on board:
Either during or just after the visit, [Michelle] Bachmann recorded a video message that was posted online urging Brazilian voters “to only vote for a candidate for the president of Brazil who will support moving the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem.” Bachmann explains:
That’s in agreement with God’s word. God is very clear in the Bible that His throne is established in Jerusalem. For three thousand five hundred years, God has designated Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It’s a fact! And so we know from the Bible that those nations and those individuals who bless Israel will also be blessed themselves, and they’ll prosper. We want Brazil to be blessed. We want Brazil to prosper. Therefore, make sure when you vote, you only vote for a candidate who will move the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem. It will be a blessing to you and a blessing to Brazil.
There’s little doubt which candidate Bachmann is talking about.
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