What I learned from my country’s “Donald Trump” and its extreme-right swing — Part 1
I am not a political analyst of any sort, just to be clear. However, I have witnessed a phenomenon in my country that several proper political analysts compared to Donald Trump in the US.
This is definitely a heated topic, but I think by telling you my learnings from my “Donald Trump,” I can contribute to America’s conversation today.
Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 with a controversial right-wing platform. He presented himself as an alternative to the ‘radical and corrupt’ left taking over Brazil and getting us closer to the feared Venezuela Communist Scenario. He was a low-level congressman whose main deed up to that point had been his interviews in comic trash tv, along with a bunch of homophobic, racist, and authoritarian remarks that were tragic and laughable.
In the year before his election, he paid an hommage to a notable military-dictatorship torturer on the Congress Floor, compared ex-slaves descendants to “fat lazy bulls,” and vouched to kill/slaughter/torture anyone that resembled “communists.” 2018 was a dramatic campaign year, with families turning against each other, friends ceasing to talk, and racist memes populating Facebook and Whatsapp.
Sounds familiar?
Now, I don’t want to rant about Bolsonaro or explain why I was disgusted by his morals, his posture, and campaign. I am more interested in telling you what happened after he got elected.
On an objective level, the country changed — and for worse. We started experiencing the radicalization of the political scene, relaxed environmental regulations with tangible global consequences, and the dismantling of significant anti-corruption efforts. In 2020, a Bolsonaro government meant tragic handling of the pandemic. The president fired its popular Health Minister because he was getting ‘too important’ due to the excellent pandemic response he was putting together. The economic recovery, the part of Bolsonaro’s platform that guaranteed him the business community’s support, was very much underwhelming, and today there are lots of corporate voices that recognize they made a mistake.
Not surprisingly, this whole downward shift started to inspire different conversations. A string of analyses was published to ‘explain’ why the heck we ended up with that individual in power. Political analysts, newspapers, magazines, and academics started to speak up, and a widespread consensus interpretation of the scenario was formed. According to those people, Bolsonaro was actually a response to the social-democratic governments’ neglect of law enforcement and corruption fighting.
It is an objective truth that the proportion of the Union budget that was destined to law-enforcement dramatically decreased in the two democratic decades. In some cities, that statistic was very much felt in real life: 3 in 10 people living in Rio de Janeiro in 2017 witnessed a shooting in the streets at some point. The city was taken over by drug gangs, and it became increasingly hard for all social classes to live. Also, despite visible advancements, the Labor Party governments orchestrated the greatest corruption scandal in all Brazilian history, where more than 8 billion USD were stolen from public funds.
Brazil was a mess, in many ways, and Bolsonaro was presenting an alternative. He represented this ‘old school’ person that would definitely be tough on the bad guys, disciplining this wild and corrupt nation once and for all. Evangelical priests that controlled a significant part of the popular vote side-lined with him, providing a needed moral endorsement.
According to the intellectuals, those ingredients explained the rise of a Bolsonaro government at this point in time.
My reflections about those analyses brought me the most significant learnings from the Bolsonaro period.
Over the few months after these theses came up, I saw lots of intellectual friends endorsing them. They also pointed out that Bolsonaro was much more relatable to the vast majority of the Brazilian population than any other presidential candidate ever.
And for a long time, this was enough reasoning for me. That’s it, it’s a process, it’s unfortunate, Brazilians are dumb, just swallow it.
But at some point, the simplicity of all those thoughts started to get me.
It made sense to explain an election by a process that had been happening in the most recent years. However, I still couldn’t get past the fact that all those voters ignored the homages to torture, the disregard for black lives, and the authoritarian speech so quickly. I mean, how fed up you must be to accept as president somebody that calls homosexual faggots and publically state some women ‘deserve to be raped’?
I had my intellectual friends call me naive when I pointed that out. After all, they said, the majority of people in Brazil are “brute, delayed, and sexist.” But even if that was the case, it seemed to me the productive conversation was not why Bolsonaro got elected in 2020, but rather why, despite showing an authoritarian, unempathetic, and cruel side, people still cut him a slack and voted for him. Additionally, if I was willing to admit that people related to Bolsonaro, then the question was even more concerning: why did Brazilians see themselves in that monster?
The biggest mistake that I made after 2018 was spending so much time studying the 10 years pre-Bolsonaro or thinking about why he was relatable. The real question I should have been asking was: if he displayed all those horrendous things and still got elected, what kind of dark values still exist in the Brazilian society that allow such a phenomenon to happen?
I want to inspire my American friends not to make the same mistake I made when analyzing the whys behind Bolsonaro.
More specifically, I believe the real question is not why Donald Trump got elected in 2016 and received 72M votes in 2020. The real problem is what is still there in American society that allows it to happen.
In my next post, I will be writing about my thinking process for the Brazilian case, hoping that this helps my American friends do a reflection exercise.
Hopefully, Donald Trump is a loophole in the decency of a decent system. Maybe he is just a glitch. But if he is still so popular, something tells me there is more to that. And while it may seem more manageable, it feels a bit simplistic to think he got elected because millions of Americans are cruel and dishonest.
