a vast right-wing conspiracy, if you will...
The Future of the Far Right [
ungated] - "We misread the far right by taking its discourse at face value. It is an error to believe Trump, Bolsonaro et al when they speak of taking a step back from 'globalism', of returning to a Fordist dream of industrial jobs, turning back the clock on the sexual revolution and re-sacralising the nuclear family and traditional gender roles. These ideas have an obvious psychological appeal to certain voters, but they are not borne out by the actions of the contemporary far right. On the contrary, it is a movement that feeds off the social disintegration produced by decades of neoliberalism, and accelerates that process towards a certain horizon." (
via)
In my book, I characterise this horizon as a "privately managed, differentially distributed state of nature": a situation in which the state relinquishes ever more responsibility for mediating social conflict and instead enshrines the rule of brute force.
Let me provide one revealing example. In 2019, illegal loggers in the Amazonian state of Rondônia set fire to a fuel truck serving a federal enforcement operation, which then had to be called off; two weeks later the environment minister travelled to the town to meet the loggers and hear their demands. The explicit message was: 'I'm on your side. It's okay if you burn government property, kill the Indigenous people whose land you are logging and collaborate with the drug traffickers who use the same routes – all of that is private enterprise, and we don't interfere with private enterprise.' The same idea informs Trump's relationship with Big Tech.
This can take the form of what I have called "overseer capitalism". In plantation economies like Brazil and the American South, policing was a public function that grew out of a private one. The overseer hired to discipline the plantation workforce became, after abolition, the police officer keeping the freed men and women in place. Today that public function is turning private once again. Wagner and Blackwater, the narcos in Mexico, the militias in Rio – such non-state actors increasingly exercise the monopoly of force over the areas they control. Overseer capitalism entails the alliance between capital and these free agents of repression, who join the coalition not merely as guns for hire but as equal political partners. Such a convergence was presaged in the first Bolsonaro government and could easily establish itself under Flávio.
It's clear why the powerful would be attracted to such a model that promises them untrammelled enjoyment of power. But why do the weakest also vote for it? Because of the psychological compensations included in the package. The promise is: 'even if you remain hyper-exploited at your job, even if your life expectations are daily shrinking, we will ensure that there is at least one sphere of life in which your power runs free. At home, you can take it out on your wife or your kids, no one will interfere; and no one can tell you not to make jokes about Black people or gay people.'
Crisis unresolved - "One way to understand the class alliance that has coalesced around this project is to think of it as the meeting of those who have given up waiting for the promises of modernization to be realized, and those who have stopped pretending that the promises they made were real."
On one side, there are those juggling several jobs, working informally or in the gig economy, dealing with the economic downturn of the post-2015 period, strained public services and unaccountable institutions. To these, Bolsonarismo offers, if not clear material advantages, the promise that, if they cannot count on the state, the state will at least get off their backs, leaving them free to manage their own risks as they see fit. Bolsonarismo also offers the unhindered exercise of whatever little power they have, in however small a sphere that may be — even if it is just by telling jokes about minorities.
To Brazilian elites, on the other hand, and particularly those in agribusiness and extractive industries, Bolsonaro offers the same, but writ large: predatory capitalism outside any control. Between these two groups, there is a middle class that is bitter from losing some of its markers of social distinction vis-a-vis the ascendant poor; from this milieu come some of the most ardent Bolsonaristas and many of the political entrepreneurs that have made a career out of far-right agitation.
Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right by
Rodrigo Nunes - "Through the lens of Bolsonarismo, Rodrigo Nunes zeros in on the challenge that the enduring success of the far right forces the left to face, in Brazil and beyond: How do we reckon with the appeal of political actors who promise radical positive change while reassuring their own supporters that they, and only they, won't need to change their ways? To put it in the words of the author, how do bold leftists convince a majority of people that, instead of hating particular categories of players, they should hate the game, when their opponents thrive on telling voters that hating other players can spare them the hazardous work of changing the game? To start answering that question seriously and intransigently,
Anatomy of Disintegration is a must read."
cf.
Frances Fukuyama on 'patrimonial capitalism' - "Megalothymia. So that is the desire to be recognized as greater than other people. I think that this is obviously a threat in a democracy because a liberal democracy is based on the premise that all people, all citizens are essentially equal. But that's not enough for a certain group, a certain subset of human beings. They want to dominate. They want to be more than others. It takes often times a very negative form of political domination. So you want to be a dictator or an autocrat." (
The return of "patrimonial capitalism")
EK: Trump appears a couple of times in End of History and the Last Man. But when he emerges into politics, he emerges as something other than simply an icon of capitalist success. He emerges as somebody bringing a renewed nationalism, a renewed belief in borders, a belief in maybe more traditional hierarchies in America. And over time he emerges in your telling as somebody who is either proposing or modeling a different form of government, a different regime, not just a different leader. You've described him as repatrimonializing the government. What does that mean?
FF: So let's begin with another bit of psychology. It's not natural to favor a well-qualified stranger over your relatives or your friends. It's a very natural human desire to want to reward friends and family. So most states in human history were patrimonial, meaning that they basically were run for the benefit of the rulers. It was the ruler's household, the friends and family of the ruler that were given privileges and were able to enrich themselves. And the reason you went into politics was to enrich yourselves. And I think that every society that has managed to create modern state institutions that are impersonal has had this constant backsliding temptation because the rulers themselves would like their friends and family to be favored...
We're doing that right now. You know, instead of professional diplomats handling our Middle East policy, you get Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, two friends and family of Donald Trump, and you're paying the price for it because a modern state really does need meritocratic, impersonal people running the state apparatus.
EK: Are you surprised how easy it was for Trump to begin to build or rebuild that structure in a system that seemed just choked with rules and procedures to keep that from happening?
FF: Yeah, I'm totally astounded that the American people don't seem to really care that much. I mean maybe in the fullness of time there'll be some accountability, but yeah, I would not have expected that the degree of corruption that exists in the current administration would have been tolerable to mainstream Republicans.
viz. "This is the apparatus of mass enslavement - here, or abroad. Deportations first, then work camps when the nonprofit organizations that fight for immigrant rights are weakened enough and the press is captured enough and the population is surveilled enough that it won't lead to mass protest in the streets."
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