Are you a woman? Are you part of the LGBTQ+ community? Are you a person of colour? Are you a Muslim? If you ticked any of those boxes, welcome to 2018, where you are now an enemy of the people. From the Philippines to Uganda to Hungary via Germany, France and Great Britain. From America to Brazil, via Australia. It’s truly global now. If you found Trump odious, Jair Bolsonaro will make your skin crawl.
I grew up in an age of unprecedented optimism. The 1990s have rightly been called the halcyon days of globalization when capitalist democracies were seen as the only way forward. Where multiculturalism thrived, and toleration, empathy and community were emphasized. Fukuyama wrote about the end of history.
Or should I take off those rose-tinted glasses? Rwanda, Srebrenica. Matthew Sheppard. Anita Hill. The warning signs were there. Huntington was right – the clash of civilisations was on the horizon. Since the end of the cold war, the world order has shifted from bi-polar, to uni-polar and now multi-polar.
America and Russia split the duties for a few generations, the Americans ruled the 1980s and 1990s, and then 9/11 shattered the calm. China and Russia are back, the Middle East is emerging, as is Latin America. A multi-polar world replete with confusing alliances. Who exactly is on who’s side in Syria again? Is that World War One calling? Do they want their intractable alliances back yet? Who’s our Franz Ferdinand? No, not the band.
The lessons from history are not kind. In the 1920s armed communist and fascist militias clashed in the streets in Italy and Germany. That’s now a regular feature of civil discourse in North America. Fascists and Anti Fascists. Targeted bombings and assassinations? Rampant anti-semitism? Is this the 1890s? Part of the calculus from the fascists was to incite the violence, to sow disorder, to guarantee the state would intervene on their side. It’s what they want. So they can justify law and order. And cracking down on dissent. Our dissent.
————————
Brazil has only been a democracy for a generation. In many senses, Brazil is a mirror for America. It is enormous, tremendously resource-rich and multicultural. There are deep historical cleavages in civil society between the conservative elite religious land-owning class and the working classes. There is an unresolved legacy with slavery and fundamental tensions with racism. After the American Civil War, thousands of defeated Southerners moved south to Brazil to maintain the Confederacy – as Brazil did not abolish slavery until the late 1880s.
As is almost always the case, economic crises bring out all the cleavages in a society. Brazil has been no exception, and Jair Bolsonaro has been quick to capitalise.
Jair Bolsonaro is a fascist in every sense of the word. He advocates for strong, authoritarian leadership and exalts the state over the individual, which happen to be central tenants of fascism. He has called for violence against his political opponents. His running mate is a retired General from the military dictatorship years who has refused to rule out a return to the dictatorship. He joined the military as a young man during the dictatorship years and rose to the rank of captain. After the return to democracy in the late 1980s he became a cabinet minister and was renowned for his fiery, passionate, yet racist, sexist and homophobic speeches.
His support comes from segments of the population that won’t surprise you if you’ve been paying attention to politics in America and Canada. He’s supported by evangelical conservatives, landowners, business people and the army. Brazil has been in an economic crisis for a half decade. Which has led to skyrocketing crime rates? Bolsonaro is a man of law and order. He views the dictatorship years from the 1960s to the 1980s quite favourably.
Listing his reprehensible statements is actually exhausting. He has said he would rather have a dead son than a gay one and that he’d fight two men in the street if he saw them kissing. He said that Afro-Brazilians are not suitable for procreation, called immigrants scum and promised to seize indigenous and Afro-Brazilian land for industrialists. He has been charged by the judiciary with inciting hatred thanks to his racist, sexist and homophobic remarks. He once told a fellow congresswoman that she was too ugly to rape. He uses the coded language of the new conservative movement. He attacks the “elites”. He says he stands for the “people”. The honest, hard working decent people. Ring a bell?
In August of this year, a similarly pugnacious and morally reprehensible authoritarian politician made a remark in the Philippines. “They said there are many rape cases in Davao,” the president said. “As long as there are many beautiful women, there will be more rape cases.” The same authoritarian politician has boasted about murdering drug addicts in the street.
On the campaign trail in 2016, a similarly pugnacious and morally reprehensible authoritarian politician made a remark about grabbing women. And doubled down on it. And has repeatedly attacked people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, women and Muslims.
For those keeping track, there’s a obvious trend here. These authoritarian leaders prey on insecurities. They invoke the stark and angry language of law and order. They scapegoat minorities. And they were all democratically elected.
Adolf Hitler was democratically elected. He was seen as a fringe candidate by the mainstream political elites of the time. In the 1932 election, Hitler won 37% of the popular vote. The mainstream social democrats and communists split the progressive vote. As a compromise, the German elites picked Hitler as chancellor. They assumed they could control him. They figured he would start acting like a proper leader once in power. They, like the Trump apologists today, implored us to ignore the over-the-top rhetoric. It was all a show, they said.
———————————
Why has there been a backlash against globalization and social progressivism? We see it everywhere. From Doug Ford’s conservatives here in Ontario scaling back workers protections and changing the sex-ed curriculum. The entire Kavanaugh debacle down south providing a wicked anecdote about the cyclical nature of society. Shouts Anita Hill.
The easy answer is economics. Milton Friedman and his merry band of profiteering snake-oil salesman pitched a new vision in the 1970s. One that thoroughly repudiated the welfare state. One that emphasized individual profits over collective wealth. One that disregarded the natural environment and marginalized communities. One sold to us as “trickle-down economics”. One that was meant to provide wealth to everyone.
It was actually class warfare. Neoliberal economics intended to redistribute wealth. Upwards. To the 1%. It was a process to restore the economic elites. These are not opinions, these are facts. Shouts to Piketty.
Oh but facts are dead too. Post-truth, amirite?? A new report came out a few days ago… 17 percent of people over 65 are able to identity objective facts. Actually. Orwell wrote about this generations ago, it’s not new.
We’ve been here before.
We were here in the French Revolution. Land-owning elites against the peasants. Liberal city-dwellers against the clergy. Did you know the terms “left wing” and “right wing” were invented in the French revolution? Did you know that at the core, a “left winger” is deeply suspicious of hierarchies, while a “right winger” believes them to be natural? And that fundamental dichotomy has characterized western-style “representative democracies” ever since the French Revolution. After the French Revolution the military took over to re-establish law and order, and the monarchy was eventually re-installed. We’ve been here before.
We’ve been here in the late 1800s. Decades of economic crises, and endless political violence between the leftists and rightists. Neither trusting the other, neither viewing the other side as worthy.
We were here in 1912. We’re making another Titanic, because, obviously.
We were here in 1919. We tried to strike for worker protections and minimum wage laws. It almost worked.
We were here in 1929 when the economy fell apart because of speculation and rampant Wall Street greed.
We were here in 1939 refusing refugees fleeing death and destruction.
Economic crises almost always lead to conflict. Which starts with scapegoating. Scapegoating other. As soon as you decide someone is other, then you dehumanize them and can justify and rationalise doing awful, terrible inhuman things. Here in the West, we have our identity politics, our tribes. It still rankles that the Republicans were able to corner the anti-globalization debate and elect an anti-globalization President who was literally lying through his teeth the entire time. But the politics of tribalism are deep, and we are still but tribal animals. We know our tribe and we stick with them. And we scapegoat other. For how else to we unify. We construct myths. Nationalisms. Chris Hedges has a wicked passage in War is a Force that Gives us Meaning drawing on his experience in the Balkans in the 1990s, where neighbours turned on neighbours because of nationalist myths. Myths are not truths. But we’ve been over that. Post-truth. Tribes and myths. Either you’re in our you’re out. The lessons from history aren’t kind.
In the 1920s and 1930s, it was the Jews, the LGBTQ+ community, socialists and women and people of colour who were intentionally scapegoated by the Fascists in Italy and Germany. The clergy, the industrialists, the wealthy and the businesspeople stood on the other side. The RIGHT side.
We’ve been here before.
There’s an old imperial tactic – one that lends itself well to domination by a small elite. It’s called divide and conquer. The British Empire was especially good at it. They would favour one group in society over all others, so as to stoke resentments between the groups. The last thing they wanted were for their imperial subjects to realise they were stronger together collectively organizing.
The same tactic was used for generations to destroy the labour movement. We have now been fully atomized and individuated. Collective action seems a lifetime away. Occupy touched a real nerve. Its’ messaging was on point. There is a 1% of people who are much wealthier and much more powerful than the rest of us. And that 1% does everything they can to keep themselves in power, be it through politics or economics. It’s fact. In a post-truth world.
They infiltrated and discredited Occupy. It was too dangerous. It threatened their status quo. Who are they? The economic elites. The 1%. The same old imperial forces that stifled the French Revolution. The land-owning conservative religious elites. THe same people that are supporting Bolsonaro, that supported Duterte and Trump. That supported Hitler and Mussolini.
We’ve been here before.
Tuko Pamoja,
Rashid
