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daniel ortega
Steve Bannon's Archipelago and the Rise of the Global Populist Right
The burning flames of political climate change
May 13, 2019
In the Americas, the Trump tsunami has swept across both continents and the "pink tide" of progressivism has all but disappeared from the southern half of the hemisphere. In Europe, with the recent exception of Spain, the left has been banished to the political margins. In Africa and Asia, socialism has devolved into nationalism, authoritarianism, or just plain corruption. And forget about the Middle East.
In this planet-wide rising tide of right-wing populism, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands -- Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Uruguay. In so many other places, increasingly illiberal leaders are in charge. Add up the numbers and significantly more than half the world's population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule, courtesy of Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China, among others
Optimists cling to the pendulum theory of politics: conservatives are now basking in the limelight, but the day will come when the right inevitably falls on its face and the left swings back into action; witness the results of the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States.
"Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Putin, Trump, and their ilk should indeed be understood as the political equivalent of global warming. Instead of deadly carbon, they spew hateful invective and show a remarkable determination to destroy a far-from-perfect status quo."In addition, pragmatists point out that many of these latter-day autocrats, for all their anti-democratic tendencies, came to power through elections. Yes, they have since sought to change constitutions, pack courts, muzzle the media, and crack down on civil society, but they remain constrained by the guardrails of the more-or-less liberal political systems they still run. In the end, so goes such thinking, democracy will prevail. Look at how, over time, some right-wing populists have been dislodged at the polls (Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia), brought down by corruption scandals (Alberto Fujimori in Peru), or forced to resign in disgrace (Silvio Berlusconi in Italy).
Optimists and pragmatists alike ultimately have faith that democracies are self-regulating organisms, not unlike the Earth's ecosystem. The planet has managed to survive countless asteroid strikes, solar flares, and extreme weather conditions. Democracy, too, will outlast Hurricane Donald and all the other examples of extreme political weather, thanks, sooner or later, to woke voters and resilient mechanisms of checks and balances.
Unfortunately, given the malign impact humans are having on the planet, this analogy is far less reassuring than it once might have been. Only the willfully ignorant expect that some natural oscillation in global temperature or the Earth's own adjustments to its climate feedback loops will arrive in time to save us. Humankind has clearly thrown a spanner into the works and now faces a distinctly difficult, if not disastrous, future. Similarly, across the globe, the electoral pendulum appears to be stuck on the side of reaction and the new generation of right-wing populists could well be on the verge of changing the political playing field, just as humans are in the process of irrevocably transforming the planet.
Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Putin, Trump, and their ilk should indeed be understood as the political equivalent of global warming. Instead of deadly carbon, they spew hateful invective and show a remarkable determination to destroy a far-from-perfect status quo. Moreover, they are the product not of farting livestock or extraterrestrial events but of the self-interested acts of blinkered humans. In an increasingly restrictive political space, liberals and progressives are looking ever more like so many polar bears on ever fewer ice floes, with diminishing room for maneuver.
Don't bet on politics as usual to lower the temperature and put a stop to this moment's tidal surge of ugly intolerance. Because the nature of the game has changed, those who oppose the global New Right must engage in a strategic rethink -- or we'll all drown in the rising waters.
The Game Changers
Today's autocrats are, at first glance, a diverse band of brothers.
In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte has attacked the Catholic Church for defending the sanctity of human life and challenging his campaign of extrajudicial murder. In Nicaragua, one-time revolutionary Daniel Ortega has courted the Catholic Church as a pillar of his undemocratic rule. Vladimir Putin presents himself and his country as saviors of Christianity, while Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to promote his own brand of political Islam, Narendra Modi has ridden to power thanks to Hindu nationalism, and Xi Jinping eschews religion altogether. Some right-wing nationalists like Bolsonaro have ambitious plans to privatize state assets, while others, like those in Italy's current leadership, want to nationalize major properties. Hungary's Viktor Orban is concerned about climate change, but most right-wing populists like Donald Trump insist that the threat doesn't exist and want to extract ever more fossil fuels.
Don't be fooled, though. While these leaders may not rhyme, they all dance to the same rhythm.
These illiberal politicians have uniformly come to power by attacking globalization. They have criticized the neo-liberal transformations of the recent past that enriched the few at the expense of the many, while challenging the major political parties of the center left and center right that implemented the economicreforms that unleashed such forces. They have taken aim at the corruption that has metastasized in political systems already ill equipped to handle a massive uptick in cross-border financial transactions. When politically useful, they have demonized immigrants and refugees who are one side effect of, as well as victims of, that very burgeoning globalization movement. They have championed national sovereignty against the interventions of multilateral organizations, while blasting multicultural values and the human-rights groups that promote them. And they have taken advantage of social media like Facebook and Twitter that promote a version of participatory totalitarianism in which individuals can freely relinquish their privacy and abandon conventional news media for daily dispatches from their favorite celebrity autocrat.
Election results in the world's most populous democracies suggest that liberalism -- in its free-market economic form and its more tolerant, inclusive, and statist political version - has become discredited at a popular level. A quick glance at the titles of some recent books (Why Liberalism Failed, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, How Democracies Die, What Was Liberalism) reveals that the chattering classes, too, have noticed this global trend.
The Trumps of this world have cannily identified a fundamental shift in the political playing field, rushing into the gap created by the declining popularity of liberal values. Viktor Orban set an early example of such opportunism when, in the 1990s, he jettisoned his liberal past and opted instead for the right side of the Hungarian political spectrum. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the left and right had alternated in power as voters became disgusted with whatever party controlled the levers of state. By successfully linking all the ills facing the country to liberals and their follies, however, Orban became the one to preside over a genuine transformation of the political landscape. The premier liberal party, the Alliance of Free Democrats, effectively disappeared when he became prime minister in 2010 -- and formally dissolved three years later. Almost a decade after he first took office, the only serious opposition to Orban is to his right.
"The Trumps of this world have cannily identified a fundamental shift in the political playing field, rushing into the gap created by the declining popularity of liberal values."
The last time globalization transformed the world so thoroughly, in the early twentieth century, the ensuing backlash led to liberalism's first catastrophic fail. In those years, liberals consistently failed to understand that the ground had shifted under them. In Russia, Bolsheviks took power from the weak crew of potential democratic reformers that had overthrown the tsar, inspiring a handful of movements in Europe that attempted something similar. In Germany, illiberal politicians took aim at the cosmopolitan values of the Weimar Republic. In Italy and Spain, leaders adopted virulent nationalism, challenging incipient global institutions like the League of Nations. In the wake of the Great Depression, Japanese ultra-militarists easily dispatched the weak Taisho democracy. Meanwhile, in the United States, right-wing demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin built large followings by railing on the radio against communists, Wall Street, and "the international money-changers in the temple," though they failed to take power in the era of a charismatic liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Where liberalism survived, it did so largely by absorbing some of the strategies of the illiberal communists and fascists, namely relying on the state to keep the economy afloat, as Roosevelt did with his New Deal policies. This lesson carried over into the post-World War II-era in which American liberals continued to embrace New Deal principles that would culminate in President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs and European liberals embraced the compromises that would eventually produce the European Union. At the global level, nations of various ideological dispositions came together to create a set of institutions -- the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund -- meant to ensure some degree of permanent stability. Economic globalization resumed, but this time in a regulatory environment that, initially, seemed to spread the benefits more equally.
That all changed in the 1970s when, in one country after another, a new generation of liberals and conservatives began to dismantle those very regulations in hopes that an unfettered market would jump-start growth globally. However, only after China embraced capitalism and the Soviet Union collapseddideconomic globalization take a quantum leap to true globalization. With it the world returned to Gilded Age levels of concentrated wealth and inequality. No surprise, then, that the instability and intolerance of that long-gone era has returned as well.
Leaders like Putin, Erdogan, and Trump aren't just politically savvy, nor have they simply been lucky or unusually ruthless. Instead, they sensed the changing mood of a moment and were able to capitalize on a profound discontent with the status quo that liberals had built, a discontent that won't disappear simply because right-wing populists are exposed as frauds, incompetents, or cheats. Worse, crafty operators with even more ambitious agendas stand ready to destroy the liberal status quo once and for all.
The Bannon Archipelago
A Nationalist International should be a contradiction in terms, but that hasn't stopped Steve Bannon from trying to create one. The erstwhile publisher and moviemaker, darling of the alt-right, and one-time Trump whisperer is on an extended world tour aimed at building a loose network of right-wing populists that he calls the Movement. It's centered in -- of all places -- Brussels, the home of the European Union.
Bannon hopes to take advantage of post-Brexit Euroskepticism to roll his Trojan horse of a movement into the very heart of the enemy's camp. With the encouragement of various right-wing oligarchs, he's already met with neo-fascists associated with groups like the Belgian Vlaams Belong, France's National Rally (the rebranded National Front), and Sweden's Democratic Party, as well as more conventional right-wing populists in Italy and Hungary. He's out to take the EU from the social democrats and pallid conservatives, the Vatican from the too-permissive Pope Francis, and the West from the clutches of immigrants and multiculturalists.
Elections for the European Parliament at the end of May should prove a testing ground for Bannon's Movement. Right now, if the polling is accurate and the Euroskeptic, populist, and far-right parties combine their efforts, they could, staggeringly enough, become the largest coalition in that body. True, some prominent right-wing parties, like Poland's Law and Justice, remain unseduced by Bannon. But it's a mistake to underestimate him, just as it was a mistake to dismiss Trump in 2016. Success can be very persuasive, as The Donald proved in his takeover of a Republican Party whose leaders initially and almost universally despised him.
But Europe is only part of Bannon's plan. For someone who has vented so much spleen at "globalists" like financier and philanthropist George Soros, Bannon is quite the internationalist. In Latin America, he's already appointed Jair Bolsonaro's youngest son as his regional representative to help build on the right's electoral successes in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay. Bannon has also partnered with a Chinese billionaire to create a Rule of Law Fund that's meant to be the point of a spear aimed at the regime in Beijing.
In search of a stable of princes, that would-be Machiavelli has also visited Japan at the invitation of the fanatical Happiness Realization Party, a political cult that embraces Japanese militarism. Israel, too, is to be part of Bannon's alt-right archipelago because the self-professed "Christian Zionist" sees Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a key link in a future anti-Islamic front. Also figuring prominently in his thinking is Russia, a vast, mostly white country led by a critic of Western liberalism and "radical Islam," though Bannon acknowledges that the Mueller report has temporarily set back his efforts.
Bannon didn't create the new right-wing populist wave, but he's been clever enough to grab a surfboard, dive into the waters, and try to guide the swell further to the right. Toward that end, he's creating what he calls a "war room." He says:
"It's what we did for Trump in the U.S.: writing op-eds, booking people on media, surrogate media -- all that. The last part of it is to do with grassroots social media and getting organized physically and getting out the vote."
This isn't, however, just a global version of Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy," an opportunistic attempt to solidify a political realignment. Bannon and his ilk have a much more ambitious project in mind. Having dismissed the current resident of the Vatican as far too liberal, Bannon has put himself forward as the pope of a new movement to fight the barbarians (as he defines them).
A lifelong Catholic and former military man, he harkens back to a much earlier papal tradition, that of Pope Urban II, who launched the First Crusade to retake Jerusalem at the end of the eleventh century. Bannon wants to recreate a pre-EU, whiter, more martial and nationalistic Europe. Like the popes and princes of the eleventh century, the right-wing populists in Europe have already been conjuring up external enemies to unify the like-minded. Islam remains a suitable adversary, whether in the form of ordinary immigrants or extraordinary terrorists. But there's China, too, which poses the greatest challenge to the West since the Middle Kingdom last ruled the world of commerce, innovation, and culture so many centuries ago. Finally, there's the enemy within: the globalists who have no patience for nationalism, the secularists who want to hold religion at arm's length, and the multiculturalists who campaign against white privilege.
This crusade of Bannon's and the far right is a last-ditch effort to maintain the United States and a large swath of Eurasia as bastions of white Christendom. For decades, those who held such views populated the extremes where they belonged. However, the economic failures of globalization, a huge uptick in refugee flows, and a general decline in faith in democratic institutions have proved fertile ground for such a new crusade to take shape.
Movement vs. Movement
In the United States, organizations like Indivisible, a progressive group created by former congressional staffers in the wake of the 2016 elections that now has 5,000 local chapters, are not waiting for the political pendulum to swing by itself. They're already working hard to push politics back to the left -- and their organizing produced results in the 2018 midterm elections when the Democratic Party retook the House of Representatives.
The 2020 presidential election, however, is a different matter. Trump now has the incumbent's advantage and, for the time being, the tailwind of a strong economy. In fact, some economic forecasters predict a landslide for him as long as the economy doesn't tank. The president's team has also made sure that areas of the country where his base is strong are experiencing greater job growth than in Democratic Party strongholds.
In addition, Trump and his minions are hard at work eroding the foundations of a democratic society -- demonizing the media, working to suppress voter turnout, chipping away at the barriers between church and state, and packing the courts with ideologues who support their agenda. The vast majority of the groups mobilizing to defeat Trump in 2020 are working with traditional tools to effect political change. Having learned from past masters of populism like Orban and Erdogan, Team Trump is instead busy changing the playing field.
That's what makes the current political moment different. The pendulum theory of political change only applies if the major electoral actors play by the same rules. The right-wing populists have, however, been busy transforming the rules of the game so that they can stay in power as long as possible, while using the levers of the state to enrich themselves and their cronies. Putin has ruled Russia for two decades. Erdogan has held onto power for 16 years. Orban is closing in on a decade in office. Even in an undemocratic country like China, Xi Jinping has altered the collective rules of succession to ensure that he will remain leader for life.
One possible response to right-wing populism would, of course, be to ramp up left-wing populism. This was a winning strategy in 2015 for the Greek political party Syriza, which has been in charge of that country for four years now. It also worked for Evo Morales, who has captained Bolivia for more than a dozen years. And, of course, Bernie Sanders came close to being the Democratic Party's standard bearer in the 2016 election while promoting his version of left-wing populism, which capitalizes on an essential political reality: passion often moves people more effectively than policy.
But it's hard to see left-wing populism as a long-term answer to the New Right. It either fails electorally, as Jean-Luc Melenchon, the standard bearer for the movement France Unbowed, discovered in that country's last presidential election; or it faces the kind of "economic realities" that forced Syriza to accommodate the austerity demands of European bureaucrats and banks; or, as Morales has demonstrated in Bolivia, it ends up presiding over the same erosion of democratic practices as its right-wing counterparts.
Yes, the nuts-and-bolts organizing of groups like Indivisible is indispensable. Yes, the passion of left-wing populists is essential. But such politicking and the mirror-image populism that sometimes goes with it are mere life preservers. They may keep us afloat, but they won't rescue us. The New Right requires a far more original kind of response.
After all, the forces that gave rise to this tidal wave of right-wing populism remain in place: widening economic inequality, surging migrant flows, ballooning corruption scandals. Parties of the center remain discredited, and liberals have not come up with convincing alternatives to the policies and institutions of globalization they created. Trying to nudge the political pendulum out of the emergency zone is a necessary but ultimately insufficient approach. It's the equivalent of expecting that a conventional fix like a gasoline tax will stop climate change. Environmentalists understand that unprecedented change requires an unprecedented response. To deal with the threat of political climate change, a similarly international, broad-based, and fundamentally new approach is called for.
So don't wait for the pendulum to swing. Don't put your faith in the guardrails. It's not time for a manifesto or a 10-point plan. It's time for a movement to counteract Bannon's Movement, a global coalition that joins people and politicians in a united, international effort to respond to the true global problems -- climate change, endless war, and economic inequality -- that threaten to overwhelm us all. Absent such a movement, the rising tide of populism will sink all boats, life preservers and all.
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'Bernie Speaks'--And Politico Hears Deviations From Cold War Orthodoxy
Politico gave us a peek at U.S. media jingoism that was past its sell-by date nearly three decades ago
May 11, 2019
Politico magazine (5/3/19) took a deep dig into Sen. Bernie Sanders' "bizarre, charming and, at times, startling cable-access TV show," Bernie Speaks With the Community--produced in the 1980s when Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. While the article and accompanying video are relatively friendly to the senator--remarking on his humor ("who knew?") and other agreeable personality quirks--writer Holly Otterbein's description of certain clips as "startling" was more eye-opening than anything Sanders actually said.
Rather than explicitly condemning any of Sanders' statements from the episodes, the piece used the dodge that other people (not us!) might use them against the presidential hopeful. Even though Politico literally paid for all 51 tapes of the show to be digitized, the piece disingenuously noted:
Whatever good it did for Bernie Sanders at the time, Bernie Speaks With the Community is now 1,667 minutes of material for opposition researchers, healthcare insurance companies and Trump's reelection campaign to pick through.
In other words: We're just gonna leave this here, with absolutely no motives, after spending hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars digitizing it for anyone who wants to watch. People are using it to attack a Democratic 2020 candidate we just happen to red-bait? Oops! So sorry, Bernie!
Otterbein went on to construct a road map of Sanders' apparently damaging statements for a hypothetical "30-second" attack ad by "his opponents":
The Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega "happens not to be a Communist." Nora Astorga, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United Nations who had recently visited Sanders, might have gotten cancer because of the "tremendous grief and suffering that's going on in her own country" caused by the war. The Soviet Union's economy is being "devastated" by military spending. And perhaps, as he proposed to a classroom of small children, Burlington should develop an exchange program with communist and socialist countries around the world. "I would like to see families--your mothers and dads and yourselves maybe--go to the Soviet Union and learn about that country, and people from there come to here," he says. "If you actually had kids here who were from Nicaragua or from the Soviet Union, and they could tell you what's going on in their own country, boy, you could learn a whole lot. And then if kids from Vermont or Burlington were in those countries, they could tell those people what was going on in their hometown."
Is it a coincidence that all of the things Politico picked out in their "short, and surely incomplete," list of supposedly damning Sanders quotes have to do with improving relations with countries the US government and corporate media have stopped at nothing to divide and conquer?
That Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega "happens not to be Communist"...happens to be true. As Jim Naureckas noted in Extra! (6/05), "Nicaragua under the Sandinistas had a mixed economy, multiple opposition parties and a vocal opposition press, features that were not found in actual Communist countries." If you actually watch the clip, Sanders' larger point is that corporate media repeat endless lies about Nicaragua--like the claim that Ortega is a dictator, regurgitated tirelessly by corporate media from the '80s unto the present day, despite his repeated victories in internationally recognized elections (Extra!, 10-11/87, 1-2/07; FAIR.org, 11/17/08, 8/23/18).
The article might have flagged Sanders' comment that "grief and suffering" could cause cancer for being a bit wacky. (Can stress cause cancer? Evidence is "weak," says the National Cancer Institute.) But there's also a suggestion that it's absurd, or at least impolitic, to suggest that the US could be responsible for said grief or suffering; a similar suggestion is made elsewhere when Otterbein puts scare quotes around Sanders' reference to the "immorality" of the US-backed Contra war. FAIR (4/11/16, 3/5/19) has previously shown how corporate media performatively frame Sanders as a red menace for defending--and refusing to denounce--leftist countries targeted by US imperialism.
In this case, Sanders was defending the Nicaraguan people, who suffered immeasurable harm in the Contra war to oust the Sandinista government--the product of a popular revolution that overthrew the murderous US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. The "immorality" Sanders was talking about, and Politico calls into question, is the tens of thousands of Nicaraguans killed by US-trained, armed and financed Contra death squads. Maybe Politico has an editorial rule against referring without irony to war crimes as immoral when the perpetrators are backed by Washington.
And because you can't do a proper red-bait without a Russia connection, Otterbein includes Sanders' contention that military spending "devastated" the Soviet economy in the list of no-nos. Oddly, the position that Sanders is being attacked for is the conventional wisdom on why the Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR. As AP (6/5/04) reported when Ronald Reagan died in 2004:
His famed "Star Wars" program drew the Soviets into a costly arms race it couldn't afford.... He is vividly remembered in Russia today as the force that precipitated the Soviet collapse.
"Reagan bolstered the US military might to ruin the Soviet economy, and he achieved his goal," said Gennady Gerasimov, who served as top spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry during the 1980s....
Even though Reagan's "Star Wars" never led to the deployment of an actual missile shield, it drew the Soviets into a costly effort to mount a response. Many analysts agree that the race drained Soviet coffers and triggered the economic difficulties that sped up the Soviet collapse in 1991.
But underscoring the US's hand in another country's economic demise conflicts with the narrative of the natural collapse of socialism, in which corporate media are heavily invested. Corporate outlets systematically overlook the fact that when the United States wages economic warfare, for whatever reason, it produces catastrophic effects on the economies and people of its "enemy" targets.
Regarding Sanders' more lighthearted desire for leftist/capitalist nation exchange programs, as Branko Marcetic pointed out, they already existed long before the 1987 clip. Even if they didn't, though, what's so scandalous about cultural exchanges that ameliorate interactions between hostile nations? If anything, exchanges might humanize foreigners who the US government and media have often dehumanized, and dispel the lies they push about nations to justify imperial aggression.
Let's sum up the fresh dirt Politico so helpfully prepared for anti-Sanders campaign consultants:
- Sanders is against the media lying about countries targeted by the US government.
- Sanders is against the US backing crimes against humanity.
- Sanders is against economic warfare and coercion.
- And Sanders is for exchange programs that would ease hostility between the US and other countries.
Now, I haven't watched all the tapes. It's very possible that Bernie Sanders said something "startling" in the 51 episodes of Bernie Speaks--but if he did, Politico didn't find it. Instead, the publication showed us its own failure to dislodge from the corporate media's anti-Communist, neo-Cold War worldview. In a Sanders story that tried to play nice--a rare find in establishment outlets--Politico nonetheless gave us a peek at US media jingoism that was past its sell-by date nearly three decades ago.
Anyway, thanks for the funny tapes, Politico.
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Why Is the Radical Right Still Winning?
What that Protestant Reformation can teach us about the durability of far-right movements — and the order they seek to replace
Oct 11, 2018
Less than a month ago, the candidate leading in the polls in the Brazilian presidential election was a jailed ex-politician who technically couldn't even run for office.
It gets even weirder. Brazilian voters have put corruption near the top of the list of their concerns this political season. Yet Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country's most popular politician, has been jailed on corruption charges. And because of a law that Lula himself signed into law, politicians charged with crimes upheld by an appeals court can't run again for eight years.
Weirder still, in a country where only 14 percent of the population has any confidence at all in Donald Trump's global leadership, the voters have rallied around a candidate who's often tagged the Trump of the Tropics.
When Brazilians went to the polls this Sunday, nearly half of them voted for this pro-Trump and anti-Lula candidate. Jair Bolsonaro is a free-market ideologue who frequently goes on homophobic, misogynist, and racist rants. He loves guns, torture, and autocracy. Brazilians who fear a return to military rule refer to Bolsonaro as "the Thing."
Bolsonaro nearly won the race in the first round, coming only a few percentage points from capturing the simple majority required to declare outright victory. It's remotely possible that the opposition could pull together for the second round, scheduled for October 28, just as the French did to deprive Marine Le Pen of the presidency last year.
But I doubt it.
Brazil is on the verge of being Trumped. And given the perilous state of the country's economy -- unemployment over 12 percent, extreme poverty on the rise, widening gap between rich and poor -- Bolsonaro will wreak even greater devastation in Brazil than his gringo inspiration has already done in the United States.
The Thing's political success in Brazil demonstrates that the radical right is far from peaking in its global influence.
Elsewhere in the world, the right has certainly mobilized resentment against neoliberal globalization. But that doesn't explain the situation in Brazil. After all, Bolsonaro's chief economic advisor, banker Paulo Guedes, adheres to the same University of Chicago philosophy that gave the world Augusto Pinochet's brave new Chile in the 1970s. Thanks to Guedes, Bolsonaro has reversed his previously anti-liberal positions on economics. Now he promises widespread privatization and cuts in government spending, while also calling for fewer taxes.
I'm not sure that Bolsonaro's supporters, aside from the very wealthy ones, are paying much attention to his economic program. What Brazilians are disgusted with is the status quo, which is corrupt and economically unsustainable. They don't just want reform.
They want a Reformation.
Against the Globalists
In the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church aspired to control the world. Its influence spread well beyond Europe to the New World and, thanks to Jesuit missionaries, to Asia as well. Orthodox Christianity was well ensconced in Russia, and Islam controlled the Middle East and North Africa. But Rome was powerful, wealthy, and corrupt enough to compete with these rivals. The Pope commanded no armies, but he still claimed the allegiance of millions of people, including any number of kings and queens.
And then along came Martin Luther.
As a young monk and then a theologian, Luther absorbed the teachings of the Vatican. But he grew to despise what he saw as the corruptions of Catholicism, chiefly the sale of indulgences as a method of buying one's way into heaven. His attacks on the Catholic order attracted a flock of like-minded protesters and reformers. And thus was born Protestant theology and the Reformation.
Luther challenged the globalists of his era, a political order based on a bogus and highly polarizing economic system (the sale of indulgences). He assailed the bureaucracy of this order, asserting instead that individuals could have a personal relationship with God without the mediation of the priests. He preferred the language of the people, rather than Latin, and translated the Bible into German.
Even before nationalism became a coherent ideology, Luther was asserting national prerogatives against the demands of the global (Catholic) order. He wasn't a big fan of minorities either, considering the anti-Semitism of his treatise, "On the Jews and Their Lies."
Luther also effectively deployed the technology of the era. The printing press, invented in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439, had become a tool of mass production by the early sixteenth century. Thanks to this new technology, Luther's tracts and his German-language bible spread rapidly around Europe, undermining the Holy See's authority.
Protestantism has proven to be an enduring phenomenon. As a schism, it has itself broken into dozens of denominations. But Catholicism, too, has endured. It has instituted some reforms, like Vatican II, and has become even more globalized since Luther's time.
The Populist Reformation follows the same pattern as Luther's earlier revolution. It targets a global elite. It criticizes a corrupt economic order. It speaks in a national language that the average person can understand. It uses the latest technologies -- social media -- to spread its message. It is full of fire and fury. And with Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential elections, it has spread to the very nerve center of the global order.
If it continues to follow the earlier example, this Populist Reformation will establish a powerful rival "church" that survives past the next election cycle. It may force some changes in the global order, but that order will survive as well. Protestants and Catholics generated one war after another in Europe. The current era looks to be equally contentious.
Modern Day Protestants
The modern-day Luthers are everywhere, railing against the globalists and tweeting their 95 theses around the world.
Eastern Europe is the center of this Reformation.
Poland's Law and Justice Party and Hungary's Fidesz are in firm control of their countries. In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis, a corrupt media mogul, is trying to Berlusconi his country into submission, with the help of former leftist and current Islamophobe President Milos Zeman. In Bulgaria, the far right-wing United Patriots coalition named six ministerial positions as a reward for helping Prime Minister Boyko Borisov form a government. In Bosnia, the ultra-nationalist Miroslav Dodik was just elected as the Serbian member of the country's unwieldy three-person presidency.
Elsewhere in Europe, the right wing is also on the rise -- in control in Austria, sharing power in Italy, and racking up significant parliamentary numbers in Germany and Sweden. These insurgents are gearing up for the 2019 European Parliament elections in the hopes of securing a large enough minority to block legislation. "We are not fighting against Europe, but against the EU, which has become a totalitarian system," the National Front's Marine Le Pen has said. In France, the National Front polls just a fraction behind Emmanuel Macron's ruling party.
On the borders of Europe, Turkey has been ruled for 15 years by a right-wing autocrat with an Islamist cast -- Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has been in charge in Russia for nearly two decades. This oligarch masquerading as a president aspires to create a vast conservative network -- corrupt, anti-liberal, nationalist, and anti-immigrant -- with Moscow at its center.
In Asia, right-wing nationalist Shinzo Abe is on track to become Japan's longest serving prime minister. After winning his party's presidency last month, Abe is expected to go after his long-sought prize: dismantling the country's "peace constitution."
Southeast Asia is full of right-wing militarists: in Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has a predilection for extrajudicial murder and other authoritarian policies that place him firmly among right-wing populists. The surprise presidential victory of 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia in May suggests that this former authoritarian leader has figured out how to reinvent himself along populist lines. And, of course, Narendra Modi has been busy imposing his Hindu nationalism-inflected right-wing approach in India.
In Latin America, Bolsonaro is not alone. In Colombia, Ivan Duque won the presidential election last June. Like Bolsonaro, Duque embraces a neoliberal economic program of tax cuts and a pro-military approach to security. Daniel Ortega, though he started out as a leftist, has moved further and further toward right-wing clerical militarism in Nicaragua.
The wave of right-wing populism hasn't completely covered the world. Mexico took a long-heralded turn to the left with the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. South Korean progressive Moon Jae-in is charting a new course for his country after 10 years of conservative rule. Jacinda Ardern is doing great things in New Zealand as is Katrin Jakobsdottir in Iceland. More traditional conservative parties, like the Christian Democrats in Germany, are holding the line against the far right.
But globally speaking, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the influence of the right-wing populists.
The Roots of Right-Wing Radicalism
Some of the countries that have shifted hard to the right have done pretty well economically in recent years, like Poland and the Czech Republic. But the populist parties that did well at the polls still managed to mobilize the resentment of those who didn't benefit from that economic success. The task of appealing to the disgruntled is even easier in countries that haven't recovered fully from the financial crisis of a decade ago.
The actual economic programs of the populists are largely immaterial. They might advocate some kind of welfare state. They might prefer, as in Brazil, the same kind of neoliberal nostrums that pass for orthodoxy among international financial institutions.
In general, however, the populists are interested in state capture: using the mechanisms of state power to enrich themselves and their circle of supporters. It's crony capitalism raised to the nth degree.
Politically, the new right-wing populists are taking advantage of a widespread disgust for political elites. This disgust has been focused in particular on the corruption scandals that have engulfed so many countries. Because they're focused on corruption, voters are willing to embrace candidates who are also members of the political elite and personally corrupt to boot -- as long as these firebrands promise to "drain the swamp."
But it's perhaps hot-button cultural issues that provide the most direct method by which the right-wing populists can distinguish themselves from the competition.
Obviously this cultural populism takes different forms around the world. Duterte challenges the Catholic Church in the Philippines while Ortega embraces it in Nicaragua. But a common denominator is nationalism. It's not just an outward-facing nationalism against globalists and immigrations. These right-wing populists deliberately stoke the anger of majority populations who somehow feel left behind by a world of greater equality and diversity.
Martin Luther King Jr. once envisioned a Poor People's Campaign that brought together a rainbow coalition of the dispossessed. Right-wing populists have discovered an equally powerful coalition: the Privileged People's Campaign that brings together rich and poor on the basis of the color of their skin, not the content of their character. King emphasized the importance of dignity. The insurgent populists make a similar appeal but to the dignity of the dominant race, class, or gender.
The left is compromised on all three grounds. It remains committed to multiculturalism. Once in office, it has often proven just as corrupt (or, at least, status-quo-oriented) as any other political bloc. And left parties have pushed forward economic globalization as vigorously as the right, if not more so -- the Democrats under Clinton, Labor under Blair, the French Socialists under Mitterand, former Communist parties in Eastern Europe, and so on. No surprise, then, that None of the Above has become so popular.
What's remarkable about many of the new right-wing populists is how long they've managed to hold onto power through the ballot box. Putin, Erdogan, Ortega: They've all been in charge for more than a decade apiece. Viktor Orban's been the head of Hungary since 2010, Abe the head of Japan since 2012. Zeman has been the Czech president since 2013.
This Populist Reformation is no recent or temporary blip. Let that be a warning to the U.S. electorate. Even if Donald Trump manages to lose his reelection bid, the populist fury that produced his improbable 2016 victory is not going away any time soon.
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