Abstract
The cohesion and resilience of the social base supporting Jair Bolsonaro is backed by an authoritarian perception of politics and society. Support for the president runs through all sectors of Brazilian society and reflects a variety of demands. A multidisciplinary research strategy that articulates statistical analysis of data from an innovative national survey with a sociological approach to the construction of an authoritarian vision of politics and society in Brazil suggests that the authoritarian right is a political and electoral force that will persist and that it has several characteristics that distinguish it from conservative movements in the Global North.
A coesão e resistência da base social que apoia a Bolsonaro são baseadas numa visão autoritária da política e da sociedade porque o apoio ao presidente se extende por todas as classes na sociedade brasileira e traz à tona uma diversidade de exigências. Uma estratégia multidisciplinária de pesquisa que articula uma análise estatística de dados colhidos de um levantamento nacional innovador com base numa aproximação sociológica voltada para a construção de uma ótica autoritária da política e da sociedade no Brasil constata que a direita autoritária persistirá como força política e eleitoral e que tem várias características as quais lhe distingue dos outros movimentos conservadores localizados nos países do norte global.
A year and a half after taking office, Jair Bolsonaro’s administration was already facing a number of problems, among them low economic growth, high unemployment, defeats in the legislature, and corruption scandals involving two of the president’s sons, Councilman Carlos Bolsonaro and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, and his former adviser Fabrício Queiroz. To make matters worse, the country was one of the worst-hit in the world by COVID-19, with the highest death rates. The federal government’s management of the crisis was severely criticized both inside and outside of the country as the international press reported that Brazil was one of the nations that was worst at administering the pandemic. 1 Still, opinion surveys conducted in the first half of 2020 reflected that about 30 percent of Brazilians scored the Bolsonaro administration “excellent” or “good,” according to data from the Datafolha Institute. 2 What explains this stability and resilient support for the president and his administration in such an adverse political and economic context?
To answer this question, we turn to a multidisciplinary research strategy in which we articulate the statistical analysis of data from the third phase of the national opinion poll “The Face of Democracy,” still unpublished, which was conducted by the Instituto da Democracia 3 between May 30 and June 5, 2020, with a sociological approach regarding the construction and consolidation of an authoritarian vision of politics and society in Brazil.
The article is organized as follows: in the first section, we demonstrate how an authoritarian perception of politics is fundamental to understanding the most loyal base of support for President Jair Bolsonaro; in the second, we discuss how worldviews and authoritarian perceptions of social life organize ways of speaking and perceiving social differences and inequalities, organizing the ideological bases of authoritarianism, and to close we address the Brazilian case from a comparative perspective and point to the long-term implications of support for Bolsonaro for the nation’s political scenario.
The concept of authoritarianism and the notion of transversality are key to our analysis. Authoritarianism as a social and political phenomenon is nothing new to Brazilian history and has been the subject of analysis by a long and varied series of writers. Among the essays addressing the Brazilian situation we have, for example, Buarque de Holanda (1936) on the difficulty of implementing both a stable and durable democratic order and the universalization of rights and citizenship in a social dynamic marked by privatism. Oliveira Vianna (1920; 1949), in turn, argued for the need to strengthen and centralize the state in order to limit the political influence of local oligarchies in the pursuit of an authoritarian modernization of the economy, legislation, and society itself. 4
While, in the Brazilian case, the tensions between democracy and authoritarianism helped to shape ways of interpreting the relations between the state and society, especially between 1930 and 1950, in the post–World War II period (1939–1945) writers such as Lowenthal and Guterman (1949), Adorno et al. (1950), and Horkheimer (1959) conducted quantitative and qualitative research dedicated to investigating the correlations between ideology and the sociological and psychological factors of large-scale adherence to authoritarianism. In general terms, they observed that socially shared perceptions about the apparent decline of traditional patterns and the inability to deal with changes in society helped to foster hatred of various groups (Jews, blacks, women, sexual dissidents, etc.), preparing the social and political terrain for the authoritarian order. The defense of tradition against degeneration has thus emerged as one of the strongest mobilizing forces for political currents that include Nazism and fascism but also for racist and xenophobic discourse and practices in contexts that include North America.
The rise of far-right governments around the world in recent years has led various scholars to return to some of these theories and offer perspectives for understanding the emergence of the phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Works by writers including Brown, Gordon, and Pensky (2018) revisit debates on authoritarianism and seek out correlations between their contemporary emergence and the economic and social crises produced by neoliberalism and its impacts on crises of representation in liberal democracies. Writers such as Eatwell and Goodwin (2018) emphasize the importance of nationalism in the emergence of contemporary authoritarian populism in an effort to reframe the nativist, racist, homophobic, sexist, and antisecular symbols aimed at legitimizing far-right governments. As we draw from these debates, we begin to understand authoritarianism as a singular way of organizing the relationships between the state, society, and the market, undermining the legitimacy of conflict as a basic dimension of democracy and citizenship. As a result, we find it to be a question of transforming the state into an instrument for promoting the identification of ideas that include that of a national majority—who the people are and what their values are.
We argue that moral values, behavioral norms, and authoritarian ideas about society, politics, and the state do not come from a single group. Our data show that the social base of Bolsonarism is ideologically cohesive and significantly heterogeneous in terms of generation, levels of education and income, and occupation. Through this information, we will show that the social and political phenomenon of Bolsonarism is a pillar of contemporary Brazilian society, with support that runs through a wide range of groups.
The Authoritarian Perception of Politics and the Social Foundations of Bolsonarism
Writings relating to the base supporting President Jair Bolsonaro have, to date, concentrated on the electoral period and factors that were key to his electoral victory in 2018. Hunter and Power (2019) point out that level of education, income, and religion help explain the retired captain’s victory. With a strong anticorruption, political antiestablishment, and law-and-order discourse, Bolsonaro won over both the more stabilized middle class and the new middle class, a segment that benefited from the economic growth and inclusive policies of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party–PT) administrations (2003–2016). The conservative discourse on issues related to sexual traditionalism was a key factor in seducing another large group, evangelicals. Nicolau (2020), in an analysis that uses electoral data and polls, also highlights the importance of the evangelical vote and rejection of the PT, also known as “anti-PTism,” in Bolsonaro’s victory.
In a similar vein, Amaral (2020), using data from the 2018 Brazilian Electoral Study, shows that anti-PTism was one of the fundamental factors in the election results, and Duque and Smith (2019) make the same argument. Drawing on an analysis of panel-format research, Rennó (2020) shows that Bolsonaro voters were aligned with his conservative discourse on moral and social issues and his liberal approach on economic issues and says that this is a new phenomenon in Brazilian politics that is likely to persist.
Our analysis is different from these others in that it does not try to explain Bolsonaro’s victory but examines which groups have formed the basis of stable support for him even after the severe economic and health crises that hit the country in the first half of 2020. We focus on the 25 percent of those interviewed in the “Face of Democracy” survey who said that they really liked Jair Bolsonaro. We will call this group “Bolsonarists” and address an issue that, until now, has been overlooked by empirical studies: the significantly authoritarian perception of politics and society that establishes cohesion within it and the stability and resilience of Bolsonarism as a social and political phenomenon.
Our hypothesis begins with the observation that Bolsonaro’s leadership promotes a synergy of two political and social phenomena that have been well-described in the literature: (1) a conservative, right-wing discourse that openly defends authoritarian regimes like those between 1964 and 1985 in Brazil and between 1973 and 1990 in Chile, a discourse identified by Coppedge (1997) and Power (2000) in processes of democratization in Latin America throughout the 1980s and 1990s but, as mentioned by Luna and Rovira (2014), less important in the early 2000s, and (2) the global emergence of similar movements in other parts of the world in which, defending what they call “authentic democracy,” leaders attack the political establishment and institutions that exercise any control over the president (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018; Norris and Inglehart, 2019).
We focus on the convergence of Brazil’s long tradition of authoritarianism and the transnational rise of authoritarian populism as fertile ground for unifying and consolidating the Bolsonarist group and suggest that this is the breeding ground for electorally competitive authoritarian leaderships in Brazil that will continue for quite some time to come.
The data we have analyzed come from the third phase of the “Face of Democracy” survey, which was conducted amidst the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and a major economic downturn. 5 The survey consisted of 1,000 telephone interviews made to persons over the age of 16 and had a 3.1 percent margin of error (C.I. 95 percent). Initially, we created two multivariate statistical models to analyze the impact of authoritarian perceptions on the scores given to President Jair Bolsonaro. Both models allow us to analyze the impact of each variable separately, taking all the others as constants. Our dependent variable is taken from the following question: “On the basis of your feelings, how would you score the following politicians on a scale of 1 to 10, in which 1 means that you don’t like them at all and 10 means you like them a lot?” For the analysis, we grouped the responses into three categories 6 : 1–3 (dislike), 4–7 (neither especially like nor dislike), and 8–10 (like considerably). The first category reflected 47.5 percent of those interviewed and the second and third categories 26.8 percent and 24.7 percent, respectively.
To assess the level of authoritarian perception of politics, we put together an authoritarianism index that involved three questions in relation to whether a military coup would be justified in any of the following situations: (1) very high unemployment, (2) high crime rates, and (3) lots of corruption. The possible answers were 0–3, with 0 being rejection in all cases and 3 representing agreement. 7 The same measurement was used as a continuous variable.
The models also included the following control variables: (1) age; (2) level of education (incomplete and complete primary, incomplete and complete middle school, incomplete and complete high school, incomplete and complete higher education, and graduate education), used as a continuous variable; (3) income (up to 1, 1–2, 2–3, 3–5, and more than 5 monthly minimum wages), also used as a continuous variable; (4) occupation (impoverished informal worker [employed with no registration, self-employed, independent professional, entrepreneur, assistant, and apprentice with family income less than two monthly minimum wages]; not impoverished informal worker [employed with no registration, self-employed, independent professional, entrepreneur, assistant, and apprentice with family income more than two monthly minimum wages]; not part of the economically active population; housewife; formal worker [registered employee and public servant]; potentially no longer seeking employment; and unemployed). 8 and (5) sex (female, male). Positive coefficients indicate a higher probability of belonging to a higher score category. Because the occupation variable was assembled taking into account the family income declared by the person interviewed, we used two models, with income the variable in one and occupation in the other. Given the ordered distribution of the dependent variable categories, we decided to use ordinal regression models.
The variations related to age, level of education, and income, along with the different occupations, have no association with whether someone likes Bolsonaro more or less (Table 1). None of these variables was shown to be statistically significant. In other words, the data show substantial cross-sectional support for Bolsonaro—support that is not directly related to homogeneous social groups, at least from the point of view of their occupation, incomes, levels of education, and ages. Since it is impossible to characterize Bolsonarism’s political base in terms of social stratification, it can only be understood in terms of the cross-cutting support found throughout different positions in such stratification.
Determining Factors of Support for Jair Bolsonaro in June 2020
Source: The Face of Democracy (2020).
Note: Model 1: N = 908. Dependent variable: Score given to Jair Bolsonaro (1–3, 4–7, 8–10). Reference category in parentheses. Ordinal regression with negative log-log function. –2LL = 1,748.500. R2 Nagelkerke = 0.109. Maximum VIF = 1.496.
Model 2: N = 908. Dependent variable: Score given to Jair Bolsonaro (1–3, 4–7, 8–10). Reference category in parentheses. Ordinal regression with negative log-log function. –2LL = 1,724.709. R2 Nagelkerke = 0.113. Maximum VIF = 1.089.
(p < 0.05)
By pointing out this transversality, we are not trying to highlight the fragility of the president’s social and political base and the random nature of its support for him. Rather, our argument is that the social heterogeneity of the persons and groups that make up his base is fundamental to the popularity, wide reach, and persistence of Bolsonarism as a social and political phenomenon. In other words, it is a political response to a wide variety of social demands and disputes. Expanding on our argument, we maintain that Bolsonarism is an authoritarian activism that needs to be repeatedly reworked and reaffirmed in practice, what we call a “performative golpismo.” 9
However, as far as the gender variable is concerned, this transversality is not observed. In both models, this variable was statistically significant. Men were 40 percent more likely to like the president than women. This is not surprising and reflects the findings of Amaral (2020) and Nicolau (2020) in relation to the 2018 elections, when, for the first time, the gender variable appeared as a good way to predict presidential votes. On the basis of the data available to us, it is difficult to say whether this is part of a broad political divide that is being created in terms of issues, struggles, and conflicts related to gender. Reading the data in context, it is more likely that this result is associated with the aggressive rhetoric against women of then-Congressman Jair Bolsonaro. During the elections, this rhetoric was the catalyst for the #NotHim movement, which was responsible for the largest street protests held in opposition to the candidate in 2018.
One of the most visible faces of the Bolsonaro candidacy and his administration so far concerns the almost omnipresent vocalization of issues related to the status of women, marriage, and sexuality. The Bolsonaro administration created the Ministry of Women, Family, and Human Rights, which was led by Damares Alves, one of the administration’s most active ministers in international forums. For example, at the September 2019 Demography Summit in Hungary, Alves said that “Brazil is now a pro-family nation” and that the country was willing to “lead a pro-family bloc in the UN,” 10 defending “a resounding no against gender ideology.” 11 Also under the Bolsonaro administration, Brazilian diplomacy promoted an unprecedented turnaround with respect to its position in the UN with its veto of the use of the term “gender” in the organization’s resolutions. This shows that gender policy was an important pillar both for the Bolsonaro administration and in relation to the set of values that mobilizes his support base. In this context, women become targets of public policies or moral or religious judgments that aim to discipline them and subordinate them to the authority and universal control of heterosexual men. 12
While the lower level of female support for Bolsonarism may not mean a permanent social divide, it does help us to understand the ideological context specific to Bolsonarism as an opportunity to use language about the gender roles associated with males and females and norms of sexuality that generates hierarchies and excludes certain groups from the world. This authoritarianism depends on the existence of conflict, since it aims at the symbolic and material exclusion of groups, public policies, and economic, political, and social agendas.
The authoritarianism variable, as expected, was statistically significant in both models. For each point above the index, the chance of a person’s liking Bolsonaro increased by about 40 percent when all other social and demographic variables were held constant. This means that the authoritarian perception of politics is an important element in distinguishing among those who give higher scores to the retired captain.
With regard to the authoritarianism index, those who very much liked Bolsonaro reflected greater favorability to a coup than the other two groups, with the differences being statistically significant (C.I. 95 percent) (Figure 1). This means that the greater the support for Bolsonaro, the higher the index, with all the differences being statistically significant (C.I. 95 percent). Among those who very much liked Bolsonaro, the index average was 1.28; for those who somewhat liked him, it was 0.76, and for those who disliked him it was 0.44 (N = 915). In other words, on average, Bolsonarists supported at least one of the three alternatives mentioned in relation to a military coup.
Support for military coups (%) under different circumstances according to degree of preference for Bolsonaro in June 2020 “Face of Democracy” survey. Those who did not answer or did not know how to answer were excluded from the results. N = 936, 942, and 936, respectively, for each intersection.
The transversality of Bolsonarism can be explained in that it also corresponds to authoritarian activism 13 reinforced by elements that included limiting the state’s role in the economy and anticorruption slogans. Is this really such a new phenomenon? If our argument is correct, there has always been a demand for leaders like Jair Bolsonaro in the postdemocratization period, but the political system that arose from the democratic transition barred the emergence of electorally viable right-wing populist-authoritarian alternatives. In recent years, the scenario has changed. The coincident discrediting of the political establishment through Operation Car Wash and the reduction of the constraints on electoral wins through the advance of new technologies and forms of political communication, as well as the international scenario, made the change possible.
The Transversality of Bolsonarism: Politics and Society
The cohesion of the Bolsonarist group is based on an authoritarian activism that converges on the state, making it an active element in the modulation of different repertoires of political action, social struggle, and ways of reading, narrating, and interpreting the country, especially in the postdemocratization context. As a consequence, the transversality of the phenomenon refers to ideological content that remains constant and is repeatedly reinforced through Bolsonaro’s performative golpismo. As examples of this tactic, we can cite the constant threats to democratic institutions, repeated positive mentions of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985), and celebration of torture.
Bolsonarism has reorganized the ideological bases of authoritarianism in two main ways: rearranging the way in which social relations based on perceived differences between sexes, genders, races, and classes are expressed and catalyzing significant aspects of anticorruption agendas and actors. In the first three decades of postdemocratization, various activisms or union actions were focused on expanding social rights and the redistribution of wealth, promoting demands that were incorporated or recognized by the state in a variety of ways (Abers, Serafim, and Tatagiba, 2014). Taken together, institutional innovations and societal dynamics converged to establish new forms of negotiation with the state that influenced perceptions of social status and the material and symbolic differences that organize them (Penna and Rosa, 2015). The interaction between collective demands and institutional responses by the state was expressed, for example, in administrative mechanisms for land expropriation performed as part of agrarian reform, financing models for popular housing programs, legal changes that implemented ethnic-racial quotas, and national conferences to discuss public policies. This all helped to reorganize symbolic and material criteria and principles of social classification while focusing on the social and economic inequalities of Brazilian society (Bastos and Chaguri, 2017).
Whereas identification within the Bolsonarist group often arises out of negation or violent reaction to such dynamics and postdemocratization processes, Bolsonarism is a phenomenon that cuts across all parts of Brazilian society precisely because it reorganizes the imagination, solidarity, and individual and collective recognition in this society. In the terms used by Bolsonarism itself, “The world needs to be indivisible (Brazil above all), sexually binary (boys in blue, girls in pink), intellectually shallow (stop whining), and devoid of empathy and otherness (majority rules)” (Cavalcante, Chaguri, and Netto, 2019: 3). Through the construction of such antagonisms, Bolsonarism offers the cultural and material bases for an authoritarian view of both politics and society, connecting past and future to forge specific ties of solidarity and identification in the present. Bolsonarism as a social and political phenomenon affects the bases on which society recognizes itself, forging characteristic connections that lead to symbolic and material transformations in the postdemocratization period. These are expressed through the emergence and gradual institutional acceptance of policies like affirmative action in higher education, putting a real value on the minimum wage, and female ownership in income transfer programs that include the Bolsa Familia (Family Allowance).
Rather than deny such differences, which could reduce the reach and impact of Bolsonarist activism, Bolsonarism redrafts and reorganizes the social roles associated with men and women; this includes the grammar used to describe class relationships and the interaction with an authoritarian bias between the state and society. This bias is expressed, for example, in the rhetoric that the state and multilateral organizations like the UN, the World Trade Organization, and the World Health Organization use in the cause of limiting individual freedoms. Former Education Minister Abraham Weintraub summarized the issue by taking up a megaphone and saying, “Freedom is the most important thing in a democracy. And the first thing they will try to silence is freedom of expression.” He made this statement to a group of activists who were waiting for the then-minister following his testimony to the Federal Police in an investigation of hate crimes. The activists’ banners demanded “Out with Communism, Out with Globalism, Out with the New World Order.” 14
Our argument is that the notion of freedom is always affirmed in opposition to social pacts and the institutional rule of promoting collective life in the public sphere. The same applies, therefore, to the seeing the state as the enemy of individual freedom. However, it is not a question of eliminating the state but one of opposing public policies or legal and institutional rules that promote social protection, recognize the right to differences, and, especially, agree on the rallying of the public in relation to private ways of organizing the social aspect of life.
To explore the dimension of authoritarianism itself, we move on to the second point: the recurrence and the capacity for mobilization that the anticorruption agenda finds in Brazil, especially within the Bolsonarist group. We initially believed that authoritarianism and the mobilization generated by anticorruption agendas or demands did not coincide. On the contrary, we now point out that anticorruption mobilization is a key component of authoritarianism.
The “Face of Democracy” survey asked people what they thought was the country’s biggest problem, and they were given the option to respond freely. Even in a context in which the novel coronavirus pandemic had already caused tens of thousands of deaths in Brazil, among those who liked Bolsonaro very much 29.6 percent said that the country’s biggest problem was corruption. The pandemic was mentioned by 22.7 percent (Figure 2). The percentages of persons who found corruption to be the country’s biggest problem increased alongside scores given to Bolsonaro, with a statistically significant difference between them (C.I. 95 percent).
Whether the country’s biggest problem is corruption or the pandemic (%) according to degree of preference for Bolsonaro in June 2020 “Face of Democracy” survey. Those who did not answer or did not know how to answer were excluded from the results. N = 990.
Almost ubiquitous in discussion about the country, corruption has become the preferred way to talk about the impasse between public and private matters in contemporary Brazil. The tension of political order in a postdemocratization period apparently reached its peak in the process that led to Bolsonaro’s winning the presidency. The ideological transversality of Bolsonarism is related to his offering a way of reorganizing the conflict between reproduction of inequality and the emergence of democratizing options. Historically, the stalemate between the public and private sectors has been expressed in terms of issues like corruption, patrimonialism, and conflicts between state, society, market, and family, a key repertoire through which ideas were produced, disputed, and put into circulation (Buarque de Hollanda, 1933; Faoro, 1957; Franco, 1969).
Bolsonarism is the electoral expression of a theoretical debate and a set of political conflicts that have been ongoing throughout Brazil’s republican history, offering ethical, moral, and authoritarian policies for establishing relationships between the state, the society, and the market. Reflecting on the role of the anticorruption agenda in the mobilization of the middle classes in recent years, Cavalcante (2018) points out that the association between corruption and the distortion of free competition is one of the most effective ideas for sparking the political mobilization of these groups, building a social base around this agenda that defends “the impartial agents of the Judiciary, while distrusting the populist character of public servants’ intentions” (Cavalcante, 2018: 118). Despite his three decades in Congress, Bolsonaro’s rise was a product of the impression that he was an antiestablishment candidate committed to the anticorruption agenda. This impression helped to bring together part of his support base, which has continued mobilizing and producing an identity within the Bolsonarist group that we analyze here.
Once elected president, and with two of his children holding public office and involved in corruption charges and scandals, Bolsonaro found himself struggling to maintain associations between the anticorruption agenda and the morality of “good men,” a symbolic pillar of, for example, the backing and reproduction of Operation Car Wash that was manifested in his support for the key role in it of his former minister of justice, Sérgio Moro. Without the option of being able to abandon the anticorruption agenda, he repositioned it to make his support base more cohesive and stable. As a result, symbolically and materially moving away from Operation Car Wash is far from abandoning the often-repeated idea that the Brazilian government is overrun by corrupt actors and has a long way to go to heal the nation.
Corruption here is not synonymous with the misappropriation of public assets; rather, it is associated with individual choices, ideological choices, or political positions, thereby offering ethical and moral justifications for authoritarianism. It has become associated with left-wing ideologies and public policies that promote the recognition of differences and the protection of the rights of women, blacks, or the LGBTQI+ population. Within the Bolsonarist group, this association is retranslated in terms of the need for honorable individuals to either restore morality to institutions or promote public policies capable of protecting the nation and the family.
The association between authoritarianism and the anticorruption agenda is one of the key points of support for Bolsonarism as a social and political phenomenon that cuts through all sectors of Brazilian society. The anticorruption agenda offers material and symbolic means of disqualification of difference and justification of inequality, operating to legitimize the fundamental reconversion led by authoritarianism: the reorganization of the state to promote policies and actions that can identify the Brazilian people and their values. Therefore, Bolsonarism offers renewed social and political bases for authoritarianism in the postdemocratization context.
Final Considerations: The Future of Bolsonarism
The existence of leaders and political parties with popular support combining social conservatism, political authoritarianism, and populist practices is far from a recent phenomenon that is exclusively Brazilian or Latin American. The list is long and has been growing in recent years in different parts of the world: Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Órban in Hungary, Donald Trump in the United States, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines are examples of such leaders. In Europe alone, Norris and Inglehart (2019: 236–237) have counted up to 16 electorally competitive parties with these characteristics existing in 15 different countries. The combination of elements responsible for the political rise of these leaders and parties varies according to the institutional and social contexts of each country, but there are several recurrent characteristics: nationalism, disdain for civil rights, and the defense of tradition and stability, generally founded on unitary notions of Judeo-Christian religiosity, the family, and the nation and making conflicts and disputes into an issue of us against them.
Norris and Inglehart (2019), seeking to understand the phenomenon in Europe and the United States, developed the theory of “cultural backlash,” pointing to an increase in levels of education and urbanization and circulation of ethnic groups that led to a silent revolution beginning in the 1970s favoring the debate and the eventual implementation of more inclusive, liberal policies, notably those with regard to gender equality and the protection of cultural, religious, or ethnic minorities (Taylor, 2007). This process ended up deepening cultural divides in these countries, producing a reaction led by groups that had lost their culturally hegemonic status in society. Feeling their social position to have come under threat, these groups began to defend agendas that were predominantly conservative in terms of social values and increasingly authoritarian in relation to politics, blaming the economic and political establishment for not listening to or for distancing itself from the real interests of the people. This generated a demand for socially conservative and politically authoritarian leaders and parties on the political scene (Norris and Inglehart, 2019: 32–64).
This theory only partly applies to Brazil. Although there is certainly an element of reaction to changes that have occurred in the past 30 years with regard to the inclusion of social groups and the recognition of their demands and rights, the Brazilian case has a component that is not found in Europe and North America. While in the older democracies postmaterialist political agendas (environmental conservation, gender equality, minority rights, etc.) gained strength after a generalized sense of material security had been achieved (Inglehart, 1977; 1993), in Brazil the past three decades have seen postmaterialist agendas come to overlap with the issue of material security itself. The extent of material inequality in Brazil is related to the dynamics of the creation of differences based on race and gender under slavery as a way of organizing the workforce and under patriarchy as a way of organizing the family and collective life. In other words, material inequalities are so deeply linked to gender and race issues, for example, that materialist and postmaterialist policy agendas have become practically indissociable, translating into the crosscutting nature of Bolsonarist support throughout society. As a result, Brazil’s social and political dynamics are marked by an ongoing redistributive conflict that, in various ways and over time, produces and reproduces symbolic and material exclusions (and inclusions) of varied economic and social groups, policies, and agendas.
In the specific case of the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, Bolsonarists articulate an authoritarian political response to this conflict. Authoritarianism is a political option that seeks to justify and normalize inequalities and material and symbolic differences among groups and classes. This characteristic is responsible for an almost daily reiteration and reaffirmation of what we have called a performative golpismo—the mobilization of material and symbolic imagery such as that of the 1964 military coup and the capacity of the military to bring order to the state and cure the nation, implementing the popular will even if it means going beyond constitutional limits.
What does this mean for the future of Bolsonarism? First and foremost, it means that Brazil is facing something more complex than the essentially cultural divide seen in the older democracies. Beyond an issue of dominance in terms of values, the country is experiencing an intense dispute over the distribution of scarce resources during an economic crisis and reviewing the historical bases of the subordination of certain social groups. Secondly, it means that politically relevant and authoritarian conservative social bases have gained space in public debate and will be key in shaping the day-to-day political workings for some time to come. These bases had previously been dormant and merely needed a competitive political agent (Zechmeister, 2015) and a favorable international environment to come together. Blocked by institutional determining factors between 1989 and 2014, as well as by a world in which the silent revolution prevailed, this agent emerged from the crisis that hit the Brazilian political system after Operation Car Wash and from the international cultural backlash that we have mentioned. Resilient support for Jair Bolsonaro is something that goes beyond the “myth,” charisma, or individual personality of the president. Bolsonarism reveals a consolidation of authoritarianism as a viable political option that could well survive any failures of his administration. The struggle will be long, and Bolsonarism is only a name.
Footnotes
Notes
Mariana Miggiolaro Chaguri is a professor of sociology at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas and the university’s Center of Contemporary Sociology. Oswaldo E. do Amaral is a professor of political science at the same institution and director of its Center for Studies on Public Opinion. They thank Bárbara Castro, Michel Nicolau Netto, Otávio Catelano, Sávio Cavalcante, and Vitor Vasques for suggestions made on the first version of the text and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (313472/2020-3; 315411/2021-0) and the CAPES/Print Program for funding. Some of the findings contained in this article were presented at seminars held in February 2020 at Brown, Columbia, and Harvard Universities, and the authors are grateful to everyone who participated in those events.