Photograph Source: Agência Senado – CC BY-SA 4.0

The far-right family tree has borne its most recent poisoned fruits of ignorance and hatred in the form of Eduarda Campopiano and Lucas Pavanato, who were among the most voted candidates in the Brazilian elections of 4 October. They follow, in reverse chronological order, transphobic and disinformation delinquent, Nikolas Ferreira; the gun-enthusiast transphobic, evangelical, Christian-values, misinformation ace, actor Juliano Cazarré (who claimed that more men are killed by women in Brazil than vice versa); the violent, toxic members of the “liberal towards economics, conservative towards habits” Free Brazil Movement (MBL) and other political startups that sprang up after the coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016; the abominable “Church Militant” Allan dos Santos; putsch planner Paulo Figueiredo; the unfunny scourge-of-the-left comedian Danilo Gentili; the thuggish Bolsonaro clan; and the vociferous charlatan guru of Jair Bolsonaro, Olavo de Carvalho.

But the lineages are much older. They are rooted in late-nineteenth-century European fascist ideology (rejection of liberal democracy, anti-rationalism, social Darwinism, anti-socialism, proto-nationalism, and Bismarckian and Napoleonic authoritarianism), which survived the defeat of Nazi-fascism in the Second World War, to extend into the brutal Franco and Salazar dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. “Bland fanatics”, as used in the title of Pankaj Mishra’s book Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire”, is one way to describe these malefactors, and it’s an expression that goes back a long way to American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s book The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959) in which he warns of the “bland fanatics of western civilisation who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

Before giving a closer look to this particular genealogy of fascist derangement, I should say that I’m using the concept of “genealogy” in the sense given to it by Michel Foucault whose “genealogy of the subject” accounts for “the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history”. In other words, it’s a way of studying the historical formation of ideas, values, institutions, and power relations which shows they don’t stem from an immutable essence or from inevitable linear evolution.

To get back to the family tree of São Paulo’s reactionary-vote crackajacks, we could start with Campopiano and Pavanato who are among the more recent personages in a political trend largely driven by angry white men who will stoop to anything to defend their privileges. Closely allied with the supposed philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, shaper of Brazil’s right-wing movements, and guru to the Bolsonaro males, father and sons, Canadian Jordan Peterson, right-wing traditionalist, purveyor of conspiracy theories, who plays fast and loose with facts, now has, since Carvalho’s death in 2022, a large following in Brazilian right-wing politics and traditionalist movements. Popularising the cultural backlash in North America, his self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, offers a compendium of slogans and cliches similar to “Bolsonarist writer” Carvalho’s execrable O Mínimo que Você Precisa Saber para não Ser um Idiota, (The Minimum You Need to Know Not to Be An Idiot). Carvalho—although he made the bizarre claim that, “The Beatles were semi-literate in music, they barely knew how to play the guitar. Who composed their songs was Theodor Adorno”—was also the revered mentor of MBL militants, the instigators of the Lava Jato plot against Lula, and splenetic and malcontent celebrities like Danilo Gentili.

Peterson and Carvalho apply their own version of Carl Jung’s concept of “archetypes” when arguing that symbolic culture is essentially masculine, so resisting male hegemony would mean flying in the face of nature. This is also the spiel of Carvalho’s disciple Juliano Cazarré, who recently organised the grandiosely titled seminar, “O Farol e a Forja” (The Lighthouse and the Forge) with more than twenty speakers on Christian spirituality, leadership, fatherhood, family, and traditional male roles for insecure he-men

Although they invoke ancestral tradition and myth, Peterson and Carvalho are simply recycling reactionary ideas of the numerous nineteenth-century intellectual and emotional snake-oil merchants who promised redemption and purification in the midst of the economic and political crises of capitalism, disenchantment with democracy, and fear of social change with discourse that did its bit to prepare the way for the prospering of sociopaths like Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. Any resemblance to what we have been seeing since the start of the present century is not coincidental.

The electoral success of tub-thumpers is an expression of the insecurity felt by large numbers of voters faced with a world undergoing irreversible change with collapsing traditional hierarchies and an imposition of new ways of living. Support for these professional scamsters, and the success of shyster-influencer Pablo Marçal (despite the mad expedition he led to Pico dos Marins in which he exposed 32 people to such life-threatening risks they had to be saved by firefighters) and self-help author Augusto Cury stems from an old desire to restore an order and privileges that are seen to be under threat. It also shows the breach between knowledge built up in universities—which requires reading, experimentation, testing, hypotheses, argument, memory, and consensus based on intellectual honesty—and indoctrination by YouTube and TikTok hustlers posing as intellectuals. In 1910, Romain Rolland described the proto-modernist mood of his times and, presciently, the world of today’s gurus and their disciples: “The reason of humanity was exhausted. It had just made a gigantic effort … The gate of dreams had reopened; in the train of religion came little puffs of theosophy, mysticism, esoteric faith, occultism to visit the chambers of the Western mind.”

One of the popular ideologists back then was Julius Evola, Nazi supporter, ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist far-right, and—with malice aforethought—embraced by Steve Bannon. Another reactionary with an intellectual patina was we’re-all-the-same, universalising, essentialising, and ethnocentric rhetorician, literature professor Joseph Campbell (abhorred by serious folklorists) is a favourite among certain pseudo-intellectual diehards. The Red Pill, an online community of anonymous men who think they’ve discovered the hidden truth of the perfidy of and need to punish women, is a distorted version of the red pill of The Matrix (which enabled facing real-world truths), and I’d argue that the spin here is comparable with the use of Jungian archetypes to justify social hierarchies.

When constructing his image, Donald Trump joined this tradition of mountebanks and “bland fanatics”. He earned millions in royalties with his book The Art of the Deal (1987) which, ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz—who later recognised his role in constructing what was literally the trumped-up story—presented Trump as an extraordinary businessman and brilliant negotiator. In fact, at the time of its publication, Trump had lost tens of millions of dollars in what the New York Times coyly called “troubled business deals”. With this particular operation, the incompetent businessman was transformed into a mythical figure: a winner, a man blessed by God, defender of the nation, of the family, and of traditional values. The self-promotion machinery turned falsification and hyperbole into his personal brand.

Assisted by Meta and other Big Tech companies, these scammers of long genealogy aim to manipulate public opinion and hence the conditions of Brazil’s electoral contest in favour of the neo-Nazi-fascist project associated with Trump and Netanyahu. Algorithms, targeted advertising, and massive disinformation overload favour authoritarian forces and undermine democratic deliberation. There’s no need to conjure up a single, well-coordinated conspiracy to recognise the political danger posed by platforms that profit from polarisation and refuse to offer safeguards against manipulation. Democratic elections require transparency, accountability, and limits on the (presently unchecked) power of these companies.

The genealogy of today’s misogynistic, racist, and homophobic reactionaries can be traced back to the political traditions that spawned the Holocaust, the Spanish Civil War, and the atrocities committed with the rise of fascism. Some members of the left, too, are now using the social media as their main source of “knowledge” and also as a political showcase. We are witnessing the triumph of digital mystification of just about everything, even the most basic human relations.

We must fear, but must also keep resisting, this spectacle of lying, oafish con-artists whose projects lead to concentration camps, gas chambers, mass graves, genocide, and ecocide. Voters must be responsible for the choice they make. The quacksalver’s world of death, destruction, and riches for a few is nigh. And it must be stopped from reaching the point of no return.

Translation by Julie Wark.