Trump, Bolsonaro and the Frustrated Attempt at Automatic Alignment under the Aegis of Authoritarian Neoliberalism
Rafael R. Ioris is professor of Latin American history and politics at the University of Denver and a research associate at the WBO. This article was originally published on the Interesse Nacional website, and then reproduced in issue 91 of the WBO weekly bulletin, dated November 3, 2023. To subscribe to the newsletter, simply enter your email in the form at the footer of the article.
The surprising elections of the tragic figures of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to their respective presidencies of the United States and Brazil should be read as expressions of a broader crisis of liberal democracy derived from a long process of promoting an atomistic ideology of society based on the neoliberal policies of the 1990s.
But although they ran their campaigns based on criticism of the limits of current democratic representation, once in power, what these leaders did was to deepen an authoritarian, individualistic, and exclusionary vision, increasingly dependent on the promise of easy and fallacious solutions to complex problems that each nation has been facing in recent years.
And even though they share the same logic and political ideals, and even though they have tried to bring their countries closer together, at least on a discursive level, under the aegis of an almost automatic alignment sought by Bolsonaro, such a project has not offered any concrete gain to Brazil. Rather it has actually deepened the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between the two countries in addition to having acutely tarnished Brazil's international image.
These are some of the main arguments of the analysis that Roberto Moll Jr. and I, respectively professors at the University of Denver in the United States and at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, outlined in the article “Trump and Bolsonaro: Neo-Fascist Expressions of the Frustrated Attempt to Redefine the Asymmetrical Relations between Brazil and the USA,” that was recently published (in English) in the academic journal Estudos Ibero-Americanos.
We also argue that although they presented themselves as outsiders in the political system of their respective countries, the viability of their anti-systemic narratives was based on the fear of change and the very idea of multicultural democracy, as well as on the vague promise of reconstructing a mythologized neoconservative past.
In this sense, when they resume the neoliberal economic agenda, now in even more authoritarian terms than in the 1990s, such undemocratic and demagogic leaders have managed to maintain surprisingly high levels of support amidst contexts continually defined by challenging economic and increasing alarming public health conditions.
But, if Trump and Bolsonaro had a lot in common, the domestic contexts mattered a lot for their desiderata, as well as for the bilateral relationship between their respective countries. If both could be defined as clear representatives of far-right neopopulism, in vogue in various parts of the world, the role of the armed forces in the Brazilian government, a country that never faced its legacy of coup interventions by its military, was something very specific, with developments still ongoing for civil-military relations.
Likewise, if Trump's populism took on a more xenophobic and racist character, Bolsonaro's had a more militaristic and ideological bias, expressing the return of articulations of notions dating back to the context of the Cold War and which seemed extinct in the Latin American scenario. Nevertheless, they have been surprisingly rescued by new right-wing leaders in the region.
Finally, despite sharing an authoritarian political ideology and a self-serving vision of power, it is certain that the situation in each country was very different given the obvious differences between the power resources and role of each nation on the global stage.
Such structural differences did not prevent, however, both leaders from seeking a clientelistic approach, in which the diplomacy of their respective countries began to seek a closely aligned relationship not only between the two nations, but between the two family clans in power.
And even though Brazil presented a line of diplomacy most often defined by autonomy and the defense of multilateralism, it was not difficult for Bolsonaro to seek to realign foreign policy on ideological bases that sought, in an ill-informed and certainly anachronistic way, to guide the defense of Brazilian national interests while fulfilling the role of junior associate member of Trumpist foreign policy. It is clear that part of this derived from the attempt to reverse the gains in the country's multilateral projection over the last few decades.
Even so, founded on a medievalist worldview of the then-chancellor Ernesto Araújo, Bolsonarist foreign policy explicitly assumed the fight against universalist values and argued that a greater rapprochement with the United States on dependent and associated bases would be the best way to articulate Brazil's interests in today's world.
Gains of recent years, such as obtaining greater weight in trade and environmental governance negotiations, should be reversed. The regional sphere of influence should be demobilized. And what should be sought would be the defense (a la medieval crusades) of the values of Western Christianity in the face of the threat (never well defined) of cultural communism. Consistent with the same defense made by similar regimes, such as Viktor Orban's in Hungary, defending Western values does not imply defending a more inclusive vision of democracy, increasingly defined according to restrictive parameters, such as human rights.
And so, as expressions of a broader crisis of liberal democracy, Bolsonaro and Trump never actually sought to offer effective responses to demands for better levels of political representation in the complex societies in which we live. On the contrary, they served more than anything as a means of implementing an exclusionary (neoliberal) economic and (authoritarian) political agenda.
Interestingly, despite their ideological and moral affinities, these leaders were unable to implement more lasting forms of close and subordinate diplomatic alignment – despite how much Bolsonaro tried to do so.
In addition to the structural reasons that did not allow such developments, such as changes in the global economic scenario leading to greater dependence of the Brazilian economy on the Chinese market, the achievements of recent decades of Brazilian diplomacy in terms of projecting the country on the international scene in a more structural and lasting way have certainly served as impediments to such a subordinate approach. It is certain, however, that a possible return of Donald Trump to the US presidency and the growing US-China rivalry will present increasing difficulties for the conduct of foreign policy even for a Brazil no longer under the shameful presidency of Bolsonaro.
