Some time ago I discovered Perry Anderson’s writing on Brazil. It coincided, roughly, with a rather gushing New York Times feature interviewing the director of a new Brazilian crime series. The interviewer seemed more worried about describing the location of their conversation and the reaction of eavesdropping strangers than getting to the core of the series, but managed to get across that the show, called “The Mechanism,” was about the Lava Jato scandal in Brazil, momentous in its portrayal of the subject matter and high in its production value – “The Wire” set on the equator.
I watched the first few episodes. I wouldn’t call myself a devotee of foreign television by any means, but I’ve watched enough that I think I know when I’m truly out of my depth culturally, and I dropped “The Mechanism” because it quickly became clear there were lines a Brazilian would pick up on that I simply wasn’t seeing, let alone reading between. Anderson’s pieces for the London Review of Books date back to 1989, although his first piece on Brazil was in 1994 – his breadth of knowledge stretches quite wide, but from his early 1990s writing on Italy and the Mani Pulite scandal (which he draws direct parallels to in his recent Brazilian coverage,) his ability to peel back the layers of political intrigue and get to its roots in the local society is well-founded. My short tenure as a “Mechanism” viewer demonstrated that periodic columns in The Economist – usually relating to inflation, oil, agribusiness, crime in the favelas, the bolsa familia policy, and Lula – had given me a shallow familiarity with the country’s headlines and macroeconomic figures but, perhaps unsurprisingly, no real idea of what was going on. Anderson’s writing was dazzlingly informed, so fluent in the history and cast of characters it was as though my previous acquaintance with the country were through a child’s coloring book and now I was watching the IMAX adaptation in 3D, no expense (i.e. word count) spared. His most recent pieces delve into Jair Bolsonaro, yet another member of the current pantheon of democratic thuggery. For an author to deliver such a compelling history and analysis of an entire country over multiple decades merely as part of digging into the backstory of the country’s newest leader is, to me, remarkable.
There is, admittedly, a tinge of implicit condescension in that remarkability that makes me wince; Brazil is the fifth most populous nation in the world, so perhaps it should be unremarkable that a cogent 17,000 word piece placing its leader in historical context should appear in a reputable global publication. Trump-related writing certainly surpasses that figure by an order of magnitude on a daily basis, even if we discount the tweets themselves! Nonetheless, Anderson’s comprehensive account taught me more in one reading than a decade of casual if regular consumption, so on that score alone he deserves to be read – past, present, and future – with attention.
He also had two asides, related to Brazil in only the broadest sense, that had me reaching for an underlining pen.
“Often heard…is the opinion that [Bolsonaro’s] rise represents a contemporary version of fascism. The same, of course, is a standard depiction of Trump in liberal and left circles in America and the North Atlantic at large, if typically assorted with escape clauses – ‘much like’, ‘reminiscent of’, ‘resembling’ – making clear it is little more than lazy invective.”
He ends the last sentence with a citation, but bear with me while we visit the other inciting comment, which comes only a paragraph later:
“Is Bolsonaro better pigeonholed as a populist? The term now suffers such inflation as the all-purpose bugbear of the bien pensant media that its utility has declined.”
There.
First off, I love any aside from an esteemed academic writer (Anderson recently retired from UCLA and was an editor of the New Left Review) because its high risk always pays off for the reader: we either get the highly trained and deadly verbal thrust of a specialist, delivered with all the esoteric power, self-assuredness, and frustration that build up in the ivory tower, or a lazy swipe that allows the ghost of Gore Vidal – and us with him – to smirk once again at the flailing efforts of academe.
I think these fall into the former category. The call out is not pedantic, as his (rather smug, certainly) swipe at the bien pensant media rings true – populism and fascism are two words on the tip of the buzzword tongue. As an undergraduate I took a course on populism which I quite enjoyed, although the political theory was well outside my wheelhouse. The populist movement of that moment, the populist characteristics of which my professor rightly challenged us to inspect, was the Tea Party, in the avatar of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. I have done little to refresh my studies of a decade ago, but my remaining knowledge does twinge every time I hear the word populism being hurled at political developments worldwide by way of explanation – it has become the equivalent of a verbal shrug. Not to say it doesn’t merit deep analysis, but Anderson’s argument for lessened utility holds true for me. So, too, his point on fascism. I despise Donald Trump, and I fully appreciate the sort of invective he deserves. I even plan to contribute my mite to the pile that history will, no doubt, pile upon him. But when the posters and rallying cries of fascism become so common from so many disparate groups, I begin to wonder if the word hasn’t become a cousin to the most popular political phrase of all – “No!” – in that many will pump their fists in the air to scream it, but can’t agree on why they screamed it when the fists come back down and conversation resumes.
Thus Anderson’s citation. Erudite readers, unlike me, would no doubt have noted that the footnote Anderson gives at the end of the first quote above leads to a recent piece in the New Left Review, so the usual sorts of academic conflicts of interest arise. And yet the argument in the piece – “What Is Trump?” by Dylan Riley – is elegant and wonderfully crafted, such that I have to give Anderson a full pass. Riley begins by plucking quotes from political figures across the spectrum (including an anarcho-syndicalist, which I thought only existed in Monty Python) comparing Trump to fascists gone by, but always with verbiage that defuses the charge. After gathering the evidence, he demolishes their charge by delving into the origins of fascism in Interwar Germany and Italy, combining an argument about the imperialist goals fascists necessarily pursued with analysis of the social classes that responded to the clarion call. He then moves on to contrast Trump’s presidency and policies with those of the Interwar fascists, and I think does a very convincing job of demonstrating the unsuitability of the label. It’s not that Trump isn’t a terrible president, racist and seemingly bent on diminishing the country he is supposed to lead morally and economically, it’s just that all of the above do not make him a fascist.
Riley goes on to categorize Trump’s political style using a more theoretical framework – Weber is trotted out – and pins him, cicada-like, with an exact political taxonomy. The departure from empirics makes me, a philistine, less inclined to follow along, but it does complete the overall idea of “we should criticize this goon using the tight terms” nicely. By the end, Riley cannot help himself but call for the forces he thinks should replace Trump – he has earned it, after all – and this being the New Left Review the FBI and CIA are abolished. The trailing off at the end, however, does not detract from what I think is a profoundly successful piece at least in that it urges the correct consideration of the facts, even if the reader doesn’t agree with the author’s conclusion after synthesizing them.
I liked Anderson’s asides because his righteous dismissal of misleading orthodoxy speaks, I think, to the same basic urge that makes everyone hate fake news – including those who are reading it. Without doing the diligence to at least agree on a basic set of facts, we risk being unable to have a basic conversation, which means the farthest we can progress together is standing in the streets with our signs shouting “No!” but never actually sitting at the table to get things done. I read recently that the Yellow Vest movement in France coalesced into not one but two political organizations, which apparently surprised their respective organizers. It’s easy to look out at the No’s and see a vision of a particular future, but without doing the work to understand what specific issues brought everyone to the table – beyond allying against an easy, if inaccurate, umbrella term – it’s hard to imagine how to successfully get things done if or when the No’s have to become Yes’s. This is what I’m afraid of for the Democrats. The No energy that in many ways motivated the midterms was a joyous release, a reaction, but I don’t see the groundwork for Yes’s in 2020. Pelosi and Schumer are, in their way, no different than McConnell – old partisan hands ready to enact their agenda when they have their chance, tacking with the intra-party winds in the meanwhile but not making fundamental changes in course. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez has seized the Sanders demographic with vigor, but her wonderfully articulate defense – or better yet, offense – in the face of Republican actions is not a substitute for concrete plans. The Green New Deal combines two nice ideas, but the fact remains no one has attached a dollar figure to it yet, and it’s Warren rather than Ocasio-Cortez who seems to have policies that actually raise revenue. Internecine Democratic warfare awaits in the wings, and with Trump standing orange and unbloodied atop a mountain of vanquished rivals, “the Resistance” may hand their archrival victory by being unable to unite. In some way I most fear some kind of Democratic Trump vaulting over opponents in the same way Trump did, so remarkably, over his Republican rivals. To repeat this cycle because we were unable to do the serious work of figuring out what was happening and how to respond to it would be the ultimate shame.
But hey, at least we’re not in Brazil!
smq.world 