Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,333]

30 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Sorry, but around 80% -90% of your posts with 'facts' are proved wrong. When confronted you either slink off, or spout irrelevancies as above.

Next day, another vat of ouzo, rinse and repeat...

0% of my posts ever have been proved wrong - save the possibility of a palpable error.
It is, normally, those confronted who sneak off.
You are trying to say to me that any peoples in the western hemisphere are judging politician from their sex.
They are judging them for their beliefs and the politician in question may infact be stupid or the person who judges the politician may be an idiot. But what you say is impossible and it is a fantasy.

[KEVINAA 106]

On YouTube and X rumours that Elon Musk bought or is going to buy FOX NEWS CHANNEL/ FOX NEWS MEDIA.

[Fulham Broadway 16,920]

32 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

0% of my posts ever have been proved wrong - save the possibility of a palpable error.
It is, normally, those confronted who sneak off.
You are trying to say to me that any peoples in the western hemisphere are judging politician from their sex.
They are judging them for their beliefs and the politician in question may infact be stupid or the person who judges the politician may be an idiot. But what you say is impossible and it is a fantasy.

We were discussing the US. You asked if I had been  there, which I have 3 times. You then said I was lying.

You then started talking about  completely different countries to deflect. Countless things you have made up over the years, eg the Greek teacher murdered by racists in London =complete bollox. You then disappeared, like you always do

 

[Vesper 29,019]

2 hours ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

When I was a kid in the 90's those sororities were still paper bag checking people for leadership. They still do it now.

Bajans still have parchment bashments

if you darker than a Big B (foodmart) bag, your black arse ain't get into the party

[Vesper 29,019]

2 hours ago, cosmicway said:

0% of my posts ever have been proved wrong - save the possibility of a palpable error.

smdh

[Vesper 29,019]

What will an evangelical Brazil look like?

Utopia brasileira

Within less than a decade, Brazil will have as many evangelicals as Catholics, a transcendence born of the prosperity gospel

https://aeon.co/essays/what-will-an-evangelical-brazil-look-like

A gospel service at the Baptist church Maranata in Jaboatao dos Guararapes, Brazil, September 2022. Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

 

Utopia is on the horizon … I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another 10 steps and the horizon runs 10 steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.
– from Las palabras andantes (1993), or Walking Words, by Eduardo Galeano

In 1856, Thomas Ewbank published Life in Brazil, an account of the Englishman’s six months spent in the country a decade earlier. In it, he argued that Catholicism as practised in Brazil and across Latin America constrained material progress. In this, the visitor would be joined by a long line of critics, from the writer and later modernising president of Argentina, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento – who denounced the negative influence of Spanish and Indigenous cultures in Latin America, including the role of the Catholic Church – to the conservative Harvard academic Samuel Huntington.

The Church of St Cosmas and St Damian and The Franciscan Monastery at Igaraçu, Brazil (c1663) by Frans Jansz Post. Courtesy the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Ewbank contended, moreover, that the ‘Nordic sects will never flourish on the Tropics,’ a line that Brazil’s greatest historian, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, immortalised in his work Raízes do Brasil (1936), or Roots of Brazil. Protestants would supposedly degenerate here, with the severity, austerity and rigour of that doctrine being incompatible with the archetypal Brazilian: the ‘cordial man’. This figure, according to Holanda, represented interpersonal warmth and openness, in contrast to closed and rule-bound northern Europeans.

At present, Protestants account for one-third of the population, while the number of Catholics has just dipped below 50 per cent. By far the largest proportion of Brazilian Protestants are evangelicals, specifically Pentecostals, neo-Pentecostals and related branches. By the centenary of Raízes do Brasil in 2036, Protestants will outnumber Catholics in Brazil for the first time in the country’s 500-plus-year history.

In 2018, the far-Right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro shocked the country by winning the presidency, bolstered by an evangelical vote that would remain faithful to him and his socially conservative, politically reactionary and cosmologically apocalyptic politics.

The rise of this bloc presents a challenge to perhaps the most clichéd description of Brazil. In 1941, the Austrian Stefan Zweig, seeking refuge from Nazism in Brazil, called this land the ‘country of the future’. Zweig highlighted not just Brazil’s natural endowments but the society’s tolerance, openness, harmony, optimism and fusionist culture.

For Zweig, as for many Europeans and Americans before him, Brazil became a utopian gleam in the eye. For centuries, certain common threads had sewn these utopian visions together: Brazil was a picture of idleness, imagination, diversity and conviviality – a means of living together that relied on adaptability. Yet the Bolsonarismo phenomenon, according to critics, is intolerant, punitive, supremacist, an embodiment of a type of Christian cosmovision at odds with any notion of society. Did the presidency of Bolsonaro, under the slogan ‘Brazil above everything, God above everyone’, signal an end of this romance?

No one holds Brazil as an existing paradise. Few even sustain any expectation that it will deliver on what was promised for it. And, indeed, utopian thinking probably died as far back as the 1964 military coup. But many have continued to uphold the country’s cultural traits as admirable and enviable – even models for the world.

‘Brazilianization’, a trope taken up by various intellectuals in recent decades, signals a universal tendency towards social inequality, urban segregation, informalisation of labour, and political corruption. Others, though, have sought to rescue a positive aspect: the country’s informality and ductility, particularly in relation to work, as well as its hybridisation, creolisation and openness to the world, made it already adapted to the new, global, postmodern capitalism that followed the Cold War.

By the 2000s, Brazil was witnessing peaceful, democratic alternation in government between centre-Left and centre-Right for practically the first time in its history. Under President Lula, it saw booming growth, combined with new measures of social inclusion. But underneath the surface of the globalisation wave that Brazil was surfing, violent crime was on the up, manufacturing was down, and inclusion was being bought on credit.

‘There is indeed an alternative, even if it is an apocalyptic one’

In 2013, it came to a shuddering halt. Rising popular expectations generated a crisis of representation – announced by the biggest mass street mobilisations in the country’s history. This was succeeded by economic crisis and then by institutional crisis, culminating in the parliamentary coup against Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff. Now all the energy seemed to be with a new Right-wing movement that dominated the streets. It was topped off by the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. Suddenly, eyes turned to the growing prominence of conservative Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal outlooks in national life.

An evangelical church near Salgueiro, Pernambuco state, Brazil, February 2022. Photo by Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg/Getty

Bolsonaro failed to be re-elected in 2022. Upon his defeat, Folha de S Paulo, Brazil’s paper of record, reported that, ‘Bolsonarista pastors talk of apocalypse.’ At the evangelical Community of Nations church in Brasília, frequented by Michelle Bolsonaro, wife of Jair, the pastor’s wife is reported to have proclaimed: ‘Brazil has an owner. That hasn’t changed, it won’t change. God continues to be the one who made Brazil shine and be the light of the world. His plan has changed neither with regard to us nor the country.’ It was a rare expression, for our times, of a sense of historical mission or destiny. The age of no alternative was being left behind. ‘There is indeed an alternative, even if it is an apocalyptic one,’ the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes sardonically remarked.

In the final 2022 pre-election poll, evangelicals split 69-31 in Bolsonaro’s favour. Although he is Catholic, he was baptised in the River Jordan in 2016 by Pastor Everaldo, an important member of the Pentecostal Assembleia de Deus (the Assemblies of God – the largest Pentecostal church in the world, and the largest evangelical church in Brazil).

The creationist and anti-gay Pentecostal Marcelo Crivella shocked many when he defeated a human rights activist to become mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Crivella’s uncle is Edir Macedo, the founder of the neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, or IURD), the largest of its denomination, reputedly with 4.8 million faithful in Brazil. Preaching the ‘prosperity gospel’, according to which commitment to the church will be rewarded with wealth, has seen Macedo become a dollar billionaire (of which there are around 60 in the country). The IURD is known for practising exorcisms and divine cures, and for purging demonic spirits, which it associates with Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé and Umbanda. But it is the IURD’s political role and media presence that really make it stand out.

The Republicanos party, founded in 2005, is a creature of the IURD. Its president, the lawyer Marcos Pereira, was a bishop who held a position in the Michel Temer administration that took office after deposing of Rousseff. The party’s 44 deputies in the lower house of Congress are part of the powerful cross-party evangelical bench in Congress, composed of 215 deputies out of a total of 513. Macedo also owns Record, the second-biggest channel in Brazil, which gave Bolsonaro plenty of free airtime.

The articulation between evangelicals and Bolsonaro only strengthened through his term. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s denial of the severity of the virus was, in part, a demonstration of evangelical coronafé, or corona-faith: ‘that confidence, that certainty that God is with you and that he will never, ever, at any time fail those who have believed in him,’ in Macedo’s words. Later in his term, Bolsonaro nominated the ‘terribly evangelical’ Presbyterian pastor André Mendonça to an empty Supreme Court seat. Upon Congressional approval, the president’s wife Michelle, a crucial link to the evangelical public, was filmed crying, praying and speaking in tongues.

Bolsonarismo is a sort of parody of Christian eschatology

After Bolsonaro left office, his supporters stormed government buildings in Brasília on 8 January 2023, in a replay of the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. The action was widely unpopular. But 31 per cent of evangelicals supported it, against a national average of 18 per cent. While 40 per cent of the population believed Lula had not won the election fairly, among evangelicals this belief was as high as 68 per cent, with 64 per cent in favour of a coup to overturn the result. The media was full of reports of pro-Bolsonaro protestors praying for miracles, speaking in tongues and behaving like the world was ending.

The theologian Yago Martins, whose videos on religious thought have won him more than 1 million followers across his social channels, refers to Bolsonarismo as an apocalípse de palha, or ‘straw apocalypse’. Bolsonarismo’s combination of a conspiratorial mindset, a longing for an imminent national conflagration, a holy war against evil, and its messianic discourse are a sort of parody of Christian eschatology. For Martins, author of A religão do bolsonarismo (2021), or Bolsonarismo as Religion, the movement is a ‘fallacious immanentisation of the eschaton’, a paraphrase of the philosopher Eric Voegelin’s phrase from 1952.

Martins, a Baptist pastor, identifies as a Right-wing evangelical, but is a critic of Bolsonarismo (though he admits to voting for him in 2018). His criticisms of Bolsonarismo’s idolatry nevertheless testify to something new on the scene: the insertion of a transcendental viewpoint into politics, something that had supposedly been expulsed with the historic defeat of socialism and nationalism.

Indeed, when I spoke to Gedeon Freire de Alencar, a sociologist of religion and author of a book on the contribution of evangelicals to Brazilian culture, as well as a presbyter of the Bethesda Assembly of God in São Paulo, he emphasised the role of dominion theology, according to which believers should seek to institute a nation governed by Christians. The ‘Seven Mountain Mandate’, popularised in 2013 by two American authors, advocates that there are seven areas of life that evangelicals should target: religion, family, government, education, media, arts/entertainment, and business.

For many progressives, this struck as a sort of ‘medieval radicalism’, the charge thrown at Crivella by Jean Wyllys, the first gay-rights activist to win a seat in Congress. The philosopher and columnist Vladimir Safatle denounced the ‘project to take Brazil back to the Middle Ages’: yes, Brazil had had its share of authoritarian and conservative figures in the past, but this was new, ‘because the old Right… never needed spokespeople.’

As testament to the growing presence of evangelicals but also their political ambivalence, consider the March for Jesus. The yearly demonstration is known as ‘the world’s largest Christian event’ drawing between 1 and 3 millions crentes, or believers, each year. Though Bolsonaro was the first president to attend the march, in 2019, it was Lula who signed the law that officialised the National Day for the March for Jesus, scheduled for 60 days after Easter.

Evangelicals attend the March for Jesus in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 8 June 2023. Photo by Amanda Perobelli/Reuters

Similarly, back in 1997 it was estimated that one-third of militants in the agrarian land reform movement, MST, were Pentecostals, which would have been double the rate of the local population at the time. Twenty years later, Guilherme Boulos, coordinator of the MTST, the unhoused workers’ movement, claimed that by far the largest part of the movement’s base was made up of Pentecostals.

So why the association of evangelicals with darkest reaction? In large part, it’s class prejudice, argues the anthropologist Juliano Spyer, whose book Povo de Deus (2020), or People of God, sparked widespread debate in the country and was a finalist in Brazil’s most prestigious nonfiction prize in 2021. For opinion-formers, the evangelical is either a poor fanatic or a rich manipulator, but the reality is that the religion is socially embedded in Brazil, particularly among the poor and Black population.

The Brazilian urban landscape sees a war of all against all play out every day

For instance, well-to-do social progressivism tars evangelical religion as patriarchal. Perhaps so, in contrast with contemporary upper-middle-class mores, but in the often machista and violent lifeworld of the Brazilian working class, when a man is born-again, he stops drinking, becomes less likely to beat his wife, and is more inclined to contribute to the household. Similarly, while evangelicals are held to be anti-science and anti-enlightenment, in a culture in which even the elite has never been particularly bookish, conversion is associated with a renewed emphasis on study. This partly explains why Pentecostalism (and evangelical Christianity more broadly), is the faith of the world’s urban poor. And ‘Brazil is ground zero for what is happening within the wider Pentecostal movement, the median global experience,’ explains Elle Hardy, author of a book Beyond Belief (2021) on the phenomenon’s spread worldwide.

The evangelical movement must be understood in relation to the reality in which real political corruption abounds, and violence and the threat of violence is omnipresent in the working-class urban context. Brazil now sees more than 50,000 murders a year, and the violence associated with criminal markets, especially drugs, is only the sharp end of a fully marketised society. The Brazilian urban landscape sees a war of all against all play out every day. Middle-class Brazilian progressives were happy to ignore the civil war raging in the urban peripheries until the violence found a spokesperson in Bolsonaro.

Broadly, the term evangélicos refers to missionary Protestants who are not members of the historic Protestant churches in Brazil – the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Adventists and Baptists who first arrived from Europe in the 19th century.

Confusingly, many historic Protestant churches carry the name ‘evangelical’ in their titles, and some have now come to adopt modes of worship evocative of charismatic or revivalist churches. But a distinction remains: historic Protestants in Brazil normally call themselves protestante or cristão, not evangélico or crente – and they tend to be middle class.

Pentecostalism arrived in Brazil in the early 20th century, taking root among the poor. Its emblematic church is the Assembleia de Deus, established by two Swedish Baptist missionaries who arrived in the Amazonian port city of Belém in 1910. The third wave, beginning in the 1950s, is marked by the arrival of the Foursquare Church (Igreja Quadrangular), and coincides with rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, with worshipers recruited over the airwaves. But even by 1970, evangelicals still accounted for only 5.2 per cent of the population, while Catholics were at 91.8 per cent.

The establishment of the IURD in 1977 marks the arrival of neo-Pentecostalism and the start of the fourth wave. Proselytising is carried out via TV and, doctrinally, a more managerial ethos is introduced. To the Pentecostals’ direct, personal and emotional experience of God is added the idea that conversion leads to financial advancement – the prosperity gospel. Macedo’s church also exemplified the movement’s growing political confidence. By the 1980s, the slogan crente não se mete na política (believers don’t get mixed up in politics) was being replaced by irmão vota em irmão (brothers vote for brothers).

Throughout, the share of Catholics in the population was falling, with an almost commensurate rise in evangelicals – by about 1 per cent per decade. But, as of 1990, this accelerates to a 1 per cent change per year. Catholics were still 83 per cent of the population in 1991 and 74 per cent in 2000, when Catholicism hit its peak in absolute terms, with 124.9 million Brazilians – making Brazil the largest Catholic country in the world, a title it still holds. But by 2010, the share of Catholics had fallen to 64.6 per cent, with evangelicals rising to 22.2 per cent. Today, evangelicals represent a third of the population, and Catholics just under half. Modellers have identified 2032 as the year of religious crossover, when each Christian camp will account for an equal share of the population: 39 per cent.

Any evangelical entrepreneur with a Bible under his arm and access to an enclosed space can set up shop

What explains this explosion? The anthropologist Gilberto Velho points to inward migration, the primary 20th-century phenomenon in Brazil. Tens of millions of poor, illiterate, rural and profoundly Catholic people from the arid northeast of Brazil migrated to big cities, especially in the industrial southeast. Spyer tells me they ‘lived through the shock of leaving the countryside for the electricity of the city – but also the shock of moving to the most vulnerable parts of the city.’ The loss of networks of support, particularly of extended family, was filled by the establishment of evangelical churches. This is why the geographer Mike Davis called Pentecostalism ‘the single most important cultural response to explosive and traumatic urbanisation’.

Sixty years ago, Brazil’s population was evenly split between town and country. Now it is 88 per cent urban, comparable with infinitely richer Sweden or Denmark, and higher than the US, the UK or Germany. The urbanisation rate is also much higher than Brazil’s fellow BRICs, China (66 per cent) or South Africa (68 per cent). Over the past decades, Brazil has also suffered ‘premature deindustrialisation’ – the loss of manufacturing jobs on the scale of the UK, for instance, but at a much lower level of income and development. Here is the recipe for what Davis called a ‘planet of slums’: urbanisation without industrialisation.

And it is in the peripheries of megalopolises like São Paulo (greater metropolitan population: 22 million) and Rio (14 million), or other large cities where informal or precarious housing and employment dominates, that nimble startup churches sprout. Unlike the slow-moving Catholic Church, which demands more established settings and that its priests undergo four years of theological study, any evangelical entrepreneur with a Bible under his arm and access to an enclosed space, no matter how rudimentary, can set up shop. To ambitious working-class men, this offers a route to a leadership position in the community, a path to self-improvement.

It was in what the sociologist Luiz Werneck Vianna called this ‘Sahara of civic life’ that Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals built spaces of acolhimento, a word denoting both warm reception and refuge. They took root in the places abandoned by the Brazilian Left, of which the Catholic, liberation theology-inspired Comunidades Eclesiasticas de Base were a major part.

Turning up in an expensive imported car signals to co-religionaries that the prosperity gospel is working

Of course, not all evangelicals in Brazil are poor or working class. The movement has seen significant expansion into the middle class, even if the elite proper remains mostly Catholic. And there are doctrinal differences that map onto these class differences, even if incompletely.

An Assemblies of God church in the city of Cabo Frio, Brazil. Photo by Nate Cull/Flickr

The model Pentecostal will be a poor assembleiano, a member of the Assemblies of God, whose small, basic and mostly ugly structures populate the landscape, from gritty industrial suburbs to lost hamlets of a dozen inhabitants deep in the interior. In these houses of worship, eschatological themes are omnipresent and the songs are about Jesus’s second coming. On the way to or back from church, worshipers – in their Sunday best – pass each other’s houses and check in on each other, reinforcing communal ties.

At the other end of the spectrum is something like the Bola de Neve Church, founded in a surf shop by a surfing pastor in 1999. Its 560 churches across a number of countries purvey something altogether ‘lighter’. Its middle-class members arrive by car, wear casual clothing, and are treated to sermons accompanied by pop-rock and reggae. Eschatological themes are largely absent. As Alencar put it to me: ‘If Jesus returned now, he’d ruin their gig.’ Accompanying the Church’s suave and sophisticated marketing is the preaching of the theology of prosperity. Turning up in an expensive imported car signals to co-religionaries that the prosperity gospel is working.

Importantly, in Brazil, ‘everything is syncretised and miscegenated,’ explains Alencar, so although in doctrinal terms the gulf between Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal is ‘abyssal’, in practice it is hard to draw clear lines. Moreover, Baptist, Adventist and even Catholic churches are undergoing pentecostalização, adopting charismatic or revivalist features. The prosperity gospel component cuts across many of these complicated lines, a result of the emphasis on competition, individualism and economic ascent typical of neoliberal societies.

At the Ministry of the Faith church in Brasília, Brazil, September 2018. Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

But ultimately, for all the variety, the growth of evangelical Christianity in a society as unequal as Brazil is a phenomenon of the poor and working class. Conversion and dedication promises – and, in some cases, delivers – a better life: not just money, but also in terms of relationships, family and especially health. Belief functions as a para-medicine, be it directly through faith-healing, through the belief, determination and support to beat addiction, or simply through the provision of psychological support. In the words of Davis, it is a ‘spiritual health-delivery system’. This is the reason why evangelicals tend to be urban, young, Black or Brown women, from the least schooled strata, with the lowest salaries. It is, as Davis put it, ‘the largest self-organised movement of poor urban people in the world.’

Utopian visions have attached themselves to Brazil and informed its self-conception from its European discovery through to the 20th century. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) news of a distant paradise was brought by a Portuguese sailor. Brazil was Utopia realised. As Patricia Vieira puts it in States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture (2018), it presented a ‘fantasy of easy enrichment, grounded on the perception of the region as a treasure trove of natural wealth.’

For one 17th-century Jesuit priest, the land demarcated on the east side of the Treaty of Tordesillas would be the ‘Fifth Empire’, a new kingdom of perpetual peace, where people would live in mystical communion with God, and all would have equal rights. Gradually, messianic and theologically informed visions would give way to secularised ones.

Curiously, Brazil is the only country whose demonym finishes in the -eiro suffix in Portuguese. So you have the Francês, the Argentino, the Americano, the Israelense… but the Brasileiro. It suggests an occupation, like marceneiro (carpenter), pedreiro (bricklayer), mineiro (miner). To be Brazilian was not a state of being, but an activity, a doing. It was the Portuguese and other Europeans who went off and ‘did’ Brazil – exploited its land.

The Indigenous hero is lazy – a ‘trait that Brazilians should embrace and consciously cultivate’

So the Brasileiro is one committed to the project of Brazil, they are not a mere natural feature of the land. But this also speaks to a rapacious pattern of Brazilian development, characterised by using and discarding, rather than building and consolidating. It is a subjectivity evocative of Max Weber’s ‘capitalistic adventurer’; a figure who would ‘collect the fruit without planting the tree,’ as Holanda put it. The utopian tangles with its opposite. Are we dealing with transformation or exploitation? Is the one who works the land subject or object?

Rejecting the exploited and exploiter dichotomy, a different utopian vision fixated on the independent, noble savage, free from work. The Índio was celebrated by Brazilian Romantics and modernists alike. In Macunaíma (1928), Mario de Andrade’s landmark novel mixing fantastical and primitivist elements, the eponymous Indigenous hero, a ‘hero without any character’, is above all lazy – a ‘trait that Brazilians should be proud of, embrace, and consciously cultivate,’ according to Vieira. But at issue is not really laziness but ócio – idleness. The Portuguese word for business is negócio, or the negation of idleness (neg-ócio). So, Vieira argues, the ‘business‑as‑usual work mentality of the capitalist world is at odds … with the primeval ócio of Brazilian Indigenous communities…’

The modernist poet Oswald de Andrade likewise foresaw a coming Age of Leisure, enabled by technology. In this egalitarian, matriarchal disposition, Brazil could be at the forefront of nations, showing the way. Civilising work, negócio, had been done; soon the dialectic would swing back to a paradisaical ócio.

In practice, the Índio and the adventurer were locked in conflict, but they jointly stood in contrast to the avaricious European bourgeois. It is for this reason that Holanda’s Brazilian archetype of the cordial man is, as the sociologist Jessé de Souza puts it, the ‘perfect inverse of the ascetic Protestant’.

Today’s Brazilian evangelicals are likewise not Weber’s northern European protestants. Their worship is emotional, not intellectual, filled with magic, rather than structured by reason. But pecuniary accumulation appears to unite them.

As the Left-leaning Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger has noted, these are the people who ‘[go] to night school, struggle to open a business, to be an independent professional, who are building a new culture of self-help and initiative – they are in command of the national imaginary.’ A few years ago, when asked about Left-wing rejection of the entrepreneurial, evangelical sector, Unger replied that the Brazilian Left should not repeat the ‘calamitous trajectory’ of their European counterparts in demonising the petty bourgeoisie and distancing themselves ‘from the real aspirations of workers’.

This neo-Pentecostal consumer-capitalist utopia is necessarily authoritarian

The ‘neo-Pentecostal movement today flourishes in a context of dismantling of labour protections,’ argues Brazil’s leading scholar of precarity, Ruy Braga. This requires less a methodical dedication to work, and more the neoliberal self-management typical of popular entrepreneurship. We are dealing not with the Protestant work ethic, but with an evangelical speculative ethic. Quantification becomes the criteria of validation, be it for believers or churches competing in the religious marketplace. ‘Blessings are consumed, praises sold, preaching purchased,’ as Alencar puts it.

Whether this is mere capitalist survival or somehow utopian depends on whether you agree with the Catholic theologian Jung Mo Sung’s assertion that evangelicals insert a metaphysical element – perfectibility; the realisation of desire through the market for those who ‘deserve’ it – into mundane society. For a critic of the prosperity gospel like Sung, this neo-Pentecostal consumer-capitalist utopia is necessarily authoritarian. Divine blessing – manifest through the crente’s increased purchasing power – is bestowed as a result of the believers’ spiritual war against the enemies of God: the ‘communists’ and the ‘gays’.

The ‘communists’ (who might in fact just be centrist progressives or Catholics) want to give money to the poor; these in turn may be sinners (drug users or traffickers, for instance). This goes against the way that God distributes blessings, which is to favour, economically, those who follow the prosperity gospel.

According to most accounts, a unifying element in the evangelical cosmology is the confrontation between good and evil. The fiel (faithful) encounters a binary: the ‘world’ (sin, violence, addiction, suffering, evil – the Devil around every corner) vs the ‘Church’ (the negation of all that). This code is efficient in affording psychic peace to those facing a complex, rapidly changing world.

How stark is the contrast with earlier self-understandings of Brazilian culture in which ambiguity prevailed! Brazil apparently lacked a moral nexus (as the historian Caio Prado Jr saw it in the 1940s), it was a society of ‘corrosive tolerance’ (according to the literary critic Antônio Cândido in the 1970s) or represented a ‘world without guilt’ (said another literary critic, Roberto Schwarz, in the 1980s).

Outsiders, too, remarked on the absence of moral depth and pure religion. Two 19th-century American missionaries, James Fletcher and Daniel Kidder, lamented in Brazil and the Brazilians (1857) that that this natural paradise could have been a moral paradise, were it not for the fact that tropical Catholicism was superficial, pagan, and hung up on feasts and saints. North Americans of the time learned that the Brazilian was ‘amiable, refined, ceremonious’, but also that the absence of stricter moral codes led him to be ‘irresponsible, insincere and selfish’.

The emblematic Brazilian figure, another archetype, is the malandro, or trickster, slacker, scoundrel. Identified by Cândido in his reading of the 19th-century novel Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, the malandro flits between the upper and lower classes, between order and disorder, and operates on the presumption of an absence of moral judgment, sin and guilt. He does not work full-time, but nor is he a full-time criminal, nor a slave. He gets by on his wits and adapts. For Vieira, the ‘relaxed, leisurely lifestyle of the malandro, which represents the quintessentially Brazilian way of being-in-the-world, generated a society where regulations are lax, and so can be easily bent to accommodate different customs and traditions.’

Conversions are negatively impacting samba schools, with the born-again quitting carnival

The malandro is at home in carnaval, which brackets real life, allowing for play, for freedom and fantasy. In Roberto DaMatta’s classic 1979 study, the festival is a subversive, free universe of useless activity – something that looks like madness from the perspective of capitalist work ideology.

In this light, Brazil’s great religious transition represents a cultural revolution. Evangelicals interrupt the ‘utopia’ of the idle Índio or the malandro at play in carnival. Firstly, they disdain idleness in favour of entrepreneurial activity and rigorous self-discipline. Secondly, and more directly, they scorn carnival itself. As the leading Pentecostal pastor Silas Malafaia puts it, carnival is a pagan feast ‘marked by sexual licentiousness, boozing, gluttony, group orgies and a lot of music.’ This is felt at the grassroots. Folha de S Paulo reports on how conversions are negatively impacting samba schools and other musical groups, with the born-again quitting carnival.

They say Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism owe their success to their adaptability to local contexts. But, at a minimum, these doctrines’ implantation in foreign soil gives voice to deep changes in the receiving culture, and at a maximum may even serve to transform it. If toleration, moral ambiguity and easy-going malleability were central to a Catholic-inflected Brazilian identity, what will an evangelical Brazil look like?

In The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E P Thompson comments that Methodism prevented revolution in England in the 1790s. Yet it was indirectly responsible for a growth in working people’s self-confidence and capacity for organisation. Could something similar be said for Brazilian evangelicals, whose self-starting community-building, at a minimum, could be looked at sympathetically for reconstructing associational life?

The Canadian political scientist André Corten, who taught and researched across Latin America, remarked that ‘the failure of secularised Utopias makes the persistence of theologised Utopias come to light.’ Pentecostalism, as a sect, is one such utopianism. It withdraws to an ‘elsewhere’ in social space, refuses to compromise with the social world, and is therefore ‘anti-political’. There is a popular-democratic thrust to this: no deference to a professionalised clergy, but rather a horizontal ordering of the faithful.

A comparison with revolutionary-democratic liberation theology is illuminating. Insofar as they construct the category of ‘the poor’, both liberation theology and Pentecostalism are discourses about suffering. But Pentecostalism privileges emotion in the place of cognition, glossolalia (speaking in tongues) in the place of equality of speech, and – crucially – it is a religion of the poor, not for the poor. It disdains poverty.

Evangelical churches ‘transform people who were born as subaltern – not just poor but also convinced that their social role is to be poor – and they are reborn: they come to understand themselves as equal to other people,’ argues Spyer. They seek to turn their back on poverty and change their lives so as to improve their station.

How does this relate to secular utopianism? It doesn’t. This democratic-popular component cannot be recycled by the Left, nor by conservatism; evangelicals may refuse infeudation to a category of scholars but, simultaneously, the intolerance and despotism of custom connote authoritarianism. This is a movement that is ‘at once egalitarian and authoritarian’, says Corten.

Is this not the obverse of the hegemonic culture, of progressive neoliberalism? Our societies are, prima facie, egalitarian: most forms of elitism and snobbery are ruled out, and we are tolerant of difference and accepting of minorities, because everything is relativised in a consumer society. But, in practice, there is a deep inequality of income, wealth, power and even recognition.

As evangelical Christianity ballooned, it would leave behind the anti-politics of the sect

So even if we are to conclude that the evangelical wave contains no utopian seeds, it is at the very least countercultural. Indeed, it was, as Alencar put it to me, ‘contestatory from the start: in their social behaviour, ways of greeting each other, their clothes, music, sport, life…’ But this was always a ‘force of transformation with no intentionality’, says Corten, making its logic distinct from the utopian ideologies of the Left.

In any case, as evangelical Christianity ballooned, it was always going to leave behind the anti-politics of the sect. Corten sketched out three political trajectories that might take shape.

One is assimilation: adapting to the reigning order of society. In formal politics, this is represented by evangelical political parties or cross-party benches behaving in physiological fashion – a term from Brazilian politics that means to become part of the organs of the state, with all the clientelism and corruption this entails.

The happy-clappy neo-Pentecostal churches like Bola de Neve would likewise represent a certain assimilation. Embourgeoisement, for evangelicals, represents not just certain churches becoming middle class, but questions over the professionalisation of the clergy, whether pastors should be paid a salary. These frictions are currently playing out among the faithful, with heated debate within churches – and competition between them.

A second entry point to politics is manipulation: this consists in evangelical leaders letting believers think that they continue to be ‘unacceptable’ while playing the political game. This might accord with the authoritarian thesis, whereby evangelical ‘despotism of custom’ fits seamlessly with secular authoritarian rule.

The third door leads to messianism. This would present the most obvious threat to liberal democracy, not (only) because it would be a species of authoritarian populism, but because ‘the solution to the conflict they displace outside themselves is sought in a “supernatural” outcome,’ argues Corten.

Critical theologians join with much Left-wing opinion in denouncing the falseness and shallowness of evangelical Christianity in its guise as prosperity gospel. Forget countercultural stances, let alone utopian visions, evangelicals are fully subsumed by contemporary capitalism! Worse still, they sustain intolerant, socially conservative attitudes!

But even this may be changing. The newsweekly Veja reports that evangelicals today ‘want to participate in the institutional decisions of their faith communities, aim for more democratic and transparent environments, and are much more flexible in behavioural matters.’ And for all the community-building of proletarian Pentecostals, the number of ‘unchurched’ is growing. In tandem, the number of evangelicals who belong to ‘undetermined’ churches is growing at the same rate as evangelicals as a whole. This would be testament to an even more total victory of the forces of commodification, atomisation, reification.

In the same river swims the data on secularisation. Those professing ‘no religion’ are increasing, reaching a plurality (30 per cent) among young people in the megalopolises of São Paulo and Rio – but these people mostly do not identify as agnostic or atheist. Indeed, 89 per cent of Brazilians ‘believe in God or a higher power/spirit’, according to the latest Global Religion survey from Ipsos.

The trend, then, is for belief without belonging, toward an individualisation of faith and the adoption of eclectic, personalised beliefs used to sustain, justify or comfort the individual subject in a competitive, anomic world. The sectarianism of the closed-off world of believers awaiting the eschaton has been corroded by the fissiparousness of liquid modernity.

Others suggest that there remains a contestatory edge to evangelicals. The anthropologist Susan Harding finds a forcible strain of anti-victimhood in Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches. Indeed, this is why progressives disdain evangelicals, because, unlike other groups, they don’t see themselves as victims of the system. They are financially motivated and seek to better themselves, in contrast with the exoticised or culturally relevant poor (Indigenous communities or practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions, for instance). For the middle-class progressive, distaste for the evangelical is mere demophobia, a rejection of the urban poor, particularly when they organise themselves.

The web of evangelical churches may represent genuine social power

True as this may be, anti-victimhood tangles in complex fashion with ressentiment, a sense of being unfairly judged or treated. In turn, this is leveraged by evangelical leaders and conservative politicians. This aspect culminates in a seeming vindication of Corten’s manipulationist theory: swampy corruption and authoritarian instincts meld with apocalyptic themes. It is a confluence that was especially evident under Bolsonaro, and the only question now is whether the constellation of forces that regrouped around him will unify again.

What isn’t going away is the social presence of evangelicals as such. But as they expand towards a plurality of the population over the next decade, internal differences and divisions will grow. Neither their politics nor their politicisation is a given. Indications from the US are that evangelicals are retreating from politics, having occupied centre-stage in the 1990s and 2000s. If religion is meant to provide solace, but becomes yet another site in which antagonisms rage, either you need to quit religion or your religion needs to quit politics.

Still, the social infrastructure represented by what is ultimately a mass movement of the poor is remarkable. The web of evangelical churches may represent genuine social power. Whether it is a carrier of mainstream capitalist values of entrepreneurship and speculation, or an anti-politics of refusal, or something else entirely, remains to be seen. Capitalism’s contradictory tendencies towards individualism and collectivity play out in full here. Brazil’s religious transition is a case of both at once.

In Who Are We? (2004), the political scientist Samuel Huntington warns that Hispanic immigration would transform US culture into something more Catholic, with a consequent demotion for Anglo-Protestant work ideology. One should not see in the advance of Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism in Brazil an opposite movement. We are not simply faced with a pendulum swing from leisure to work – nor, needless to say, a utopian overcoming of that division.

Instead, urbanisation without industrialisation has created a social landscape of low-key civil war. The war of all against all finds its ideological correlate not in a Protestant work ethic but in the speculative-entrepreneurial ethic of evangelicals. In a terrible duality of overwork and worklessness, a speculative leap towards prosperity looks like the only escape. And this obtains whether one follows the rigours of evangelical dedication, studying, setting up a microbusiness on credit – or turning to a life of crime. There are plenty of cases where it’s both.

Finally then, evangelical Christianity may be the form that popular ideology takes in a context of precarity, after old utopias have dried up. All that remains is a utopia in the sense that Theodor W Adorno discussed: not as a positive social vision, but as the absence of worldly suffering. Adorno, though, was mistaken: he conflated the secular notion of freedom (liberation of our finite lives) with a religious notion of salvation (liberation from finite life).

It is the former utopianism that is lacking today – that which drags us along and keeps us walking forward. We need not surrender to the grinding banality of capitalist life for the sake of ‘realism’, nor endow tawdry capitalist creeds with the name ‘utopia’. We need only note that the desire for transcendence exists – it is manifest, in both earthly and metaphysical aspects. The worldwide explosion of Pentecostalism should give us pause, and act as an injunction to invent secular transcendence once more.

Translations from Portuguese sources are the author’s own.

 

 

[robsblubot 3,529]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

What will an evangelical Brazil look like?

Utopia brasileira

Within less than a decade, Brazil will have as many evangelicals as Catholics, a transcendence born of the prosperity gospel

https://aeon.co/essays/what-will-an-evangelical-brazil-look-like

A gospel service at the Baptist church Maranata in Jaboatao dos Guararapes, Brazil, September 2022. Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

 

Utopia is on the horizon … I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another 10 steps and the horizon runs 10 steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.
– from Las palabras andantes (1993), or Walking Words, by Eduardo Galeano

In 1856, Thomas Ewbank published Life in Brazil, an account of the Englishman’s six months spent in the country a decade earlier. In it, he argued that Catholicism as practised in Brazil and across Latin America constrained material progress. In this, the visitor would be joined by a long line of critics, from the writer and later modernising president of Argentina, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento – who denounced the negative influence of Spanish and Indigenous cultures in Latin America, including the role of the Catholic Church – to the conservative Harvard academic Samuel Huntington.

The Church of St Cosmas and St Damian and The Franciscan Monastery at Igaraçu, Brazil (c1663) by Frans Jansz Post. Courtesy the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Ewbank contended, moreover, that the ‘Nordic sects will never flourish on the Tropics,’ a line that Brazil’s greatest historian, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, immortalised in his work Raízes do Brasil (1936), or Roots of Brazil. Protestants would supposedly degenerate here, with the severity, austerity and rigour of that doctrine being incompatible with the archetypal Brazilian: the ‘cordial man’. This figure, according to Holanda, represented interpersonal warmth and openness, in contrast to closed and rule-bound northern Europeans.

At present, Protestants account for one-third of the population, while the number of Catholics has just dipped below 50 per cent. By far the largest proportion of Brazilian Protestants are evangelicals, specifically Pentecostals, neo-Pentecostals and related branches. By the centenary of Raízes do Brasil in 2036, Protestants will outnumber Catholics in Brazil for the first time in the country’s 500-plus-year history.

In 2018, the far-Right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro shocked the country by winning the presidency, bolstered by an evangelical vote that would remain faithful to him and his socially conservative, politically reactionary and cosmologically apocalyptic politics.

The rise of this bloc presents a challenge to perhaps the most clichéd description of Brazil. In 1941, the Austrian Stefan Zweig, seeking refuge from Nazism in Brazil, called this land the ‘country of the future’. Zweig highlighted not just Brazil’s natural endowments but the society’s tolerance, openness, harmony, optimism and fusionist culture.

For Zweig, as for many Europeans and Americans before him, Brazil became a utopian gleam in the eye. For centuries, certain common threads had sewn these utopian visions together: Brazil was a picture of idleness, imagination, diversity and conviviality – a means of living together that relied on adaptability. Yet the Bolsonarismo phenomenon, according to critics, is intolerant, punitive, supremacist, an embodiment of a type of Christian cosmovision at odds with any notion of society. Did the presidency of Bolsonaro, under the slogan ‘Brazil above everything, God above everyone’, signal an end of this romance?

No one holds Brazil as an existing paradise. Few even sustain any expectation that it will deliver on what was promised for it. And, indeed, utopian thinking probably died as far back as the 1964 military coup. But many have continued to uphold the country’s cultural traits as admirable and enviable – even models for the world.

‘Brazilianization’, a trope taken up by various intellectuals in recent decades, signals a universal tendency towards social inequality, urban segregation, informalisation of labour, and political corruption. Others, though, have sought to rescue a positive aspect: the country’s informality and ductility, particularly in relation to work, as well as its hybridisation, creolisation and openness to the world, made it already adapted to the new, global, postmodern capitalism that followed the Cold War.

By the 2000s, Brazil was witnessing peaceful, democratic alternation in government between centre-Left and centre-Right for practically the first time in its history. Under President Lula, it saw booming growth, combined with new measures of social inclusion. But underneath the surface of the globalisation wave that Brazil was surfing, violent crime was on the up, manufacturing was down, and inclusion was being bought on credit.

‘There is indeed an alternative, even if it is an apocalyptic one’

In 2013, it came to a shuddering halt. Rising popular expectations generated a crisis of representation – announced by the biggest mass street mobilisations in the country’s history. This was succeeded by economic crisis and then by institutional crisis, culminating in the parliamentary coup against Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff. Now all the energy seemed to be with a new Right-wing movement that dominated the streets. It was topped off by the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. Suddenly, eyes turned to the growing prominence of conservative Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal outlooks in national life.

An evangelical church near Salgueiro, Pernambuco state, Brazil, February 2022. Photo by Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg/Getty

Bolsonaro failed to be re-elected in 2022. Upon his defeat, Folha de S Paulo, Brazil’s paper of record, reported that, ‘Bolsonarista pastors talk of apocalypse.’ At the evangelical Community of Nations church in Brasília, frequented by Michelle Bolsonaro, wife of Jair, the pastor’s wife is reported to have proclaimed: ‘Brazil has an owner. That hasn’t changed, it won’t change. God continues to be the one who made Brazil shine and be the light of the world. His plan has changed neither with regard to us nor the country.’ It was a rare expression, for our times, of a sense of historical mission or destiny. The age of no alternative was being left behind. ‘There is indeed an alternative, even if it is an apocalyptic one,’ the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes sardonically remarked.

In the final 2022 pre-election poll, evangelicals split 69-31 in Bolsonaro’s favour. Although he is Catholic, he was baptised in the River Jordan in 2016 by Pastor Everaldo, an important member of the Pentecostal Assembleia de Deus (the Assemblies of God – the largest Pentecostal church in the world, and the largest evangelical church in Brazil).

The creationist and anti-gay Pentecostal Marcelo Crivella shocked many when he defeated a human rights activist to become mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Crivella’s uncle is Edir Macedo, the founder of the neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, or IURD), the largest of its denomination, reputedly with 4.8 million faithful in Brazil. Preaching the ‘prosperity gospel’, according to which commitment to the church will be rewarded with wealth, has seen Macedo become a dollar billionaire (of which there are around 60 in the country). The IURD is known for practising exorcisms and divine cures, and for purging demonic spirits, which it associates with Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé and Umbanda. But it is the IURD’s political role and media presence that really make it stand out.

The Republicanos party, founded in 2005, is a creature of the IURD. Its president, the lawyer Marcos Pereira, was a bishop who held a position in the Michel Temer administration that took office after deposing of Rousseff. The party’s 44 deputies in the lower house of Congress are part of the powerful cross-party evangelical bench in Congress, composed of 215 deputies out of a total of 513. Macedo also owns Record, the second-biggest channel in Brazil, which gave Bolsonaro plenty of free airtime.

The articulation between evangelicals and Bolsonaro only strengthened through his term. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s denial of the severity of the virus was, in part, a demonstration of evangelical coronafé, or corona-faith: ‘that confidence, that certainty that God is with you and that he will never, ever, at any time fail those who have believed in him,’ in Macedo’s words. Later in his term, Bolsonaro nominated the ‘terribly evangelical’ Presbyterian pastor André Mendonça to an empty Supreme Court seat. Upon Congressional approval, the president’s wife Michelle, a crucial link to the evangelical public, was filmed crying, praying and speaking in tongues.

Bolsonarismo is a sort of parody of Christian eschatology

After Bolsonaro left office, his supporters stormed government buildings in Brasília on 8 January 2023, in a replay of the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. The action was widely unpopular. But 31 per cent of evangelicals supported it, against a national average of 18 per cent. While 40 per cent of the population believed Lula had not won the election fairly, among evangelicals this belief was as high as 68 per cent, with 64 per cent in favour of a coup to overturn the result. The media was full of reports of pro-Bolsonaro protestors praying for miracles, speaking in tongues and behaving like the world was ending.

The theologian Yago Martins, whose videos on religious thought have won him more than 1 million followers across his social channels, refers to Bolsonarismo as an apocalípse de palha, or ‘straw apocalypse’. Bolsonarismo’s combination of a conspiratorial mindset, a longing for an imminent national conflagration, a holy war against evil, and its messianic discourse are a sort of parody of Christian eschatology. For Martins, author of A religão do bolsonarismo (2021), or Bolsonarismo as Religion, the movement is a ‘fallacious immanentisation of the eschaton’, a paraphrase of the philosopher Eric Voegelin’s phrase from 1952.

Martins, a Baptist pastor, identifies as a Right-wing evangelical, but is a critic of Bolsonarismo (though he admits to voting for him in 2018). His criticisms of Bolsonarismo’s idolatry nevertheless testify to something new on the scene: the insertion of a transcendental viewpoint into politics, something that had supposedly been expulsed with the historic defeat of socialism and nationalism.

Indeed, when I spoke to Gedeon Freire de Alencar, a sociologist of religion and author of a book on the contribution of evangelicals to Brazilian culture, as well as a presbyter of the Bethesda Assembly of God in São Paulo, he emphasised the role of dominion theology, according to which believers should seek to institute a nation governed by Christians. The ‘Seven Mountain Mandate’, popularised in 2013 by two American authors, advocates that there are seven areas of life that evangelicals should target: religion, family, government, education, media, arts/entertainment, and business.

For many progressives, this struck as a sort of ‘medieval radicalism’, the charge thrown at Crivella by Jean Wyllys, the first gay-rights activist to win a seat in Congress. The philosopher and columnist Vladimir Safatle denounced the ‘project to take Brazil back to the Middle Ages’: yes, Brazil had had its share of authoritarian and conservative figures in the past, but this was new, ‘because the old Right… never needed spokespeople.’

As testament to the growing presence of evangelicals but also their political ambivalence, consider the March for Jesus. The yearly demonstration is known as ‘the world’s largest Christian event’ drawing between 1 and 3 millions crentes, or believers, each year. Though Bolsonaro was the first president to attend the march, in 2019, it was Lula who signed the law that officialised the National Day for the March for Jesus, scheduled for 60 days after Easter.

Evangelicals attend the March for Jesus in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 8 June 2023. Photo by Amanda Perobelli/Reuters

Similarly, back in 1997 it was estimated that one-third of militants in the agrarian land reform movement, MST, were Pentecostals, which would have been double the rate of the local population at the time. Twenty years later, Guilherme Boulos, coordinator of the MTST, the unhoused workers’ movement, claimed that by far the largest part of the movement’s base was made up of Pentecostals.

So why the association of evangelicals with darkest reaction? In large part, it’s class prejudice, argues the anthropologist Juliano Spyer, whose book Povo de Deus (2020), or People of God, sparked widespread debate in the country and was a finalist in Brazil’s most prestigious nonfiction prize in 2021. For opinion-formers, the evangelical is either a poor fanatic or a rich manipulator, but the reality is that the religion is socially embedded in Brazil, particularly among the poor and Black population.

The Brazilian urban landscape sees a war of all against all play out every day

For instance, well-to-do social progressivism tars evangelical religion as patriarchal. Perhaps so, in contrast with contemporary upper-middle-class mores, but in the often machista and violent lifeworld of the Brazilian working class, when a man is born-again, he stops drinking, becomes less likely to beat his wife, and is more inclined to contribute to the household. Similarly, while evangelicals are held to be anti-science and anti-enlightenment, in a culture in which even the elite has never been particularly bookish, conversion is associated with a renewed emphasis on study. This partly explains why Pentecostalism (and evangelical Christianity more broadly), is the faith of the world’s urban poor. And ‘Brazil is ground zero for what is happening within the wider Pentecostal movement, the median global experience,’ explains Elle Hardy, author of a book Beyond Belief (2021) on the phenomenon’s spread worldwide.

The evangelical movement must be understood in relation to the reality in which real political corruption abounds, and violence and the threat of violence is omnipresent in the working-class urban context. Brazil now sees more than 50,000 murders a year, and the violence associated with criminal markets, especially drugs, is only the sharp end of a fully marketised society. The Brazilian urban landscape sees a war of all against all play out every day. Middle-class Brazilian progressives were happy to ignore the civil war raging in the urban peripheries until the violence found a spokesperson in Bolsonaro.

Broadly, the term evangélicos refers to missionary Protestants who are not members of the historic Protestant churches in Brazil – the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Adventists and Baptists who first arrived from Europe in the 19th century.

Confusingly, many historic Protestant churches carry the name ‘evangelical’ in their titles, and some have now come to adopt modes of worship evocative of charismatic or revivalist churches. But a distinction remains: historic Protestants in Brazil normally call themselves protestante or cristão, not evangélico or crente – and they tend to be middle class.

Pentecostalism arrived in Brazil in the early 20th century, taking root among the poor. Its emblematic church is the Assembleia de Deus, established by two Swedish Baptist missionaries who arrived in the Amazonian port city of Belém in 1910. The third wave, beginning in the 1950s, is marked by the arrival of the Foursquare Church (Igreja Quadrangular), and coincides with rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, with worshipers recruited over the airwaves. But even by 1970, evangelicals still accounted for only 5.2 per cent of the population, while Catholics were at 91.8 per cent.

The establishment of the IURD in 1977 marks the arrival of neo-Pentecostalism and the start of the fourth wave. Proselytising is carried out via TV and, doctrinally, a more managerial ethos is introduced. To the Pentecostals’ direct, personal and emotional experience of God is added the idea that conversion leads to financial advancement – the prosperity gospel. Macedo’s church also exemplified the movement’s growing political confidence. By the 1980s, the slogan crente não se mete na política (believers don’t get mixed up in politics) was being replaced by irmão vota em irmão (brothers vote for brothers).

Throughout, the share of Catholics in the population was falling, with an almost commensurate rise in evangelicals – by about 1 per cent per decade. But, as of 1990, this accelerates to a 1 per cent change per year. Catholics were still 83 per cent of the population in 1991 and 74 per cent in 2000, when Catholicism hit its peak in absolute terms, with 124.9 million Brazilians – making Brazil the largest Catholic country in the world, a title it still holds. But by 2010, the share of Catholics had fallen to 64.6 per cent, with evangelicals rising to 22.2 per cent. Today, evangelicals represent a third of the population, and Catholics just under half. Modellers have identified 2032 as the year of religious crossover, when each Christian camp will account for an equal share of the population: 39 per cent.

Any evangelical entrepreneur with a Bible under his arm and access to an enclosed space can set up shop

What explains this explosion? The anthropologist Gilberto Velho points to inward migration, the primary 20th-century phenomenon in Brazil. Tens of millions of poor, illiterate, rural and profoundly Catholic people from the arid northeast of Brazil migrated to big cities, especially in the industrial southeast. Spyer tells me they ‘lived through the shock of leaving the countryside for the electricity of the city – but also the shock of moving to the most vulnerable parts of the city.’ The loss of networks of support, particularly of extended family, was filled by the establishment of evangelical churches. This is why the geographer Mike Davis called Pentecostalism ‘the single most important cultural response to explosive and traumatic urbanisation’.

Sixty years ago, Brazil’s population was evenly split between town and country. Now it is 88 per cent urban, comparable with infinitely richer Sweden or Denmark, and higher than the US, the UK or Germany. The urbanisation rate is also much higher than Brazil’s fellow BRICs, China (66 per cent) or South Africa (68 per cent). Over the past decades, Brazil has also suffered ‘premature deindustrialisation’ – the loss of manufacturing jobs on the scale of the UK, for instance, but at a much lower level of income and development. Here is the recipe for what Davis called a ‘planet of slums’: urbanisation without industrialisation.

And it is in the peripheries of megalopolises like São Paulo (greater metropolitan population: 22 million) and Rio (14 million), or other large cities where informal or precarious housing and employment dominates, that nimble startup churches sprout. Unlike the slow-moving Catholic Church, which demands more established settings and that its priests undergo four years of theological study, any evangelical entrepreneur with a Bible under his arm and access to an enclosed space, no matter how rudimentary, can set up shop. To ambitious working-class men, this offers a route to a leadership position in the community, a path to self-improvement.

It was in what the sociologist Luiz Werneck Vianna called this ‘Sahara of civic life’ that Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals built spaces of acolhimento, a word denoting both warm reception and refuge. They took root in the places abandoned by the Brazilian Left, of which the Catholic, liberation theology-inspired Comunidades Eclesiasticas de Base were a major part.

Turning up in an expensive imported car signals to co-religionaries that the prosperity gospel is working

Of course, not all evangelicals in Brazil are poor or working class. The movement has seen significant expansion into the middle class, even if the elite proper remains mostly Catholic. And there are doctrinal differences that map onto these class differences, even if incompletely.

An Assemblies of God church in the city of Cabo Frio, Brazil. Photo by Nate Cull/Flickr

The model Pentecostal will be a poor assembleiano, a member of the Assemblies of God, whose small, basic and mostly ugly structures populate the landscape, from gritty industrial suburbs to lost hamlets of a dozen inhabitants deep in the interior. In these houses of worship, eschatological themes are omnipresent and the songs are about Jesus’s second coming. On the way to or back from church, worshipers – in their Sunday best – pass each other’s houses and check in on each other, reinforcing communal ties.

At the other end of the spectrum is something like the Bola de Neve Church, founded in a surf shop by a surfing pastor in 1999. Its 560 churches across a number of countries purvey something altogether ‘lighter’. Its middle-class members arrive by car, wear casual clothing, and are treated to sermons accompanied by pop-rock and reggae. Eschatological themes are largely absent. As Alencar put it to me: ‘If Jesus returned now, he’d ruin their gig.’ Accompanying the Church’s suave and sophisticated marketing is the preaching of the theology of prosperity. Turning up in an expensive imported car signals to co-religionaries that the prosperity gospel is working.

Importantly, in Brazil, ‘everything is syncretised and miscegenated,’ explains Alencar, so although in doctrinal terms the gulf between Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal is ‘abyssal’, in practice it is hard to draw clear lines. Moreover, Baptist, Adventist and even Catholic churches are undergoing pentecostalização, adopting charismatic or revivalist features. The prosperity gospel component cuts across many of these complicated lines, a result of the emphasis on competition, individualism and economic ascent typical of neoliberal societies.

At the Ministry of the Faith church in Brasília, Brazil, September 2018. Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

But ultimately, for all the variety, the growth of evangelical Christianity in a society as unequal as Brazil is a phenomenon of the poor and working class. Conversion and dedication promises – and, in some cases, delivers – a better life: not just money, but also in terms of relationships, family and especially health. Belief functions as a para-medicine, be it directly through faith-healing, through the belief, determination and support to beat addiction, or simply through the provision of psychological support. In the words of Davis, it is a ‘spiritual health-delivery system’. This is the reason why evangelicals tend to be urban, young, Black or Brown women, from the least schooled strata, with the lowest salaries. It is, as Davis put it, ‘the largest self-organised movement of poor urban people in the world.’

Utopian visions have attached themselves to Brazil and informed its self-conception from its European discovery through to the 20th century. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) news of a distant paradise was brought by a Portuguese sailor. Brazil was Utopia realised. As Patricia Vieira puts it in States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture (2018), it presented a ‘fantasy of easy enrichment, grounded on the perception of the region as a treasure trove of natural wealth.’

For one 17th-century Jesuit priest, the land demarcated on the east side of the Treaty of Tordesillas would be the ‘Fifth Empire’, a new kingdom of perpetual peace, where people would live in mystical communion with God, and all would have equal rights. Gradually, messianic and theologically informed visions would give way to secularised ones.

Curiously, Brazil is the only country whose demonym finishes in the -eiro suffix in Portuguese. So you have the Francês, the Argentino, the Americano, the Israelense… but the Brasileiro. It suggests an occupation, like marceneiro (carpenter), pedreiro (bricklayer), mineiro (miner). To be Brazilian was not a state of being, but an activity, a doing. It was the Portuguese and other Europeans who went off and ‘did’ Brazil – exploited its land.

The Indigenous hero is lazy – a ‘trait that Brazilians should embrace and consciously cultivate’

So the Brasileiro is one committed to the project of Brazil, they are not a mere natural feature of the land. But this also speaks to a rapacious pattern of Brazilian development, characterised by using and discarding, rather than building and consolidating. It is a subjectivity evocative of Max Weber’s ‘capitalistic adventurer’; a figure who would ‘collect the fruit without planting the tree,’ as Holanda put it. The utopian tangles with its opposite. Are we dealing with transformation or exploitation? Is the one who works the land subject or object?

Rejecting the exploited and exploiter dichotomy, a different utopian vision fixated on the independent, noble savage, free from work. The Índio was celebrated by Brazilian Romantics and modernists alike. In Macunaíma (1928), Mario de Andrade’s landmark novel mixing fantastical and primitivist elements, the eponymous Indigenous hero, a ‘hero without any character’, is above all lazy – a ‘trait that Brazilians should be proud of, embrace, and consciously cultivate,’ according to Vieira. But at issue is not really laziness but ócio – idleness. The Portuguese word for business is negócio, or the negation of idleness (neg-ócio). So, Vieira argues, the ‘business‑as‑usual work mentality of the capitalist world is at odds … with the primeval ócio of Brazilian Indigenous communities…’

The modernist poet Oswald de Andrade likewise foresaw a coming Age of Leisure, enabled by technology. In this egalitarian, matriarchal disposition, Brazil could be at the forefront of nations, showing the way. Civilising work, negócio, had been done; soon the dialectic would swing back to a paradisaical ócio.

In practice, the Índio and the adventurer were locked in conflict, but they jointly stood in contrast to the avaricious European bourgeois. It is for this reason that Holanda’s Brazilian archetype of the cordial man is, as the sociologist Jessé de Souza puts it, the ‘perfect inverse of the ascetic Protestant’.

Today’s Brazilian evangelicals are likewise not Weber’s northern European protestants. Their worship is emotional, not intellectual, filled with magic, rather than structured by reason. But pecuniary accumulation appears to unite them.

As the Left-leaning Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger has noted, these are the people who ‘[go] to night school, struggle to open a business, to be an independent professional, who are building a new culture of self-help and initiative – they are in command of the national imaginary.’ A few years ago, when asked about Left-wing rejection of the entrepreneurial, evangelical sector, Unger replied that the Brazilian Left should not repeat the ‘calamitous trajectory’ of their European counterparts in demonising the petty bourgeoisie and distancing themselves ‘from the real aspirations of workers’.

This neo-Pentecostal consumer-capitalist utopia is necessarily authoritarian

The ‘neo-Pentecostal movement today flourishes in a context of dismantling of labour protections,’ argues Brazil’s leading scholar of precarity, Ruy Braga. This requires less a methodical dedication to work, and more the neoliberal self-management typical of popular entrepreneurship. We are dealing not with the Protestant work ethic, but with an evangelical speculative ethic. Quantification becomes the criteria of validation, be it for believers or churches competing in the religious marketplace. ‘Blessings are consumed, praises sold, preaching purchased,’ as Alencar puts it.

Whether this is mere capitalist survival or somehow utopian depends on whether you agree with the Catholic theologian Jung Mo Sung’s assertion that evangelicals insert a metaphysical element – perfectibility; the realisation of desire through the market for those who ‘deserve’ it – into mundane society. For a critic of the prosperity gospel like Sung, this neo-Pentecostal consumer-capitalist utopia is necessarily authoritarian. Divine blessing – manifest through the crente’s increased purchasing power – is bestowed as a result of the believers’ spiritual war against the enemies of God: the ‘communists’ and the ‘gays’.

The ‘communists’ (who might in fact just be centrist progressives or Catholics) want to give money to the poor; these in turn may be sinners (drug users or traffickers, for instance). This goes against the way that God distributes blessings, which is to favour, economically, those who follow the prosperity gospel.

According to most accounts, a unifying element in the evangelical cosmology is the confrontation between good and evil. The fiel (faithful) encounters a binary: the ‘world’ (sin, violence, addiction, suffering, evil – the Devil around every corner) vs the ‘Church’ (the negation of all that). This code is efficient in affording psychic peace to those facing a complex, rapidly changing world.

How stark is the contrast with earlier self-understandings of Brazilian culture in which ambiguity prevailed! Brazil apparently lacked a moral nexus (as the historian Caio Prado Jr saw it in the 1940s), it was a society of ‘corrosive tolerance’ (according to the literary critic Antônio Cândido in the 1970s) or represented a ‘world without guilt’ (said another literary critic, Roberto Schwarz, in the 1980s).

Outsiders, too, remarked on the absence of moral depth and pure religion. Two 19th-century American missionaries, James Fletcher and Daniel Kidder, lamented in Brazil and the Brazilians (1857) that that this natural paradise could have been a moral paradise, were it not for the fact that tropical Catholicism was superficial, pagan, and hung up on feasts and saints. North Americans of the time learned that the Brazilian was ‘amiable, refined, ceremonious’, but also that the absence of stricter moral codes led him to be ‘irresponsible, insincere and selfish’.

The emblematic Brazilian figure, another archetype, is the malandro, or trickster, slacker, scoundrel. Identified by Cândido in his reading of the 19th-century novel Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, the malandro flits between the upper and lower classes, between order and disorder, and operates on the presumption of an absence of moral judgment, sin and guilt. He does not work full-time, but nor is he a full-time criminal, nor a slave. He gets by on his wits and adapts. For Vieira, the ‘relaxed, leisurely lifestyle of the malandro, which represents the quintessentially Brazilian way of being-in-the-world, generated a society where regulations are lax, and so can be easily bent to accommodate different customs and traditions.’

Conversions are negatively impacting samba schools, with the born-again quitting carnival

The malandro is at home in carnaval, which brackets real life, allowing for play, for freedom and fantasy. In Roberto DaMatta’s classic 1979 study, the festival is a subversive, free universe of useless activity – something that looks like madness from the perspective of capitalist work ideology.

In this light, Brazil’s great religious transition represents a cultural revolution. Evangelicals interrupt the ‘utopia’ of the idle Índio or the malandro at play in carnival. Firstly, they disdain idleness in favour of entrepreneurial activity and rigorous self-discipline. Secondly, and more directly, they scorn carnival itself. As the leading Pentecostal pastor Silas Malafaia puts it, carnival is a pagan feast ‘marked by sexual licentiousness, boozing, gluttony, group orgies and a lot of music.’ This is felt at the grassroots. Folha de S Paulo reports on how conversions are negatively impacting samba schools and other musical groups, with the born-again quitting carnival.

They say Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism owe their success to their adaptability to local contexts. But, at a minimum, these doctrines’ implantation in foreign soil gives voice to deep changes in the receiving culture, and at a maximum may even serve to transform it. If toleration, moral ambiguity and easy-going malleability were central to a Catholic-inflected Brazilian identity, what will an evangelical Brazil look like?

In The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E P Thompson comments that Methodism prevented revolution in England in the 1790s. Yet it was indirectly responsible for a growth in working people’s self-confidence and capacity for organisation. Could something similar be said for Brazilian evangelicals, whose self-starting community-building, at a minimum, could be looked at sympathetically for reconstructing associational life?

The Canadian political scientist André Corten, who taught and researched across Latin America, remarked that ‘the failure of secularised Utopias makes the persistence of theologised Utopias come to light.’ Pentecostalism, as a sect, is one such utopianism. It withdraws to an ‘elsewhere’ in social space, refuses to compromise with the social world, and is therefore ‘anti-political’. There is a popular-democratic thrust to this: no deference to a professionalised clergy, but rather a horizontal ordering of the faithful.

A comparison with revolutionary-democratic liberation theology is illuminating. Insofar as they construct the category of ‘the poor’, both liberation theology and Pentecostalism are discourses about suffering. But Pentecostalism privileges emotion in the place of cognition, glossolalia (speaking in tongues) in the place of equality of speech, and – crucially – it is a religion of the poor, not for the poor. It disdains poverty.

Evangelical churches ‘transform people who were born as subaltern – not just poor but also convinced that their social role is to be poor – and they are reborn: they come to understand themselves as equal to other people,’ argues Spyer. They seek to turn their back on poverty and change their lives so as to improve their station.

How does this relate to secular utopianism? It doesn’t. This democratic-popular component cannot be recycled by the Left, nor by conservatism; evangelicals may refuse infeudation to a category of scholars but, simultaneously, the intolerance and despotism of custom connote authoritarianism. This is a movement that is ‘at once egalitarian and authoritarian’, says Corten.

Is this not the obverse of the hegemonic culture, of progressive neoliberalism? Our societies are, prima facie, egalitarian: most forms of elitism and snobbery are ruled out, and we are tolerant of difference and accepting of minorities, because everything is relativised in a consumer society. But, in practice, there is a deep inequality of income, wealth, power and even recognition.

As evangelical Christianity ballooned, it would leave behind the anti-politics of the sect

So even if we are to conclude that the evangelical wave contains no utopian seeds, it is at the very least countercultural. Indeed, it was, as Alencar put it to me, ‘contestatory from the start: in their social behaviour, ways of greeting each other, their clothes, music, sport, life…’ But this was always a ‘force of transformation with no intentionality’, says Corten, making its logic distinct from the utopian ideologies of the Left.

In any case, as evangelical Christianity ballooned, it was always going to leave behind the anti-politics of the sect. Corten sketched out three political trajectories that might take shape.

One is assimilation: adapting to the reigning order of society. In formal politics, this is represented by evangelical political parties or cross-party benches behaving in physiological fashion – a term from Brazilian politics that means to become part of the organs of the state, with all the clientelism and corruption this entails.

The happy-clappy neo-Pentecostal churches like Bola de Neve would likewise represent a certain assimilation. Embourgeoisement, for evangelicals, represents not just certain churches becoming middle class, but questions over the professionalisation of the clergy, whether pastors should be paid a salary. These frictions are currently playing out among the faithful, with heated debate within churches – and competition between them.

A second entry point to politics is manipulation: this consists in evangelical leaders letting believers think that they continue to be ‘unacceptable’ while playing the political game. This might accord with the authoritarian thesis, whereby evangelical ‘despotism of custom’ fits seamlessly with secular authoritarian rule.

The third door leads to messianism. This would present the most obvious threat to liberal democracy, not (only) because it would be a species of authoritarian populism, but because ‘the solution to the conflict they displace outside themselves is sought in a “supernatural” outcome,’ argues Corten.

Critical theologians join with much Left-wing opinion in denouncing the falseness and shallowness of evangelical Christianity in its guise as prosperity gospel. Forget countercultural stances, let alone utopian visions, evangelicals are fully subsumed by contemporary capitalism! Worse still, they sustain intolerant, socially conservative attitudes!

But even this may be changing. The newsweekly Veja reports that evangelicals today ‘want to participate in the institutional decisions of their faith communities, aim for more democratic and transparent environments, and are much more flexible in behavioural matters.’ And for all the community-building of proletarian Pentecostals, the number of ‘unchurched’ is growing. In tandem, the number of evangelicals who belong to ‘undetermined’ churches is growing at the same rate as evangelicals as a whole. This would be testament to an even more total victory of the forces of commodification, atomisation, reification.

In the same river swims the data on secularisation. Those professing ‘no religion’ are increasing, reaching a plurality (30 per cent) among young people in the megalopolises of São Paulo and Rio – but these people mostly do not identify as agnostic or atheist. Indeed, 89 per cent of Brazilians ‘believe in God or a higher power/spirit’, according to the latest Global Religion survey from Ipsos.

The trend, then, is for belief without belonging, toward an individualisation of faith and the adoption of eclectic, personalised beliefs used to sustain, justify or comfort the individual subject in a competitive, anomic world. The sectarianism of the closed-off world of believers awaiting the eschaton has been corroded by the fissiparousness of liquid modernity.

Others suggest that there remains a contestatory edge to evangelicals. The anthropologist Susan Harding finds a forcible strain of anti-victimhood in Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches. Indeed, this is why progressives disdain evangelicals, because, unlike other groups, they don’t see themselves as victims of the system. They are financially motivated and seek to better themselves, in contrast with the exoticised or culturally relevant poor (Indigenous communities or practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions, for instance). For the middle-class progressive, distaste for the evangelical is mere demophobia, a rejection of the urban poor, particularly when they organise themselves.

The web of evangelical churches may represent genuine social power

True as this may be, anti-victimhood tangles in complex fashion with ressentiment, a sense of being unfairly judged or treated. In turn, this is leveraged by evangelical leaders and conservative politicians. This aspect culminates in a seeming vindication of Corten’s manipulationist theory: swampy corruption and authoritarian instincts meld with apocalyptic themes. It is a confluence that was especially evident under Bolsonaro, and the only question now is whether the constellation of forces that regrouped around him will unify again.

What isn’t going away is the social presence of evangelicals as such. But as they expand towards a plurality of the population over the next decade, internal differences and divisions will grow. Neither their politics nor their politicisation is a given. Indications from the US are that evangelicals are retreating from politics, having occupied centre-stage in the 1990s and 2000s. If religion is meant to provide solace, but becomes yet another site in which antagonisms rage, either you need to quit religion or your religion needs to quit politics.

Still, the social infrastructure represented by what is ultimately a mass movement of the poor is remarkable. The web of evangelical churches may represent genuine social power. Whether it is a carrier of mainstream capitalist values of entrepreneurship and speculation, or an anti-politics of refusal, or something else entirely, remains to be seen. Capitalism’s contradictory tendencies towards individualism and collectivity play out in full here. Brazil’s religious transition is a case of both at once.

In Who Are We? (2004), the political scientist Samuel Huntington warns that Hispanic immigration would transform US culture into something more Catholic, with a consequent demotion for Anglo-Protestant work ideology. One should not see in the advance of Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism in Brazil an opposite movement. We are not simply faced with a pendulum swing from leisure to work – nor, needless to say, a utopian overcoming of that division.

Instead, urbanisation without industrialisation has created a social landscape of low-key civil war. The war of all against all finds its ideological correlate not in a Protestant work ethic but in the speculative-entrepreneurial ethic of evangelicals. In a terrible duality of overwork and worklessness, a speculative leap towards prosperity looks like the only escape. And this obtains whether one follows the rigours of evangelical dedication, studying, setting up a microbusiness on credit – or turning to a life of crime. There are plenty of cases where it’s both.

Finally then, evangelical Christianity may be the form that popular ideology takes in a context of precarity, after old utopias have dried up. All that remains is a utopia in the sense that Theodor W Adorno discussed: not as a positive social vision, but as the absence of worldly suffering. Adorno, though, was mistaken: he conflated the secular notion of freedom (liberation of our finite lives) with a religious notion of salvation (liberation from finite life).

It is the former utopianism that is lacking today – that which drags us along and keeps us walking forward. We need not surrender to the grinding banality of capitalist life for the sake of ‘realism’, nor endow tawdry capitalist creeds with the name ‘utopia’. We need only note that the desire for transcendence exists – it is manifest, in both earthly and metaphysical aspects. The worldwide explosion of Pentecostalism should give us pause, and act as an injunction to invent secular transcendence once more.

Translations from Portuguese sources are the author’s own.

 

 

Comes to show that even a Brazilian people can be completely clueless. 😅

[NikkiCFC 8,048]

German government down due budget. 

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massive net gender gap for black voters in terms of Harris v Trump

Black women were a net +84 for Harris v Trump

Black men were only a net +56 for Harris v Trump

 

a staggering net gap

🤕

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How Trump Won

Trump’s return to power reveals a fractured America, where defiance of democratic norms and ruthless ambition signal a troubling shift in the nation’s political future.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/how-trump-won

 

Fans of The Lord of the Rings will remember the scene where King Théoden, with his refuge of Helm’s Deep poised to fall to the marauding orcs and their “reckless hate,” wonders: How did it come to this? Following Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, many Americans are asking the same question. 

How did a convicted felon, who sought to overturn a presidential election that he decisively lost just four years ago, win the votes of more than 71 million Americans? That sort of thing might happen in countries without strong democratic traditions – in Venezuela, Hugo Chávez was imprisoned after a failed coup attempt in 1992, only to be elected president six years later – but it is not supposed to happen in the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy. 

Trump is not just a criminal. He is also a charlatan, who has proved time and again that he knows almost nothing about policy, and an aspiring dictator, who has pledged to carry out mass deportations and vowed to prosecute his “enemies.” Yet he has won not only the Electoral College, but also the popular vote – a feat he did not achieve in 2016 or 2020. 

The explanation starts with Trump’s enablers. The same people who decry “wokeism” for supposedly suppressing open public discourse seem to consider it verboten to criticize the mainly white, older, and rural voters who have remained blindly loyal to Trump, no matter how nasty, dangerous, or capricious his behavior. They do not understand who Trump is or the threat he poses, the apologists say; they are responding to legitimate grievances, such as economic insecurity. 

While this explanation has some merit, something more sinister may be lurking in a significant chunk of Trump’s base. Many of them may want to see their country’s institutions destroyed. Instead of fearing Trump’s threats to democracy and the rule of law, they view him as the wrecking ball they have been waiting for. 

To be sure, Trump’s voters might not want him to make good on every menacing promise he has made. But rather than view this as reason not to support him, they dismiss incendiary rhetoric as hyperbole. If anything, they reason, Trump’s exaggerations prove that he is a man of the people – not just another polished politician making carefully calibrated statements agreed by a team of political strategists. It is the flattened logic of the blind believer – utterly incoherent and virtually impossible to challenge. 

It helps that many of Trump’s supporters secretly – or, increasingly, vocally – share his worst instincts. His racism? Many white Americans are sick of talk of “white privilege” and even sicker of immigrants supposedly pouring across the border to take their jobs and consume their tax dollars. His misogyny? Many of his young male voters, feeling outdone or rejected by their female counterparts, like the idea of reminding women of “their place.” His threats to punish “enemies within”? The answer is self-evident: they are enemies. 

Trump’s backers dismiss all other criticism as well. The experts who warn that Trump’s plans will impose high costs on the US economy fail to appreciate his exceptional business acumen. Those who highlight his self-dealing to enrich himself and his family – Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner raised billions from Saudi Arabia for his investment fund – are overstating its scale and impact. 

As for Trump’s vulgarity, it is a non-issue – even, apparently, for his evangelical supporters. Trump might feign fellatio on his microphone at a rally, but he has also been chosen by God to act as a modern-day Cyrus. Just as the Persian king freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity, Trump’s divine mission is to liberate (white) Christians from the “prison” that is modern America, recreating the country as a bastion of evangelical values. Surely it was the hand of God that deflected the assassin’s bullet at a rally this summer. 

Trump had plenty of help in converting voters to his debauched religion. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s highly profitable propaganda machine, distorted discourse and stoked outrage. Social-media giants largely – and, in the case of Elon Musk’s X, completely – abandoned their efforts to contain disinformation. 

Tech billionaires have also supported Trump’s rise more directly – Musk was Trump’s second-largest financial backer during this campaign – in the hopes of benefiting from a deregulation spree. (Tesla shares have already surged.) Such tech titans – together with the silent powerbrokers of Wall Street, like Jamie Dimon – are the modern American equivalents of the German business leaders who thought they could control Adolf Hitler. 

Trump’s fellow Republicans are under no such illusions, which helps to explain why even those who once attempted to challenge him have rolled over for him. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley mounted the most formidable challenge to Trump in the Republican primaries, only to endorse him as soon as she dropped out of the race, presumably to salvage her own political career. 

And then there are the cowardly Republican politicians who have helped Trump to shake the political radioactivity that should have engulfed him after he incited his supporters to march on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The next day, figures like Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham finally seemed prepared to wash their hands of Trump. But days later, they refused to vote for his impeachment. And when Trump launched his campaign for the party’s nomination this year, they quickly fell into line. 

Nobody wants to be on a dictator’s bad side. And, given the US Supreme Court’s ruling granting the US president virtual immunity from criminal prosecution, Trump will be nothing if not a dictator. If he wants to impose enormous tariffs on China, or withdraw from NATO, or throw immigrants into holding camps, he will. The same goes for punishing those who have defied him. 

How did it come to this? A majority of white Americans have lost faith in their country. Members of the profit-hungry business elite have gained an unfettered ability to use their platforms and pocketbooks to shape politics. And Republican politicians have sacrificed their own integrity – and American democracy – at the altar of power.

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How Trump Plans to Upend Immigration

As the former president returns to office, the blueprint is clear: End birthright citizenship, implement mass deportation, and attack legal immigration.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/how-trump-will-change-immigration-migration-mass-deportation-muslim-ban-tps-daca/

 

In January, former President Donald Trump will reclaim the White House after years of vowing to unleash an unprecedented overhaul of the immigration system in the United States. With mass deportation as a central promise of his campaign, Trump will undoubtedly build on the sweeping crackdown that marked his first term.

He already has promised to restore the travel prohibition on foreigners from Muslim-majority countries (often called the “Muslim ban”). He wants to revive “Remain in Mexico”—which left thousands of vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers awaiting court hearings stranded in dangerous border towns. Trump has also taken his anti-immigrant rhetoric and proposals to new heights, notably by pledging to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and attacking legal immigration. 

Trump’s efforts to reshape the immigration landscape are likely to start immediately. Appearing on Fox News the morning after the election, the president-elect’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt celebrated a “resounding victory” and a “mandate to govern as he campaigned to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on day one, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants.”

Immigrant rights groups and lawyers have been diligently preparing for the possibility of a Trump comeback. Not unlike the first time around, they will inevitably pursue strategic litigation to stop some of the next administration’s harshest, and possibly unlawful, policies. “I’ve sued every president since George W. Bush, including Presidents Obama and Biden,” Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said in a statement. “We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court.”

Still, the breadth and depth of Trump’s agenda will have lasting impact, not only on immigrants who will directly bear the brunt of a heightened militarized immigration enforcement environment, but also on all Americans.

Here’s how.

Launch Mass Deportation

Indiscriminate workplace raids, massive detention camps, and around-the-clock deportation flights. That’s the radical vision to remove millions of undocumented immigrants put forward by Trump and Stephen Miller, his senior adviser on immigration. They would attempt to accomplish it by invoking a 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act—last used during World War II for the internment of Japanese, Italian, and German nationals—and deploying the full force of law enforcement agencies and the US military in violation of due process rights and the law.

A mass deportation campaign would permanently change the United States. It could lead to racial profiling, the potential separation of families, and the wrongful deportation of Americans and lawful residents. It would also ruin the economy.

The logistical and practical challenges of purging even 1 million people a year are considerable, not to mention the moral and human devastation. But, if realized, a recent analysis by the American Immigration Council found that such a project would cost $967.9 billion over more than a decade. The deportation of immigrant workers who are the backbone of so many critical industries would also break the economy, resulting in an estimated drop of up to 6.8 percent in gross domestic product.

End Birthright Citizenship

Trump promised to sign an executive order on day one to end the long-standing constitutional guarantee of citizenship for those born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The order would instruct federal agencies to require that at least one parent be a US citizen or lawful permanent resident for a child to be granted automatic citizenship.

“This current policy is based on a historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocate,” Trump has said. Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution—and reaffirmed in Supreme Court decisions—which states that, with very few exceptions, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Revive the “Muslim Ban”

During his first term, Trump took 472 executive actions in his bid to reshape the immigration system. One of them was the infamous “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” order, which permanently suspended the resettlement of refugees from Syria and barred the entry of travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The policy created instant chaos, sparked international repudiation, and galvanized Americans all over the country.

Trump has vowed to restore the so-called Muslim ban. The original iterations faced repeated legal challenges. Federal appeals courts ruled against the Trump administration, concluding that the executive order’s “stated national security interest was provided in bad faith” and “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” But in a 5–4 decision in June 2018, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to carry out a version of the ban. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden issue a proclamation reversing it.

End Immigration Programs

Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world who currently benefit from Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—granted to those fleeing wars, natural disasters, and other country-specific circumstances—are at risk of losing protection against deportation.

That includes nationals of Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Venezuela. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook, crafted by a number of administration-in-waiting former officials, specifically calls for the repeal of TPS designations.

While in office, Trump tried to rescind the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that shields from deportation the undocumented youth brought to the United States as children. There were as many as 535,030 active DACA recipients as of June 2024. Miller has said a second Trump administration would again attack the program, whose fate already lies with the courts. “It would be absolutely catastrophic,” Michelle Ming, political director at United We Dream, says of the prospect of tens of thousands of young people losing status. “It would destroy families. It would destroy entire communities.”

Roll Back Refugee Resettlement

In a September social media post in which he introduced to concept of remigration, Trump said he would “suspend refugee resettlement.” The first Trump administration dealt a massive blow to the US refugee resettlement program, and it likely wouldn’t be different this time. In September, Trump said he would “ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.”

As president, he set an annual cap of 15,000 refugee admissions. The number of admissions went from 84,994 during President Barack Obama’s last year in office to a record low of 11,814 in 2020. Ultimately, the Trump administration resettled fewer refugees than any other going back at least to the Carter administration. Upon taking the White House, Joe Biden worked to restore the program, resettling 100,034 refugees in fiscal year 2024—the most in decades.

Restrict Legal Immigration

While Trump has tried to signal that he’s in favor of legal immigration pathways, his allies have been preparing the terrain to severely restrict them. “Decades of ‘we’re not against legal immigration’ will culminate in the largest cut to legal immigration in US history,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, posted on X.

Their plans include severely curbing asylum, ending diversity lottery visas, and doing away with temporary legal programs like parole that have allowed immigrants from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba to come to the United States after being vetted and securing a sponsor. They could even resuscitate the public charge rule making it harder for low-income immigrants to qualify for visas and green cards.

Immigration lawyers have additionally warned that, in a second Trump administration, visa processing might be subject to delays and increased denial rates. “If Donald Trump is elected president in November 2024,” the National Foundation for American Policy stated, “he should be expected to restrict legal immigration, including green cards and [high-skilled] H-1B visas.”

The Project 2025 agenda contemplates undermining T and U visas for undocumented immigrant victims of trafficking and certain crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (These temporary protections serve as a powerful tool to encourage victims to report crimes and keep their communities safe.) It also envisions winding down crucial temporary agricultural worker programs.

Projecting a scenario in which Trump’s policies result in less immigration and even more people leaving the United States than entering, a preelection Brookings Institution analysis concluded the GDP in 2025 would be $130 billion lower than under a Harris administration.

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Why Did Trump Really Win? It’s Simple, Actually.

When the economy thrives while half of America struggles, something has got to give.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/why-donald-trump-won-election-white-house/

 

In the coming days, you will hear every imaginable take on why Americans voted to put Donald Trump back in office.

Pundits will say toxic masculinity was to blame—and men feeling usurped by women. They’ll say it was the Christian nationalism movement. A surprising shift in Latino voting patterns. Sexism. Racism. Transphobia. Elon Musk. Crypto bros. “Theo bros.” Housing prices. Gaza! Propaganda from Fox News and Newsmax. Misinformation on X.

Perhaps it was the cowardice of powerful men like Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon. The anti-immigrant frenzy—Trump’s incessant false claims about vicious murderers and rapists and mental patients swarming across the border like locusts. Property crime. Inflation. Interest rates. Lingering malaise from the pandemic. The Democrats’ failure to sell their economic wins. Kamala Harris’ inability to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Or maybe a combination of all these things. Gender and Gaza clearly made a difference. Inflation is a notorious regime killer—it was high inflation that underpinned the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century—and rising wages haven’t kept pace. When the Dems say, “Look, inflation is back to normal,” well, the price of groceries sure ain’t.

But I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest:

Wealth inequality.

There is little that leaves people as pissed off and frustrated as the feeling that no matter how hard they work, they can’t ever seem to get ahead. And this feeling has been slowly festering since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and his cadre of supply-side economists launched the first salvos in what would become the great fucking-over of the American middle and working classes.

The frustration was evident in something two very different women in two very different states told me on the very same day in 2022 for a story on how America spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year subsidizing retirement plans mostly for rich people: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”

The great fucking-over commenced with President Reagan’s gutting of unions and the wealth-friendly tax cuts he signed into law in 1981 and 1986. The trend continued with George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and culminated with the Trump tax cuts of 2017—which, like all of those other Republican initiatives, failed to generate the degreee of growth and prosperity the supply-siders promised. They did, however, make the rich richer as wages stagnated and the middle class shriveled.

We talk a lot about income inequality, but wealth and income are different beasts. Income is what pays your bills. Wealth is your security—and in that regard, most American families are just not feeling sufficiently secure.

In January 1981, when Reagan took office, the households of the Middle 40—that’s the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles—held a collective 31.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Fast-forward to January 2022: Their share of the pie had dwindled to 25.7 percent, even as the combined wealth of the richest 0.01 percent of households soared from less than 3 percent of the total to 11 percent.

Put another way, 18,300 US households—a tiny fraction—now control more than a tenth of the nation’s wealth.

And what of the bottom 50 percent? How have they fared over the past four decades or so? When Reagan came in, their average household wealth was a paltry $944. (All figures are in 2023 dollars.) Today they have even less—just $659 on average, according to projections from Real Time Inequality, a site based on data from the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. All told, those 92.2 million households now hold less than 0.05 percent of the nation’s wealth—which rounds down to zero. In short, half of the people living in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all.

They’re not doing so hot income-wise, either. In September, the Congressional Budget Office reported that average income of the highest-earning 1 percent of taxpayers in 2021 was more than $3.1 million, or 42 times the average income of households in the bottom 90 percent, according to the nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting this data in 1979, the group noted. Back then, the disparity was only 12 to 1.

And the billionaires? I’m glad you asked. Based on Forbes data, from January 1, 2018, when the Trump cuts took effect, to April 1 of this year, the nation’s 806 billionaires saw a 57 percent gain in their collective wealth—after adjusting for the inflation that has plagued working families.

“It’s a class and inequality story for sure,” Richard Reeves, the author of 2017’s Dream Hoarders, concurred when I ran my premise by him. “But it’s also a gendered class story.” (His latest book, Of Boys and Men, examines how “the social and economic world of men has been turned upside down.”) And he’s right.

But are you starting to see why the broader electorate, race and gender notwithstanding, might be just a little fed up?

I suppose, having also written a book about wealth in America, that I know enough to assert that wealth insecurity is fundamental.

But why, you might ask, would someone living on the edge vote for Republicans, whose wage-suppressing, union-busting, benefit-denying policies have only tended to make the poor and the middle class more miserable?

And why in the name of Heaven would they vote for Trump, a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has lied and cheated his way through life? A man whose latest tax-cut plans—though some, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security income, can sound progressive—will be deeply regressive, giving ever more to the rich and rationalizing cuts that will hurt the poor and middle class and accelerate global climate chaos.

The reason, my friends, may well be that those on the losing end of our thriving economy don’t see it as thriving. Historically, every election cycle, when reporters fan out to ask low-income voters in swing states what they are thinking, the message has been roughly the same: Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, come around here every four years and talk their talk, and then they leave and forget about us when it comes to policy.

Now that’s not entirely fair, because the Biden administration actually has done a good bit for working people and families of color, and has proposed all sorts of measures to make the tax code fairer and reduce the wealth gap (both the racial one and the general one)—including increasing taxes and IRS enforcement for the super-rich. But one can only get so far with a split Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on your team, and a rival party that would just as soon throw you into a lake of fire as support your initiatives.

And nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching yourself to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month. Roughly half of the population barely gets by, has no stocks, no wealth, no retirement savings, and can’t imagine how they’ll ever afford a house—certainly not at current interest rates. Meanwhile, the billionaire techno-dicks are strutting around, publicly flexing their wealth and power with Democrats and Republicans alike.

In courting Americans who, fairly or not, feel like the system has never done them a bit of good, Team Trump has the rhetorical advantage, because he says he’ll destroy that system—even if that really just means he’ll subvert it to further enrich his buddies. “Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S.” was one of the New York Times’ headlines after the race was called on Wednesday morning. And that’s absolutely right.

Because when the Republicans say, “The economy is a nightmare under Biden and Harris, and illegal immigrants are committing heinous crimes and taking your jobs and we’re gonna cut your taxes,” and the Dems counter, “Hey, none of that is really true and we actually did a lot and we feel your pain and the economy is going gangbusters and Trump’s tariffs will destroy it,” well, whom do you think a person struggling from paycheck to paycheck might be more inclined to believe?

Sure, the economy is doing great—if you own stock. If you have a well-paying job and a retirement plan. If you are in the top fifth of the wealth and income spectrums.

If not, even if you rightly suspect that the Republicans won’t do a damn thing to improve your lot, you might just be tempted to say, “Fuck it.”

And watch the system burn.

[Vesper 29,019]

13 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

The crucial thing is not to fall for the billionaires 'Culture Wars' that they promote to divide people at every opportunity - this is their biggest priority because they are greedy and want more and more. They hate Solidarity between ordinary people, and dont want us educated

The Oligarch Election

American billionaires have long placed their thumbs on the scale of democracy—but never like this.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/the-2024-election-was-defined-by-oligarchs-musk-mellon-bezos-zuckerberg/

It feels strange to suggest that the second-most memorable thing that happened on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, this year was the former president of the United States getting shot in the face. But if Donald Trump wins the presidential election, the image that will be seared in my mind is that of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, jumping around the same stage a few months later—eyes weirdly vacant, a black MAGA hat splayed awkwardly on his head, his legs and arms outstretched in the shape of a knotted and overgrown X.

Musk had been a public Trump supporter since the summer, and a not-so-subtle conservative sympathizer for far longer. He was already pouring tens of millions of dollars into an unusual and untested field campaign in key swing states. And he had hosted a glitchy and uncomfortable conversation with Trump on X. But the appearance at that rally of a defense contractor who controls half the satellites in the night sky, the electric-vehicle charging network, and quite possibly the social media network where you found this article, felt like something ominous and new. 

Tim Walz—who told a crowd a few weeks after Musk’s appearance in Butler that the tech mogul was “skipping around like a dipshit”—was only trying to get one over on his counterpart when he called Musk Trump’s “running mate.” But it was not entirely wrong. It was Musk who lobbied Trump to put JD Vance on the ticket. Musk was the one funding the get-out-the-vote effort. Musk was the guy who turned one of the world’s biggest social media platforms into a black hole of anti-immigrant agitprop. Musk was the guy who was going to be given the keys to the federal budget, to find $2 trillion in cuts from just $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending. Vance was the headliner at a rally in Scottsdale over the weekend, but Musk was a star in absentia, the name people kept bringing up on their own. He was “hilarious,” a voter told me. He was a “genius.” (He was also: “Not a very good speaker.”) Musk’s organizers swarmed the line outside to collect data for Musk’s PAC so that he could—well, it’s not really clear what the point of that was. That felt kind of Trumpian too.

It is hard to say anything new about 78-year-old Donald Trump. Nine years after his first campaign event in Manhattan, even the ex-president himself seemed to be running out of steam sometimes, forgetting names and places, missing door handles, and eschewing his entire stump speech entirely to dance—if that’s the word—to a Sinéad O’Connor cover of a Prince song from 1985. But Musk did offer something different, if not in any of the things he had to say—the inevitable race science and disinformation and faux-heterodox drivel of someone discovering conservative message boards for the first time while also playing Starcraft—than in the relationship between money and power he represented. This was the oligarch election. And Musk was the richest and most powerful oligarch of them all.

One of the simpler explanations you often heard about Trump’s rise was that the electorate had been primed for someone like him. The conditions were all there for the right kind of demagogue—we had bad trade deals, scam culture, reality television, and the Electoral College. You could say the same about Musk and the billionaires whose spending set the terms for how the election would be conducted and what it would be about.

In Musk’s case, the work was made possible by landmark Supreme Court decisions more than a decade ago, which opened the floodgates to an ever-growing and frankly horrifying gusher of often untraceable cash into the political system. The rules on what those outside groups can and cannot do, and how closely they can coordinate, have become a little more toothless every cycle since. For one person to gain this much influence, a lot of other kinds of people and institutions have to lose it. Musk’s power has been enabled by the monopolistic growth of the internet economy, and the not entirely unrelated collapse of much of the hard-news media industry, online and off, and by a tax and regulatory climate that has allowed a small subset of people in Silicon Valley to grow not just rich, but nation-state rich.

But the oligarch election was not just about Musk. From the start of the primaries, it was almost impossible to separate what was happening on stage from what some of the richest people alive were doing off it. Rep. Dean Phillips’ primary challenge to Joe Biden was funded in large part by billionaire investor Bill Ackman. (Phillips even changed his campaign’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy after Ackman complained.) Sen. Tim Scott’s primary challenge to Trump was supposed to be bankrolled by Larry Ellison, but the money never materialized. And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign, while it lasted, was an almost wholly-owned subsidiary of Timothy Mellon, grandson of Andrew. Mellon, who was, at one point, the largest contributor to both the RFK Jr. and Trump campaigns, was sort of Musk, inverted—a scion of Gilded Age wealth who spent part of his share of family fortune on a fruitless search to find Amelia Earhart’s plane at the bottom of the sea.

(An aside: Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, who was chosen for the ticket largely because of her perceived ability to fund it, once allegedly had an affair with Musk while married to Sergey Brin. According to a recent New York Times story, Musk once offered her his sperm, as part of his obsession with populating the world with children who share his genes. During the campaign, Musk similarly offered to father a child with Taylor Swift, following the pop star’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.)

Musk’s former partner at PayPal, Peter Thiel, did not give as much money this cycle as he has in the past. But he also didn’t really need to. His contribution to the race was merely a vice presidential nominee—his former employee, Vance, with whom Thiel shares some unusual ideological influences. Vance got to the Senate because Thiel personally introduced him to Trump at Mar-a-Lago and spent $15 million to get him elected. He’s on the ticket now, in part, because Thiel, like Musk, urged Trump personally to pick him.

All this money, and the people throwing it around, often defined the terms of the debate. Trump said so explicitly at a fundraiser early in the campaign, promising fossil-fuel executives a host of goodies—including eliminating the electric vehicle mandate—if they ponied up $1 billion to support his bid. He supported a ban on TikTok in the United States. Then he changed his mind after a meeting with the Pennsylvania billionaire—and TikTok investor—Jeff Yass, who has given Republican outside groups and candidates upwards of $50 million. Incidentally, Yass was a shareholder in a company that merged with Trump’s media venture this year.

The money sloshing around, in pursuit of tax cuts and government contracts and something called “pronatalism,” has real consequences on real people. If there was a defining issue on the Republican side, it was the continuing attack on transgender athletes who compete—in astonishingly small numbers—in high school and college sports. It is impossible to overstate how much this issue dominated the airwaves of competitive Senate races.

Who was funding this onslaught? A peek at the disclosures of Senate Leadership Fund, a leading Republican outside group in Senate races, offered a revealing look. Leading the way was billionaire Ken Griffin, the Florida-based hedge-funder who once told his local paper that ultra-wealthy elites have “insufficient influence” in American politics. His $27.5 million was followed by $20 million from Paul Singer, a hedge-funder who grew his fortune by squeezing poor countries for debt repayments, and who appeared in the news most recently for flying Samuel Alito to Alaska on his private jet. Another top contributor was Stephen Schwarzman ($9 million), the private-equity mogul who once compared President Barack Obama’s efforts to close the carried interest loophole to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Marc Andreesen, the Silicon Valley mogul, chipped in a more pedestrian but still respectable $375,000—perhaps enough to buy a starter home someday in the new model city he’s trying to build from scratch in California. Throw in a few million from several different Waltons, and a big check from Rupert Murdoch, and SLF was flush.

I’ve mostly focused on Trump and his allies, and not Democrats, because this election in particular was asymmetrical. Donors were contributing to Republican super-PACs at a roughly 2-to-1 clip. No one on the left is fusing government business with high-dollar donations and media manipulation like Musk.

But the Democratic campaign was shaped by the power of ultra-wealthy donors too. Conservatives talked incessantly about George Soros not just because of the subtext but because of the plain text—he gave $60 million to a super-PAC that supports Democrats earlier this year, while seeding left-of-center political organizing efforts across the country. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent $50 million. So has Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose philanthropic efforts have given him vast influence over the future of public health and education. The right-wing populists and the demagogues might be full of shit. But their punches often land for a reason.

In the three-week interregnum between President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate and his eventual departure from the race, some of the most important voices were the megadonors—the shadow party within the party. And in the punch-drunk weeks that followed, as Harris set out to define what her candidacy would be about, everyone from Mark Cuban to Barry Diller to Reid Hoffman came forward with the same suggestion—that perhaps Harris could replace Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who has been the tip of the spear of the current administration’s anti-trust enforcement. When the people funding the campaign are naming the bureaucrats they want fired, that’s oligarchy, too.

But the election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated but by those who sat it out. 

When I mentioned Musk’s donations to a voter at the Vance rally in Scottsdale, she was nonplussed.

“Look at what Zuckerberg is doing on the left with his money,” she said.

But seriously, look at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing with his money: Not very much! A former supporter of immigration reform efforts, who helped pay for poll workers across the country a few years ago, Zuckerberg has largely given up on political activism, the New York Times reported recently. He has made peace with Trump, who has said Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” for taking down Covid misinformation during the pandemic. After Trump was shot, Zuckerberg called the former president a “badass.” They even spoke by phone. 

In seemingly abandoning any efforts to maintain a functioning online space, and actively throttling real political news, Zuckerberg created a vacuum that other powerful actors could fill. Facebook no longer really cares about politics or moderation or the appearance of impropriety now. The company is happy to take huge amounts of money from Musk for misleading advertisements that pretend to be coming from Harris.

Last month, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, unilaterally stopped his newspaper, the Washington Post, from publishing an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, on the grounds that he believed newspaper endorsements contributed to a declining trust in news media. And while few people will miss one more sternly worded editorial about Donald Trump, it was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a potential Trump second term. It fit into a pattern of elite timidity. The Times recently reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—like a number of other prominent business titans—quietly supported Harris, but was afraid to say so publicly. The billionaires aren’t going to save us. They might not even try.

[Vesper 29,019]

Insurrectionists Are Lining Up for the Pardons Trump Has Promised to Dispense

Chances look good.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/insurrectionists-are-lining-up-for-the-pardons-trump-has-promised-to-dispense/

More than 1,500 people charged with or convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress are now presumably hoping to win pardons and commutations that the now president-elect has repeatedly, if vaguely, promised to give many of them.

And they aren’t alone. Numerous people convicted since 2020 of federal crimes in prosecutions they claim were politically motivated seem to be positioning themselves to seek clemency when Donald Trump takes office in January.

On the campaign trail, Trump—who doled out various pardons to political allies ruing his first term—made frequent, though somewhat qualified, pledges to offer clemency to January 6 attackers. In a July exchange with ABC news anchor Rachel Scott, for instance, Trump said that he would “absolutely” pardon even rioters who were convicted of assaulting police officers. He then said he would do so “if they’re innocent,” but also said they had faced a “tough system.”

These statements have people charged with crimes on January 6 positioning themselves for pardons in the wake of Trump’s victory.

On Wednesday, Christopher Carnell, a man charged with entering the Capitol on January 6, asked a DC judge to postpone his case, citing Trump’s statements about pardoning January 6 attackers.

“Throughout his campaign, President-elect Trump has made multiple clemency promises to the January 6 defendants, particularly to those who were nonviolent participants,” Carnell’s lawyer wrote. “Mr. Carnell, who was an 18 year old nonviolent entrant into the Capitol on January 6, is expecting to be relieved of the criminal prosecution that he is currently facing when the new administration takes office.”

This is one of what will likely be a deluge of similar filings. Judges are under no obligation to postpone proceedings based on such requests.

Trump might pardon not only rank-and-file January 6 rioters but high-profile far-right leaders convicted of helping to organize the attack.

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right Proud Boys, who is serving a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the January 6 attack, is exploring a pardon, even as he continues to appeal his sentence, Tarrio’s lawyer, Nayib Hassan indicated to HuffPost. “We look forward to what the future holds, both in terms of the judicial process for our client and the broader political landscape under the new administration,” Hassan said.

Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder sentenced last year to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy due to his role in the attack, could also receive a Trump pardon, a prospect Rhodes’ ex-wife and son have said causes them fear for their safety due to what they allege is his past physical abuse. (Rhodes has denied abusing family members.)

Trump used the pardon process liberally while president to free war criminals, personal allies, campaign donors, people who could have acted as witnesses against him, and others—a use of clemency power that was unprecedented in American history and deeply corrupt.

In a second term, he may continue to pardon allies facing federal charges or seeking help with past convictions.

Former advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both of whom already served four-month prison terms for contempt of Congress after ignoring subpoenas from the House January 6 committee, may receive pardons aimed at clearing their names. (Trump pardoned Bannon in 2020 on charges that he defrauded donors to a charity that claimed to be raising private funds to help build Trump’s promised wall along the Mexican border, but he can’t help Bannon with pending New York state charges related to the same alleged scam.)

Bannon could also lobby Trump to pardon his former patron Guo Wengui, a Chinese real estate mogul convicted of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from Chinese diaspora followers of a movement Guo and Bannon launched in 2019. Guo used that movement and a network of Chinese-language media companies to spread disinformation aimed at helping Trump in 2020.

New York Mayor Eric Adams, facing charges for accepting bribes from Turkish interests, has ludicrously suggested that he was prosecuted by the Justice Department due to criticizing the Biden White House over immigration issues. That sounds like a bid for a pardon. Trump might prove amenable.

Then there is former Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), convicted last year of taking bribes from Egyptian agents in exchange for helping advance Cairo’s interests in the United States. Menendez previously persuaded Trump to pardon Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor accused of bribing Menendez in a case that ended in a mistrial, but who was also convicted of defrauding Medicare. Could Menendez join other corrupt Democrats Trump pardoned, like former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich? Don’t rule it out.

One person Trump probably won’t have to pardon is himself. The Justice Department “is evaluating how to wind down the two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump before he takes office to comply with longstanding department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted,” NBC News’ Ken Dilanian reported Wednesday. That would relieve Trump of having to take the unprecedented and controversial step of telling DOJ to drop charges into himself.

[Vesper 29,019]

After Win, Trump Fans Admit “Project 2025 Is the Agenda”

“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/project-2025-is-the-agenda-trump-what-is-trump-plan-after-win-steve-bannon/

On Wednesday morning, some of Trump’s favorite fans finally felt comfortable joking about what the next president has long denied: Project 2025 has always been the plan for a second Trump term.

“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh wrote in a post on X of the 900-plus-page extremist guidebook. Walsh’s message soon got picked up and promoted by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist who was recently released from prison, where he landed after ignoring a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee. “Fabulous,” Bannon said, chuckling, after reading Walsh’s post out loud on his War Room podcast today. “We might have to put that everywhere.”

Benny Johnson, a conservative YouTuber with 2.59 million followers who has called affirmative action “Nazi-level thinking” and said Trump should prosecute Biden for human trafficking of immigrants, also chimed in: “It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time,” he posted on X.

Bo French, a local Texas GOP official who recently came under fire for using slurs about gay people and people with disabilities on social media, wrote: “Can we admit now that we are going to implement Project 2025?”

Walsh, Bannon, and the others are not the only people in Trump’s orbit who have made these promises. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, there is a long list of his connections to it, which include many people who have similarly said that Trump plans to enact the policies if reelected. Russell Vought, a potential next chief of staff profiled by my colleague Isabela Dias, said in a secretly recorded meeting that Project 2025 is the real Trump plan and the distancing tactic was just campaign necessity.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign, the RNC, and the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing think tank behind the plan—did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Mother Jones.

If these claims are true, then Trump could potentially see an erosion of support from his base. As I reported in September, an NBC News poll found that only 7 percent of GOP voters had positive views of Project 2025, while 33 percent held negative views. That is not entirely surprising when you consider the drastic ways it could radically reshape American life if enacted. It calls for banning abortion pills nationwide; using big tech to surveil abortion access; rolling back climate policies; enabling workplace discrimination; and worsening wealth inequality. 

[Vesper 29,019]

[Vesper 29,019]

Elon Musk Just Became One of the Most Powerful Men in the World 

The billionaire’s bet pays off, and he’s not done playing.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/elon-musk-donald-trump-win/

There’s no overstating how good election night was for Elon Musk. With Donald Trump’s victory, Musk—already the richest man in the world, thanks in part to lucrative federal contracts—has also made himself a major force in politics. During a Spaces conversation hosted on his X platform on Tuesday night, Musk said that America PAC, the newly formed pro-Trump super-PAC into which he poured millions of dollars, is “going to keep going after this election,” promising to begin preparing for 2026’s midterms, judicial contests, and other local races. Such commitments are another indication of how far-reaching and consequential he aims to make his new political ambitions. 

At this point, there’s no telling how big of a role Musk’s enthusiastic Trump boosterism actually played in the former president’s reelection. But Musk has already taken credit for improving Republicans’ ground game, despite America PAC’s having faced a widely publicized story by Wired that cast serious doubt on its effectiveness. Largely Black canvassers told reporter Jake Lahut that they were “tricked and threatened” into working for the PAC, and then were trundled into seatless UHauls, given unrealistic quotas, threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet them, and left stranded with no way home.

Despite the controversy, Trump gave Musk generous credit for his victory, singling him out during his Wednesday morning victory speech. “We have a new star,” he declared. “A star is born: Elon… He’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them.”  

Musk and Trump both said during the campaign that Musk will head a “Department of Governmental Efficiency,” which they have floated could slash federal spending by as much as $2 trillion, a strategy that could throw the country into economic chaos. While there’s also no guarantee that DOGE—a jokey acronym referencing Musk’s favored cryptocurrency—would actually come to pass, such an arrangement would see Musk wielding power over agencies that are currently investigating his companies, including the SEC, which is probing his 2022 acquisition of Twitter.

Even in the face of Trump’s clear victory, Musk’s America PAC is still working to impute that pro-Harris election fraud took place on Tuesday. In a Wednesday tweet, America PAC called to impose new voter ID requirements, reposting a tweet from a user that claimed ”Kamala won all the states that don’t require voter ID.” (There are already 36 states that either require or request voters to show ID at the polls, and while Harris did win several states without strict voter ID laws, there’s no evidence it’s due to fraud. Instead, they tended to be liberal-leaning states where she was heavily favored.) 

In the hours following the election, Musk has begun articulating a broader and more draconian vision. This was signaled in his Spaces conversation, when he said America PAC would weigh in on district attorney races to encourage tough-on-crime candidates. “We have to have DAs that protect the citizens of their cities,” and “put repeat violent offenders in prison,” Musk added, describing the agenda as “doing common sense stuff.”

Musk has continued to toggle between these two polls—a dark and paranoid vision of how America functions, and giddiness at a Trump victory, and his role within it—from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.

“I think there’s a sea change in the country,” Musk concluded, at the end of the Tuesday night Twitter space. “I hope I’m not wrong about that.”

[Vesper 29,019]

Democracy Derailed: Trump’s Triumph Signals a Dark New Era

Trump returns with full power, leaving Democrats and half the nation reeling as America faces an unprecedented political upheaval.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/democracy-derailed-trumps-triumph-signals-a-dark-new-era

 

When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, the result stunned the nation, its political elites and even Trump himself, who hadn’t really expected to win. Fear and anger swept the ranks of liberals and moderates, who hadn’t reckoned on this demagogic, bigoted outsider actually winning state power. Could any conceivable outcome be worse?

Well, yes. This year’s outcome is decidedly worse. For one thing, Trump is now a known quantity to virtually every American and one who, according to the exit polls, is still in negative territory when it comes to his approval rating. The campaign he just waged was more vituperative, more reliant on racist and misogynist slander and big lies than the ones he’d waged in 2016 and 2020. Yet despite all that, when all the votes are tallied, he will probably emerge as the victor not only in the Electoral College but also, as was not the case in the last two elections, in the popular vote.

And this time around, the Trump tide has also swept out the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, which means that Trump will be able to appoint any cabinet and agency heads and federal judges he desires, since these confirmations, by virtue of Senate rules, require a simple majority rather than the supermajorities that are needed to pass legislation. When all the votes are counted, Republicans may also be able to cling to their narrow majority in the House, which will effectively give Trump complete carte blanche to dismantle laws and regulations that ensure public health, mitigate climate change, provide some oversight to financial markets, and secure free and fair elections.

Trump’s gains in the electorate came chiefly among working-class voters, who, as in many European nations, have moved rightward as the transformation from an industrial economy to an information economy has diminished their economic prospects and political clout. Like many centre-left parties, the Democratic base now centres on college-educated and, hence, more prosperous voters. Exit polls showed Trump narrowly winning among voters whose yearly family incomes were under $100,000, with Harris narrowly carrying those voters with family incomes higher than that.

Ironically, Biden’s presidency was the first Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson’s to put working-class interests at the centre of its economic programme, bringing about a historic increase in factory construction and clearly siding with unions in their disputes with management. But Biden, hobbled by declining health, seldom appeared in public to make the case for his policies, and his foremost macroeconomic achievement – providing an economic stimulus so massive that it brought about the swiftest economic recovery that any nation experienced following the plunge that came with the COVID pandemic – went all but unnoticed. Voters tend to be oblivious to policies that keep things, even bad things, from happening. What the public most certainly noticed, however, were the high prices that were partly a byproduct of running such a hot economy but were more the consequence of dysfunctional global supply chains and such geopolitical disruptions as Russia’s war on Ukraine.

And so the Biden-Harris Administration went the way of numerous regimes that had the misfortune to govern during a global wave of price increases. But that only begins to address the problems that the Democratic Party faces. A factor that clearly underlies its steadily weakening posture among working-class voters is the nearly complete deunionisation of that working-class. Today’s blue-and-pink collar workers had grandfathers who were able to support their families by virtue of their union wages and benefits. Today, with a bare 6 per cent of private-sector workers enrolled in unions, workers’ ability to bargain and to wield political clout has largely disappeared. Absent any sense of actual agency, many become receptive to a demagogue like Trump, who vows to deport millions of immigrants and argues that that policy will somehow enable them to better their lot.

Just as the exit polls revealed how decisive a role class played in the Republicans’ victory, they also revealed the decisive role of gender. Among white voters, the gap in Trump support between white men and white women was seven percentage points. Among Black voters, it was 14 percentage points, and among Latinos, it was 16 percentage points. While immigrants were the chief target of Trump’s attacks, the “feminised” Democratic Party, personified by Harris, was his second target of choice. Trump’s ground game was nowhere near as extensive as Harris’s, but its choice of turnout targets – working-class young men of all races, who are generally the group least likely to vote – was also reflected in the violence of Trump’s speech. Like all political coalitions, the MAGA movement is made up of a collection of disparate groups, from cryptocurrency speculators to Christian evangelicals, but at its core, it’s a movement of precarious manhood, which is why Trump sought to embody and surround himself with presumable examples of hypermasculinity (like the actors who play professional wrestlers).

Trump’s victories not only plunge the Democrats into playing defence for (at best) the next several years, but also compel them to go through a wrenching period of redefinition and recomposition. I suspect a number of the party’s social concerns – support for immigrants, some restrictions on gun ownership and the like – will be de-emphasised if not altogether dumped for some time to come. I don’t believe, however, that the party will once again embrace the neoliberal policies of free global trade and deregulation of markets that characterised the Carter, Clinton and Obama presidencies and played a decisive, decades-long role in workers abandoning their Democratic voting habits. Harris did not lose because she supported using the government’s power to lower the price of prescription drugs; indeed, the exit polls showed the public’s preference for such governmental interventions over the alternative of a more laissez-faire economics.

That said, the election leaves American liberals, progressives, Democrats – effectively, half of the nation and more than half of its political elites – stunned, disheartened, and just beginning to grope for ways out of the cave into which the nation has plunged. I suspect the party will find its new leaders chiefly among Democratic governors, as they can enact popular progressive policies in their states, even as Congressional Democrats will find themselves unable to do anything other than mounting rhetorical opposition to the neo-fascists who will now control the federal government.