I’ve no idea, don’t know much about him. Bolsonaro clearly is a dangerous right wing populist, so I’m relieved he’s been defeated.
You and me both.
I was responding to a more general point about the polarisation of politics throughout the democratic world. The lesson from history is clear; people are easily manipulated, and drawn towards demagogues, when they feel insecure and abandoned.
That is true enough.
To a very large extent, here as in Brexit Britain and MAGA USA, the polarization is rather one-sided and fed by widespread, unquestioning acceptance of wild, shameless lies on a regular basis.
We did not really have anything comparable to the British tabloids nor to FOX News here before Bolsonaro's presidential term, but we have it now. It is called "Jovem Pan". There are also more properly fringe media channels such as "Brasil Paralelo" and "Gazeta do Povo".
To the best of my understanding (and it is very unhealthy to try and understand a bolsonarista's mind) it all comes down to a bad need to avoid accepting change meeting outlets and social circles (I want to avoid using the word "bubble" too much) that reassure those people with authoritarian tendencies that they can, in fact, avoid accepting the reality of changes and challenges if they keep true to their fear, immaturity and submission to words of silly defiance and refusal to grow.
It is scary, and also deeply embarrassing. Because it is so transparently immature and so arrogantly set on devouring its own entrails.
Unfortunately, we are far from hearing the last of it. Quite on the contrary. Even the lulistas have not yet felt the full extent of the economic and political ravaging that Bolsonaro committed.
We will need decades to heal from it. Much will have to go through full, slow, reeking putrefaction and painful death for the healing to set in. In just a few years we lost sizeable, very significant chunks of our cultural ability, of our intellectual capability, of our industrial viability and of our ethical discernment.
It will get much worse before it gets better. It has to; the means for anything less painful to happen have been consumed by blind fear, ignorance and hatred.
I had never witnessed the decadence caused by fascism up close before, not even in the 1964-1985 regime, which did not go quite this far during my life. This is all news to me, and much worse than I ever feared could happen during my lifetime.
Far too many people flat out do not want to live in a democratic society anymore, and seem to have lost the ability to make the attempt outright. We have degenerated into a community where savages want to be accepted and recognized as if they were the civilized people that they gave up on being.
Truly, it is a clash of worldviews that will leave deep, lasting, painful scars resulting from the grieving reversal of authoritarianism. And that is the best case scenario.
Ultimately, Bolsonaro was the manifestation and painful symptom of much deeper, graver illnesses. There was never a short supply of whacko madmen in our politics (or most any other). But voters and other citizens didn't always give them any attention.
We do not suffer too much from bad leaders, which exist aplenty and always have and always will; we suffer atrociously from bad citizens, which have gained way too many numbers and way too much confused enthusiasm.
