Ricardo Pascoe Pierce.
These three characters, AMLO, Trump, and Bolsonaro, profit from the accusation of electoral fraud, while all three were elected Presidents. All three used extreme social, economic, and political polarization as their privileged instrument to hold on to power. And all three have flirted with reelection, each in a different legal and political context.
AMLO, Trump, and Bolsonaro have used the strength granted to them by being the Presidents of their respective countries to accumulate a personal, family, and group economic base to continue to exercise power, even when out of it.
All three represent a way of political operation and exercise of power that will serve future generations as a model for those who aspire to emaciated republics but are controlled by authoritarianism under the moral disguise of uniformity and subordination. All three destroyed the moral fabric of three representative democracies, undermining the citizenry’s confidence in their democratic institutions. They undermined the credibility of judges, educators, clergy members, police officers, legislators, doctors, scientists, and business people. That was their primary objective, and they succeeded. After that, taking over the political control system was like moving on a superhighway at full speed. With social demoralization, everything was ready to fall into their hands.
It is also significant that their supposed ideological or political “sign” is irrelevant. What is essential, what unites them spiritually and politically, is their extremism. Extreme left or extreme right? It doesn’t matter when their public policies come into operation. The State and its levers to exercise coercive power is the only thing that matters. Left and right coexist in a market economy, where the State regulates for the benefit of the President’s designees.
Underlying all three is a discourse of the “relativization of values” while insisting on being the bearers of the “new social values”. Their narrative endorses the powerful but subjective idea that the collective social benefits when it accepts to discard rules and norms of coexistence of the community under the belief that they are an obstacle to their personal development. For example, if having a good education does not serve for personal development, but the possibility of cheating the less apt to get ahead, then that is the path to success in life—the deception as a vehicle for personal achievement. In the case of AMLO, it is expressed in his glorification of drug trafficking and the destruction of democratic institutions, while Trump promotes immorality and illegality in acts and words as legitimization “of individual progress”. Bolsonaro offers, wrapped in an evangelist cellophane package, the normalization of robbery as a form of personal advancement, putting the legitimized destruction of the Amazon as an example, together with the arming of the population to fight against each other, having the State as a referee in the fight.
AMLO wants “his poor” to have the impression that, by receiving the money he gives them, they are stealing from the rich and middle classes who naively pay taxes. A modern Robin Hood supposedly stimulates consumption in the Mexican capitalist market. It is all complicity and looting, as far as it goes. His outstanding moral achievement is the individualization of the sensation of poverty, each in his own tragedy. At the same time, this individualization is the destruction of an idea of community or collective strength. Individualization weakens the subject and makes him more dependent on the all-powerful President. It is a populist form of subordination. A necessary effect of Obradorist individuation is the destruction of the moral fabric of society. Social demoralization leads to polarization, disenchantment, and lots and lots of violence.
Trump normalizes tax evasion, customer theft, and all deception “necessary” to advance the individual, including the abuse of women—another Robin Hood, inside the U.S. market. By promoting the normalization of immorality, he questions the role and necessity of normative state institutions and makes society doubt the need for order and progress. Such demoralization affects community relations and is the breeding ground for racial, religious, and class-based hatred—individuation and isolation as state policy.
Nothing is an accident. Violence in U.S. society, as in Mexican society, is a direct product of the breakdown of society’s moral and ethical fabric. Along with that breakdown comes polarization, heightened hatred, and cross-accusations that seem unlikely to be resolved.
Bolsonaro promotes individualization by accusing “the State” of preparing electoral fraud, since in Brazil, as in Mexico, the electoral authority is centralized and national (unlike the United States, which is decentralized in each state). The accusation of electoral fraud in Brazil, as in Mexico, is a call to disregard the Powers of the national State and the institutions that emanate from it. Throughout his electoral campaign, Bolsonaro denounced “electoral fraud” as inevitable. He tried to dominate the electoral bodies and failed. So his post-election complaint that he lost the election because of fraud by the electoral bodies, such as manipulating electronic votes by a pernicious rigged algorithm, was a surprise to no one. Bolsonaro alleged the same as López Obrador did in 2006. Both without being able to prove anything, but indignant to the core and full of existential rancor (Literary note: in these two cases, “existential” means for the rest of one’s life).
One thing must be made clear. Even though AMLO claims to be “left”, while Trump and Bolsonaro are “right” (many would say “extreme left” and “extreme right”), the truth is that, in these three examples, those categories lose their meaning altogether. This is because all three operate politically in the same way. They promote the individualization of citizens so that they mobilize only around the figure of Power and not around their unions, community organizations, schools, professional guilds, churches, etc. None of the three actors wants a society organized and independent of them. They do not want autonomous organs of government. They want to concentrate power, attention and be the sole focus of widespread affection. The clearest example was AMLO’s rally in the Zócalo yesterday. The objective was only one: for everyone to shout in unison, “The People Love the Leader, and the Leader Loves the People”. It is a political model of populism with a solid fascist taint and inclination.
The three politicians move skillfully between the management of the State and its regulatory instruments of the economy while using the market and business to increase their personal and family wealth and that of their political project. At the same time, they denounce the corruption of the politicians and business people of the past. Criticizing the past has been politically profitable for them, and a widely popular sentiment agrees with their criticisms. What is hidden, however, is that this criticism of the past is the screen behind which they hide their corrupt dealings of equal or greater magnitude.
AMLO, Trump, and Bolsonaro walk in the same direction and share the same purpose. And when they finally leave power, the three societies will face the arduous task of rebuilding the institutions of a democratic and diverse Republic, recovering a rule of law that reflects the social pact that gave origin and order to the national concord.
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