The Recasting of the Latin American Right: Polarization and Conservative Reactions, edited by André Borges, Ryan Lloyd, and Gabriel Vommaro, 2024, Cambridge University Press
The hidden backdrop to the rise of the far right in Europe has been the “silent revolution” of post-materialism identified in the late 1970s by Ronald Inglehart.
The embrace by a materially comfortable new generation of values reflecting non-material goals—from gender diversity to radical decolonial and racial theories—goes a long way towards explaining the positions staked out by the Left in today’s culture wars.
The long-term secular trend suggests those positions, however, are destined to fail, because not only has the mainstream Left largely abandoned class as the organising principle of mobilization, it is also losing the fleeting cultural battles it has chosen to fight in its stead.
Latin America may still have a chance to avoid this historic error, even if all the signs suggest that the radical right in the region, witnessing their own leftwing adversaries repeat the mistakes of their European counterparts, has smelled blood.
As this collection edited by André Borges, Ryan Lloyd, and Gabriel Vommaro shows, the Right is on the rise across Latin America—at its most extreme in the form of the populist radical right (PRR) embodied by such characters as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, José Antonio Kast in Chile and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Elsewhere, in countries such as Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador and Colombia, traditional and more moderate conservative forces have made gains by embracing more extreme positions.
This rise of the Right owes much to how adept it has been at learning how to divide and conquer constituencies which, in essence, are not its natural territory.
Post-2000 rightwing leaders have mobilized discontent with the Left’s performance in government and economic stagnation, corruption and rising crime. But the editors note in particular that policy and value shifts in Latin American societies often, but not necessarily, associated with leftwing agendas, have fostered a backlash.
That is because cultural changes driven by ideologically progressive agendas since the left turn of the “pink tide” governments after 2000—if not the sole explanation for the rightwing resurgence—have fuelled support for extreme alternatives.
Rather than simply adapting to the new attitudes, conservatives have actively politicized non-economic issues based on a strategic instinct, preying on fertile sectors resistant to changes in family structures and sexual and gender rights.
Moral unease at same sex marriage and the increasing politicization of race, for example, attest to the speed of social changes in these fragile democracies and the resilience of conservative nuclei that are turning gender and racial “ideologies” into electoral gifts that keep on giving.
The editors write: “While Latin America did not experience the post-materialist turn that triggered cultural backlash in Western Europe, there is evidence that progressive cultural changes in issues such as LGBT rights have indeed polarized mass publics.”
Race has also become increasingly politicized in countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador with concomitant social policies generating resistance by more conservative forces that see the promotion of equality as a threat to the status quo.
We need only look at the rhetoric and behaviour of Bolsonaro and Kast to know that what we are dealing with today is not your historically typical rightwing wannabe autocrat acting through the military on behalf of international capital and US imperialism, but a new species entirely.
It is here that the Left must be careful, because a key theme to take away from this book is just how diverse—and sometimes even contradictory—rightwing politics has become in contemporary Latin America, making it harder to isolate individual vaccines for this virus.
The editors propose a typology of rightwing movements determined by how they broaden their appeal from a small elite core without alienating them through, on the one hand, strategies of radicalization and, on the other, building party organisations.
On this spectrum the most extreme movements are the populist radical right, exemplified by Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party in Brazil and Kast’s Republican Party in Chile, which have been fashioned into personal vehicles with limited organisational investment.
There are also examples of conservatives ambivalent about an increase in the social role of the state and less exercised by issues of redistribution.
One shared factor thrust into relief by the experience of Brazil among others has been the politicization of religion through rapidly growing evangelical movements that have tended to be—if this were even possible—more conservative than the Catholic church itself. The success of bolsonarismo owes much to evangelical churches and politicians organised in congress in a caucus across party lines.
Yet given the historical weakness of the partisan right and obstacles to party-building in Latin America, how do we explain the electoral vigour and resilience of new conservative forces?
Contributors to this collection provide evidence to suggest that rightwing parties created since 2000 have been organisationally weak. This has complemented ideological entrepreneurialism to cultivate political identities that secure mass loyalties through polarizing messages.
In some cases radical populists in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay have dispensed with strong party organisations and pursued mobilization strategies that resemble those of social media influencers.
Therein lie clues to the Right’s weakness and the Left’s structural advantage—new leftwing parties created after 2000 display substantially greater levels of organisation than their rightwing rivals.
Recent history is also on the Left’s side. The experience of the “pink tide” in the 2000s shows that in unequal societies socioeconomic advances deliberately linked to ideas of redistribution successfully isolated and weakened the electoral right.
By associating large-scale redistribution with the politicization of class cleavages, leftwing leaders were able to consistently mobilize electoral majorities.
Cultural issues cannot stop this juggernaut: evidence in Latin America suggests polarization is far greater on the issue of same sex marriage, for example, than on traditional left-right divisions over issues such as economic redistribution and state intervention to tackle inequality. Like a hyena circling wounded prey, the radical right has detected this.
As contributor Lisa Zanotti observes, Latin America has been a latecomer to the PRR party largely because material issues shaped by poverty and inequality have continued to weigh heavily on electoral competition.
She writes: “The relative weakness of the ‘silent revolution’ in Latin America limited the opportunities for the PRR to capitalise on a cultural backlash and politically channel a silent counterrevolution.”
The implications of this observation—that material values still represent the main structural constraint to the radical right—should become the Left’s lodestar.
It is still in a position to remove the rightwing cultural stings infecting Latin America’s body politic by ensuring that it remains firmly, myopically even, focused on material socioeconomic issues and dispenses with cultural ephemera.
A version of this review first appeared in the Morning Star
Read this and receive articles straight to your inbox by subscribing on Substack
Categories: Argentina, Brazil, Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, South America, Uruguay