The communion of hate: two contemporary political cults

Stalk and pounce

When stalking the herds of antelopes that graze in the savanna, the African cats choose carefully the specific individual that will be hunted. The injured, sick or weak are obvious choices. It’s the same reason why we are prone to sickness when depressed, the weak is easy prey.

That is how people get involved in toxic relationships, cults, and fall into the hands of charlatans of all kinds. Exhausted by sickness and poverty, consumed by vices, and living in ignorance, people desperately search for anything that speaks of rebirth, resurrection, salvation or second chances. Despair brings vulnerability.

Trumpism and Bolsonarism, two contemporary political cults – the latter being an imitation of the former – rose abruptly in 2016 and 2018. Against all odds, their leaders won the presidency of the two most populated countries in the Western Hemisphere, shocking the world. Almost 63 million people in the US and 58 million in Brazil decided it was best to have psychopaths as presidents. There are deep complexities and contradictions pertaining religion, race, and class in those large numbers. These political cults defy common sense.

Trumpism and Bolsonarism are the convergence of authoritarianism, racism, classism, chauvinism, fascism, militarism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, gun culture, loud and proud let’s all be idiots! and contempt for nature, a complete dictionary of political abominations. Both are expression of various fears and negations: of globalization, the unconventional, human intelligence, and change in general.

Neither Trump nor Bolsonaro invented any of that. They just burst in to stir and mess things up to the fullest in a communion of hate. “Burst in” is a figure of speech here. Trump was a decades long familiar face, a celebrity and millionaire by blood who had been trying to get into politics from above for years. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, had seated silently for three decades in the Deputy Chambers of Brazil when the 2018 campaign began.

They have been around for long, misogynist, homophobic and racist as ever though picturing them as presidents was always preposterous. Very special historical conditions had to take shape for what was unconceivable to become government for more than 500 million people. To grasp those historical conditions is a way to understand the nature of the phenomenon.

The president of racists succeeded the first black president in US history (2009-2016). The staunchest misogynist and fanatic anticommunist of Brazil was possible only after the first government of popular origin ever, that of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT), 2003-2016, led by Lula. Bolsonaro was also the final act of the coup d’etat that brought down Dilma Rousseff, the first female president in Brazilian history.

American racists could not bear addressing a black man as Mr. President. Mental cripples as they are, they took Obama as having something to do with bin Laden. In Brazil, bosses and generals could not take Lula, a worker born in poverty, and Dilma, a former victim of torture during the military dictatorship. First and foremost, Trumpism and Bolsonarism are reactions from above.

Both fed on already existing senses of outrage, deception and humiliation, manufacturing new ones in addition. American voters had been duped into believing Obama would be a president of the people. Instead, he was just another enforcer from the banks. To such an extent the economic policies of the so progressive democrats had become undistinguishable from those of the so conservative republicans that many Obama voters went to Trump lines.

In contrast, Lula’s Workers’ Party had taken millions out of poverty, created universities and promoted welfare as never in history. The problem is banks and corporations fared even better. No other government contributed more to the development of capitalist relations in Brazil as that of the Workers’ Party. A new middle class rose with capitalist values and culture. Then came the economic crisis and many people got hit really hard. The 2013 Jornadas de Junho protests and popular outrage at the 2014 Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics evidenced a clear distancing between workers and the Workers’ Party.

People like to say that hope is the last thing you lose. Well, lost hope gave us Trump and Bolsonaro.

Stories abound about the lost and desperate who one day find redemption in any New First United Rise in Christ the King of Universal Love Hallelujah We Stand in Awe 24/7 Community Mission Church. Alcoholics who go sober, losers who start winning, scoundrels who repent, crooks who straighten up, slobs who tidy up, people who finally find meaning and purpose in giving up the pursuit altogether.

With his quackery, Trump did not only trick the all-time nobodies who dream of fame, riches, and survival. Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s legions are also packed with white-haired people. The elderly were easy prey for the same reasons they are a favorite in the menu of scammers and swindlers. Accordingly, these cults are full of the intellectually deficient and analphabets of all kinds, the distracted and hooked up to the entertainment industry, people governed by fear and uncertainty, deemed ugly, rejected, bullied, and isolated, the weirdos, the sexually unsatisfied, hopeless and desperate, the kind of people who feel the world has turned the back on them. Lack of love evolves into excess of hate. That is why they set the house on fire, a politics of fuck it all.

Hatred is that filthy place where we scratch the itching of our worst miseries and weaknesses. The millions of Trumpers and Bolsominions were always there, misogynistic neighbors, racist uncles, and homophobic friends with their dirty jokes and inappropriate comments. Things that were just eye-rolling material needed the right conditions and the proper leader to put it all together in new and powerful ways. Embraced in rancor, they want to destroy everything that was denied to them. They want to set it all on fire and burn, them, us, in the blaze of hatred.

Nowadays, it is possible to pick out with high precision the most isolated of the crowd, the most dejected, the most distracted. Anyone can do it small-scale with a Facebook account. Thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg’s complicity, Trump’s henchmen could stalk the herd, large-scale and from above. Then, they pounced with big data, algorithm, bots, fake news, epistemic bubbles, Artificial Intelligence, marketing and videos. An ultramodern political cult designed with cutting edge technology.

Christians are the new Christians

Sects and cults offer ludicrous narratives of the world that defy common sense. When a new member gets in, he is turning his back to realities – at least to conventional ways to see them – the rest of us share.

The reborn in Trump for instance. Their beliefs include that Jewish vampire pedophile communist homosexual aliens rule the world through Hollywood, mainstream media, and the US Democratic Party. Earth is flat, snow and global warming are fake, Jesus would have loved assault rifles, Covid19 never existed and Obama’s wife is a man.

Every nonsense that comes out of Donald Trump’s twisted mind becomes another block of the alternative universe his followers live in. His untiring verbal diarrhea is nonetheless insufficient to quench his flock’s thirst for absurdity. We are talking about people who can waste days, weeks and months searching for conspiracy theories in internet.

The brain of a conspiracist is modified to observe the world as a grandiloquent plot. Each fragment of reality that gets in their minds is transformed into irrefutable proof, there is nothing that cannot feed their absolute conviction that the world is a lie, a big hoax.

They are looking for explanations. They are humans, after all. Who is not searching for meaning? The herds are just too stupefied by entertainment culture and social media to understand the basics of economy, politics or sociology. Traditional religion on the other hand is not enough for them because it is slow and doesn’t keep up with a 21stcentury world. And then, there is mainstream media. Its narrative was in crisis since internet, social networks, Youtube and Twitter had expanded sources of information for everyone. That the press lies, manipulates, distorts, defends its interests, his owners’ and the status quo became transparent for anyone with a cellphone at hand.

Consequently, Trump and Bolsonaro wiped the floor with the press. Mainstream journalists, some of whom sincerely believe they inform the public with objectivity, did not understand why they were being attacked with such virulence. Trump, Olympic swimmer in the shallow waters of show business, knew the formula to master the liberal press: talk nonsense, make up outlandish lies, put on a show, and, of course, be rich and famous. Addicted to all of that, the media squeezed every word excreted by Trump. That way, insulting them, harassing them and humiliating them, he used them.

In pre-Bolsonaro Brazil, the Globo Network (Rede Globo) had built for years a key component of the pro-coup rhetoric: that corruption was the Workers’ Party and the Workers’ Party was corruption. Precisely, the 2016 coup against Dilma Rousseff was arranged by the highest corruption networks in Congress to prevent prosecution at all costs. Needless to say, the coup rhetoric easily became Bolsonaro’s.

Trumpism and Bolsonarism are the result of technological and communicative phenomena. In addition, they are the political-religious result of a social predisposition to cults. American and Brazilian landscapes have been historically fruitful soil for religions, cults, and sects. Let us not get into the morbid details of Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s links to the most loathsome fundamentalist Christians. Let us just point out some of the spiritual transformations of Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism into contemporary political cults.

The devotees of hatred do not understand their own language; they are unable to keep an adult conversation. When they meet, Trumpers and Bolsominions recite the litanies of resentment and shout without any regard for their vocal cords. They come from a world in which making random noises and nonsensical gestures is speaking with god. That is why they connected so easily with Trump and Bolsonaro who are the embodiment of poverty of language. Thank Twitter for that too.

For years, these masses have been crushing their heads with the prosperity gospel and now we have people who think they are rich when they are not. Wealth is the new city of god, ideas that replace old slavery with a new one. Furthermore, the Qanon sect, the most ferocious of the American fanatics, is a literally evangelical group in the sense that their member zealously search for new adepts to their brotherhood. So Christians are the new Christians.

Psychopathologic aptitudes for permanent suppression of reason, political-emotional outbursts, submission to the messianic leader who will restore the lost order, obsession with individual financial success, class treason and intolerance in these political cults are spiritual mutations in Pentecostal glossolalia, cheap miracles, exorcisms, submission to pastors, prosperity gospel, and Manicheism. For decades, Pentecostal fanaticism prepared the spiritual ground for Trumpism, Bolsonarism and their crooked worldviews.

Exodus, chapter 32: Moses has climbed up Mount Sinai to receive the ten commandments directly from god’s hands. Anxious to worship anything, the people of Israel have built a golden calf to adore it. It must have looked something like the Wall Street’s Charging Bull, as repulsive as Trump’s golden New York apartment or his golden rather orange spray painted skin. Rich, famous and crooked, the perfect idol for the American people, Trump embodies the cult to money and fame. That is why he got voted. Capitalism is also religion, with the prosperity gospel as the bridge to Pentecostalism.

Liberalism presupposes

Liberalism, official doctrine of most modern polities, understands society as a conglomerate of free rational individuals. Freely and rationally, each individual deals with facts, debates with his peers, and makes an important choice every four years more or less. Even funnier, liberalism presupposes that a society organized along liberal lines produces free rational individuals.

What shocks and frightens about Trumpers and Bolsonaristas is their separation not from democratic values, not from liberal narrative but from human intelligence, which has to do with dealing with facts. They belong, body and soul, to the will of the psychos they serve. Rather than leaders, these lunatics are regarded as masters, bosses, prophets, idols, messiahs, gods. Trumpers and Bolsonaristas do not think by themselves. They take as theirs the nonsense that comes out the mouth of the one who does the thinking for them. In Brazil they correctly call them minions. They belong to a reality stranger than the fiction of Dumb & Dumber, Jackass, Idiocracy or any zombie movie.

Bolsonaro’s defeat in October 2022 unleashed an unprecedented weeks-long outburst in the deranged mob. They can be seen tearing up their vocal cords when screeching the master’s name, improvising military parades in stern demeanor and embarrassing clumsiness, paying homage to a tractor tire, requesting extraterrestrial help through their cellphones’ flashlights, complaining to clouds, self-injuring outlandishly, celebrating fake coup d’états, behaving like zombies and doing all kinds of airs and graces typical of Tik-Tok culture.

These people are not in possession of themselves, not mentally OK, clearly unfit for social life. This is not a matter of ignorance or illiteracy, this is a massive cognitive collapse in societies supposedly rich – Bolsonaro’s strongholds are the most prosperous, developed and whitest states of Brazil. Disgustingly rich, obscenely stupid and rotten in the soul, few things are more harmful to society than an idiot with money.

Democrats, liberals, secularists, freethinkers from all origins celebrated in 2020 and 2022. The reason was strictly mathematic: more people voted for Biden and Lula than for Trump and Bolsonaro. The hard truth is, though they lost the elections, they did not lose one single vote after four years of circus. Although these lunatics were unfit for office every second of their four-year terms, more people voted for them in 2020 and 2022 than in 2016 and 2018. Trump went from 63 to 74 million votes.

Since their defeats, these cults have undergone atomization, normalization, conciliation and rebranding. Apostles and imitators arise everywhere, their means and methods easily integrate into traditional politics. What in 2016 and 2018 was unacceptable, becomes commonplace. Meanwhile, Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s countless crimes will most likely remain unpunished. At the same time, these particular leaders may very well be already in the dustbin of history. But Trumpism and Bolsonarismo, atomized, reconciled with the State, rebranded, perhaps even reloaded will prevail.

The communion of hate will prevail because Evangelical churches are more powerful than the love of god. It prevails every day because celebrity and stupidity cultures feed many, physically and spiritually. It will prevail because public education matters little almost everywhere and lacks everything the military-industrial complex have in excess. It prevailed because the nearly 700 thousand who agonized as Bolsonaro roared with laughter will never come back. It will prevail because what we know as society dilutes everyday in the spittle puddle of Facebook, Instagram, and Tik-Tok. It will prevail because the liberal State forgives nothing except fascism.