Opinion, by Michael Royster
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil’s President Bolsonaro has, one reads, a cultural guru, whose influence extends to the ability to control certain key ministries. He is Olavo de Carvalho, an octogenarian astrologist cum philosopher long resident in Richmond Virginia.
Mr. Carvalho’s principal claim to fame as a philosophizer is his adherence to the theory of “cultural Marxism”. This theory holds that, back in 1930’s Germany, the Frankfurt School of Marxist intellectuals considered how to cure Marxism of its failure to convert proletarians in places other than the Soviet Union.
Their suggestion was that Marxism should concentrate more on culture and less on ideology. The cultural values they opposed were family, education, crime and morality. Most of the Frankfurt School members were Jewish, and so fled Germany to the USA, where they set up shop.
Their efforts supposedly involved promoting aspects of culture that were not quintessentially part of conservative Judaeo-Christian culture: multiculturalism, feminism, sexual and gender fluidity, civil rights movements. Their alleged method was to infiltrate academia, Hollywood and Broadway, mainstream media, and the civil rights movement.
All these cultural institutions supposedly worked to enshrine political correctness as a cultural good, denigrating small town patriarchal Christian family values as benighted and outmoded.
According to “cultural Marxist” dogma, the Frankfurt School succeeded in subverting the United States until the arrival of Donald Trump; Lula and Dilma also succeeded in undermining bedrock Brazilian culture, until the arrival of Bolsonaro.
[In America, Jews supposedly controlled mainstream media, Hollywood and Broadway and their deep-pocket financial backers; they were especially prominent in the groves of academe. Hence, the phrase “cultural Marxism” has a whiff of Antisemitism.]
Adherents to the “cultural Marxist” theory posit that all these non-traditional cultural features, when combined with such “socialist” doctrines as free health care and higher education for all, expanding immigration, racial quotas for university admission, and “punitive” income taxes, all enforced by political correctness, will kill off citizens’ healthy instincts for freedom, for risk-taking, for creativity, for innovation.
President Bolsonaro’s campaign rhetoric for the past three decades has embodied precisely those conservative values (family, education, morality and crime) so allegedly antipathetic to “cultural Marxists”; moreover, his appointments to key Ministries shows he still subscribes to the “cultural Marxism” theory.
His Ministers of Education and Foreign Relations have both set about ridding their respective fiefdoms of the long-ensconced purveyors of political correctness. His Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights has proclaimed, “Girls wear pink, boys wear blue”. Climate change is ridiculed as part of a cultural Marxist effort to keep people from making better economic use of the Amazon forests.
In the Curmudgeon’s view, most of Brazilian society, outside the largest urban conurbations, is extremely conservative, with deep roots in the traditional family and its conservative values, including religion (both Catholic and Evangelicals). So far, at least, Bolsonaro’s adoption of the “cultural Marxism” theory has not caused any problems with his base, nor is it likely to.
Indeed, as Bolsonaro runs into increasing difficulties with Congress, and fails to get his reform legislation enacted (and he will probably fail, for a variety of reasons the Curmudgeon will discuss soon), it may be that he will have to fall back on “cultural Marxist” rhetoric to keep an increasingly unruly base in line.