The Transnational History of the New Right

Abstract

In August 2021, one of the President’s sons spoke at a far-right meeting in South Dakota, flanked by Mike Lindell and Steve Bannon. The talking points about election fraud were unremarkable, except for the fact that they were being recited by Eduardo Bolsonaro, the third son of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Lindell explained that he had met Eduardo “in a divine appointment” earlier that year and learned that the fate of the two countries were intimately connected. “If the lights go out here, they’re going out [in Brazil], they’re going out everywhere.”1 The parallels between the United States and Brazil have been widely reported in recent years. Bolsonaro and Trump are both populists who command the support of evangelicals and rightwing Catholics (Lindell is an evangelical and Bannon is a Catholic). Benjamin A. Cowan, professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the convergence between the United States and Brazil is not coincidental. The two countries are linked together historically by a religious right that arose between the 1960s and 1980s and was “essentially transnational” (9). While historians have focused on the transnational religious left in Latin America, Moral Majorities Across the Americas shows just how important the religious right has been to Brazil and to U.S.-Brazilian relations. Brazil served as a locus for the development of late-Cold War transnational conservatism because the country was governed by a military dictatorship from 1964 until 1985, which created a safe haven for religious rightwingers. Cowan argues that the military junta shared the outlook of religious reactionaries and actively aided their cause. Cowan’s research echoes themes of a growing body of work on religion and national security in the United States by scholars including Michael Graziano, Sylvester Johnson, Lerone Martin, Michael McVicar, and Matthew Sutton. These works show that the national security apparatus in the United States also made common cause with conservatives but it generally shied away from the kind of theological partisanship that prevailed in Brazil.