Thread by @OrangoQuango

Fascinating piece by @zeithistoriker and @willcallison. In Brazil, it’s maybe too early for this stuff to be fully discernible as an independent strand in the far right, but what they say tallies with my observations.
I’ve noticed that, because my
piece @PublicBooks said

https://twitter.com/zeithistoriker/status/1349017865815543809

that Bolsonaro made inroads with the poorest (until then fairly refractory) during the pandemic, some people have interpreted it as saying that his strongest base was the poor. But the situation is closer to what they describe here.

As I write in a piece on Bolsonarismo coming out soon on @rphilos, the quintessential bolsonarista belongs to what Orwell woul call a ‘lower upper middle class’, adjusting for the particularities of Brazilian class structure — ie, a wafer-thin middle class wedged between

a tiny elite and an ocean of poor. With poorer academic qualifications and little by way of assets, this stratum is very exposed to economic fluctuations and downward mobility, as in the last 5 years.
Their characteristic occupation is ‘failed businessperson’:

they are people who flit between self-employment (reframed as entrepreneurialism) and failed attempts to start businesses, and generally hustle. Management speak, coach culture etc. is rife.
And this is the great similarity with what the text describes.

As I write in the @rphilos piece, Bolsonarismo is not just pro entrepreneurialist ideology: it is an entrepreneurial phenomenon in its own right. It’s a career path for the temporarily embarrassed, who go from online angry person to YouTube influencer to media figure,

and use to visibility to either promote their ventures or go into politics.
One difference, and reason why Querdenken might not quite catch in Brazil, is that anticommunism is one of the glues holding Bolsonarismo together, so the ‘neither left nor right’ branding wouldn’t work.