Brian Winter in The New York Times on the U.S. and Brazilian Political Parallels
Brian Winter in The New York Times on the U.S. and Brazilian Political Parallels
The question of why two nations "have of late walked such similar paths has set off a vigorous debate," writes AS/COA's vice president.
How self-obsessed—how quintessentially American—to believe that our political rhythms could dictate those of a country as large and idiosyncratic as Brazil.
For the first half of my career as a journalist and an analyst following Latin American politics, this was my message to U.S. audiences: Brazil, the world’s seventh-most-populous nation, with a landmass greater than the continental United States, governed by a Portuguese-descended monarchy in the nineteenth century, a military dictatorship for part of the twentieth, and a vibrant if often messy democracy in the twenty first, would always dance to its own drummer.
But then, starting around a decade ago, the Brazilian echoes of American politics became too eerie to deny, like watching a Brazilian spinoff of a U.S. television series with a two-year production lag and a few homegrown plot twists. The 2016 election of Donald Trump was followed by the 2018 arrival of the “Trump of the Tropics,” Jair Bolsonaro, so in sync with his northern counterpart in style and worldview that he once livestreamed himself for an hour quietly watching Mr. Trump give a news conference on TV...
