The Recasting of the Latin American Right: Polarisation and Conservative Reactions
Edited by Andre Borges, Ryan Lloyd, and Gabriel Vommaro, Cambridge University Press, £29.99

THE hidden backdrop to the rise of the far right in Europe has been the “silent revolution” of post-materialism identified in the late 1970s by Ronald Inglehart.

The embrace by a materially comfortable new generation of values reflecting non-material goals — from gender diversity to radical decolonial and racial theories — goes a long way towards explaining the positions staked out by the left in today’s culture wars.  
 
The long-term secular trend suggests that those positions, however, are destined to fail, because not only has the mainstream left largely abandoned class as the organising principle of mobilisation, it is also losing the ephemeral cultural battles it has chosen to fight in its stead.

Latin America may still have a chance to avoid this historic error, even if all the signs suggest that the radical right in the region, witnessing their own left-wing adversaries repeat the mistakes of their European counterparts, has smelled blood.

As this collection edited by Andre Borges, Ryan Lloyd, and Gabriel Vommaro shows, the right is on the rise across Latin America, at its most extreme in the form of the populist radical right (PRR) embodied by such characters as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Jose Antonio Kast in Chile and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Elsewhere, in countries such as Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador and Colombia, traditional and more moderate conservative forces have made gains by embracing more extreme positions.

This rise of the right owes much to how adept it has been at learning how to divide and conquer constituencies which, in essence, are not its natural territory. 

Post-2000 right-wing leaders have mobilised discontent with the left’s performance in government and in terms of economic stagnation, corruption and rising crime. But the editors note in particular that policy and value shifts in Latin American societies (often, but not necessarily, associated with left-wing agendas) have fostered a cultural backlash.

Rather than simply adapting to the new attitudes, conservatives have actively politicised non-economic issues based on a strategic instinct, preying on fertile sectors resistant to changes in family structures and sexual and gender rights.

Moral unease at same sex marriage and the increasing politicisation of race, for example, attest to the speed of social changes in these fragile democracies and the resilience of conservative nuclei that are turning gender and racial “ideologies” into electoral gifts that keep on giving.

The editors write: “While Latin America did not experience the post-materialist turn that triggered cultural backlash in Western Europe, there is evidence that progressive cultural changes in issues such as LGBT rights have indeed polarised mass publics.”

We need only look at the rhetoric and behaviour of Bolsonaro and Kast to know that what we are dealing with today is not your historically typical right-wing autocrat acting through the military on behalf of international capital and US imperialism, but a new species entirely.

It is here that the left must be careful, because a key theme to take away from this book is just how diverse — and sometimes even contradictory — right-wing politics has become in contemporary Latin America, making it harder to isolate individual vaccines for this virus. 

Yet given the historical weakness of the partisan right, and the obstacles to party-building in Latin America, how do we explain the electoral vigour and resilience of new conservative forces?

Contributors to this collection provide evidence to suggest that right-wing parties created since 2000 have been organisationally weak, often pursuing mobilisation strategies that resemble those of social media influencers. This has complemented ideological entrepreneurialism to cultivate political identities that secure mass loyalties through polarising messages.

Therein lie clues to the right’s weakness and the left’s structural advantage: new left-wing parties created after 2000 display substantially greater levels of organisation than their right-wing rivals.

Recent history is also on the left’s side. The experience of the “pink tide” in the 2000s shows that in unequal societies socioeconomic advances deliberately linked to ideas of redistribution successfully isolated and weakened the electoral right. 

Cultural issues cannot stop this juggernaut. As Lisa Zanotti observes, Latin America has been a latecomer to the PRR party largely because material issues shaped by poverty and inequality have continued to weigh heavily on electoral competition.

She writes: “The relative weakness of the ‘silent revolution’ in Latin America limited the opportunities for the PRR to capitalise on a cultural backlash and politically channel a silent counter-revolution.”

The implications of this observation — that material values still represent the main structural constraint to the radical right — should become the left’s lodestar.