Angels at the Top, Rocks at the Bottom: Naturalized Inequality in Brazilian Conservative Thought

Abstract

Racialized social inequality is considered a structural problem in Brazil and has been a political priority of recent progressist governments. This understanding is not backed up by the so-called New Right, who understands inequality as an inherent principle of a God-given “order” and question of personal capability and merit. In this study, I explore the ideological roots of this powerful Rightist narrative by looking at the Brazilian canon of traditional conservative thought and its influence on New Right discourse. The results show that the core ideas stem from neo-Thomist interpretations of late-scholastic scholarship, which were promoted in Brazil through the Vatican’s integrist reaction to modernization during the First Republic. Since then, Brazilian conservatives have successfully used these religious legitimizations of naturalized inequality to constrain State-driven social reformism and join forces with neoliberalism through the invention of the supposed late scholastic roots of the Austrian School of Economics. After redemocratization, a recycled version of this liberal-conservative claim for less “State” and more “Brazil” (as guided by theocratic traditional order), promoted mainly by the philosopher and online influencer Olavo de Carvalho, has fueled the desecularizing discourse of the New Right and their attempt to conserve the colonial social hierarchy in Brazil.

Hating inequality is hating order,

is hating the image of God’s wisdom.

Hating inequality is hating God.

Orlando Fedeli (2003)1

1. Introduction

Is it possible to defend the legitimacy of “natural” social inequality in one of the world’s most unequal countries? And if so, how is this politically feasible, not only under the conditions of an authoritarian regime but even within a system of liberal democracy? This article argues that defense of a naturalized status quo of social inequality is not sporadic but the century-old permanent practice in Brazil of successfully constraining any structural reform of the racialized colonial hierarchy. It further points out that this practice relies considerably on a powerful narrative, promoted by the Catholic conservative elite, which evokes a sublime order as a bulwark against social change. This narrative has its ideological roots in Integrism, the Vatican’s fin de siècle reaction to modernity. Integrism had a strong impact on Brazilian Catholics in their attempt to re-Christianize the “positivist” First Republic and remained their ideological backbone until the II Vatican Council (1962–1965), with repercussions until today. Far from being a phenomenon of only the past, a recycled version of this narrative, propagated mainly by the philosophical influencer Olavo de Carvalho (1947–2022) and combined with the invention of the supposed late scholastic roots of economic neoliberalism, again fuels the reaction of the so-called New Right (a term established by convention, which I will use only instrumentally, not conceptually) to Brazil’s progressist governments of the Sixth Republic.

2. Entering into the Rightist Spirit

My approach to this topic is situated within the frameworks of discourse history and political theology, looking more at the ideas and topoi that motivate policies than the actions themselves. Furthermore, the character of my study is exploratory, and the results are meant to sensibilize possible variables more than explain their function and measure their impact. Regarding my method, to find out about the origins and resilience of this narrative of naturalized inequality, I rescanned the Brazilian text canon of conservative thought, which I had examined in depth elsewhere as an original, autonomous, and rich tradition (Wink 2021a), in dialogue with previous works of specialist scholars (Todaro Williams 1971; Caldeira 2005; Zanotto 2007; Power 2010; Cowan 2016, 2021; Lacerda 2019). Considering this background, I then examined through critical discourse analysis how core ideas concerning inequality were used by conservative lobbyists and opinion-makers in their writings and other forms of communication. Especially fruitful were texts addressing perceived threats to the social hierarchy in Brazil, which intensified in 1935–1937 (during Getúlio Vargas’ New State), in the early 1960s (before the coup of 1964), and during the redemocratization process in the 1980s. What I extracted from this material and will discuss in the following are selected examples to show patterns in the conceptualization and interpretation of inequality. This allows me to demonstrate how the so-called New Right today infers again their premises and fundamental arguments from this tradition, principally in reaction to the political landslide of the Workers’ Party coming to government in 2002 and their reformism to mitigate social inequality. As I will show, this recycling of ideas is largely dependent on the influence of so-called Olavism, the reception of ideas spread through traditional mass and social media by Olavo de Carvalho since the early 1990s, which contributed to the formation of an anti-egalitarian and even anti-modernist New Right ideology.

My main objective is to show through this example that full comprehension of the New Right’s ideological roots in the past (meaning well before the civilian-military coup in 1964) contributes to a better understanding of what motivates their political goals today. For example, before one can answer the crucial question to what degree the New Right puts into danger the system of liberal democracy, one has to consider what some Rightist protagonists understand as “democratism” (such as ex-president Jair Bolsonaro’s Minister of Education, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez 2020, p. 257) or “totalitarian democracy” (such as ex-diplomat José Osvaldo Meira Penna 2019, p. 113), alluding to Sweden as a legendary example of an egalitarian and wealthy society. To understand why Bolsonaro’s designated Foreign Minister, Ernesto Araújo, when accused of having medieval attitudes, innocently asked if that was meant as critique or praise,2 requires familiarity with his own conception of the Middle Ages. Related to this, is it a coincidence that the only scholar Jair Bolsonaro frequently mentions is a certain Eric Voegelin? And what does it mean for the question of inequality when Olavo de Carvalho ([1995] 2015, p. 161, footnote 88) generously concedes the poor have the right to improve their material conditions, but only to give them “an opportunity to vacare Deo,” i.e., spend quality time with God? And after all, to what apparently clearly separate entities does the New Right refer when they claim “less State, more Brazil”?

Comprehension of the ideas behind political discourses might also permit a more holistic approach to the burning question that remains outside the scope of my research and certainly would require other tools of investigation: why the anti-progressive defense of “the order” seems to be plausible and persuasive not only to those who at all costs defend their inherited privileges but also those Rightist supporters who could greatly benefit from socioeconomic progress and mobility? That equality is far from being a consensual value of our times (not even rhetorically) supports Bobbio’s ([1994] 1999) already classic thesis that striving for more social equality or maintaining the status quo continues to be a fundamental differentiator between Left and Right. Notwithstanding, it also confirms Levin’s (2013) provocative thesis that the main divider between political orientations is not Left and Right but following Edmund Burke or Thomas Paine—which means to believe either in a “sublime order” or Rousseau’s “social contract” as the basic principle of societal organization. For Burke, any man-made order like Paine’s abstract, universal, and egalitarian “rights of men” is a violation of the natural order expressed in “all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination.” Relativizing this normalized structural inequality implies to “raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents” (Burke [1790] 1792, p. 12).

Evidently, this prophecy has become a reality sooner or later and with various outcomes depending on the region. For many, it is taken for granted as a sign of inevitable modern progress. For anti-modernist conservatives Sedgwick (2004) defines as “Traditionalists,” it is a process of degeneration to block or at least to deaccelerate through their strengthening of the “natural order,” which they see as their sacred duty. Not only but especially in the case of Brazil, this sacred duty inevitably implies accepting blatant “naturalized” class, race, and gender inequalities as the outcome of a violent process of colonial conquest, fueled by enslaved work, and necessarily under authoritarian control.

3. “The Order” against Modernist Progress

When, at the beginning, I dated the origins of this Brazilian conservative tradition as century-old, I did not even consider the monarchic past of Imperial Brazil in the 19th century. In my earlier study Wink (2009), I demonstrated how the country’s extraordinary historical path brought about a unique national imaginary, and Wink (2021b) describes how this Imperial legacy has been incorporated by part of the New Right. In this article, I will only consider the conservative reaction to the country’s political modernization, which started during the laic First Republic, and take as the starting date a historical milestone: the foundation of the weekly journal A Ordem [the Order] in 1921 by a group of conservative Catholic intellectuals in São Paulo and establishment of the think tank Centro Dom Vital (CDV) one year later—the same year the Communist International founded a Brazilian branch. This is so relevant because, for decades, the Center was the hub and the publication the mouthpiece of an intellectual elite that strictly opposed secularizing and progressist tendencies in Brazil and—on a much larger scale and at an accelerated pace—worldwide. CDV built its resistance on an ideology and political movement the name of which is almost forgotten: Integrism. Since the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), this was the designation for the ultramontane Catholic reaction of the fin de siècle to combat all “erring” symptoms of modernism, as previously defined by pope Pius IX (1864). These included any human thoughts and actions since the Middle Ages that possibly relativized Catholic doctrine, starting with Gnosticism, via Protestantism, Rationalism, and Masonry, to Republicanism, and in the very end, communism—a continuity for the first time traced by Leo XIII (1881). Against this loss of hegemony, Integrism defended the primordial order of Tradition, Church, and Monarchy to regenerate society by reestablishing the integrity of faith in the totality of existence (Antoine 1972). Ideologically, this mission was firmly based on Thomism, the philosophical school inspired by the thought of Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and his main oeuvre Summa Theologiae, which Leo XIII (1879) turned into the sole theological and philosophical system of the Roman Church. The core element of this neo-Thomism3 is the Sovereignty of God, his sublime order, enshrined in natural law, and consequently the supremacy of spiritual over temporal power in all spheres of humanity. The Vatican’s battle plan to start a counter-attack was then presented by Pius X (1907), implementing a sophisticated system of proselyting activism, targeting above all the political elite but also reaching out through modern mass communication, and internal control through Diocesan Watch Committees (Miceli 1988).

In Brazil, Integrism was received by Catholics as the salvation of the Church, pressured by positivist secularization as attempted by the young laic First Republic. In the 1920s and 1930s, Integrist intellectuals successfully managed to re-Christianize the country and achieved political power as never before (Mainwaring [1986] 1989; Pierucci 1992; Azzi 2003; Cowan 2016). Two examples are paradigmatic for this impressive roll-back: Symbolically, the erection of the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer in 1931, an initiative of the Integrist archbishop Sebastião Leme, founder of CDV, who in 1916 had presented his own militant action plan Católicos, ao combate! [Catholics, fight!]. Politically, the Constitution of 1934, elaborated with participation of the Catholic church, which reintroduced legally binding religious marriage and strengthened the prohibition of divorce as constitutional precept, religious education in public schooling, and the subsidiarity principle of publicly financed religious institutions acting in education and health, and the authoritarian Constitution of 1937, applauded by the elite of Integrist thinkers and sealing the alliance between the Church and the New State (Moura 1978, p. 89; Todaro Williams 1971, pp. 330–34).

As such, Integrism not only anteceded, but indeed incubated later Integralism, the much more famous political movement, created in 1932 and led by its main ideologue, Plínio Salgado. As research has exhaustively shown, Integralism is not so much a variant of European fascism but the populist excrescence of a Brazilian tradition that at some point adopted fascist rhetoric, organization, and symbology (Trindade 1974; Chasin 1978; Cavalari 1999; Bertonha 2014; Doria 2020, among others). Still, inspiration came more from the Catholic-Monarchic reactionary movements in Spain and Portugal than from Italian fascism itself (Vasconcelos 1979; Gonçalves 2018). Regarding core ideas and even personnel, it is almost impossible to distinguish between Integrism and Integralism (Todaro Williams 1971; Deutsch 1999; Trindade 2016). For Salgado, it was an imperative premise that a political system “can only exist under the law of God” (Salgado 1937, p. 179) and he concentrated most of his writings on the defense of the true traditions of Catholicism and the spiritual “internal” revolution (Salgado 1933, 1947, [1945] 1979; Lustosa 1976). Therefore, if seen within the longer history of Integrist re-Christianization, the short episode of Integralism is an attempt to complement the political strategy of discreet elite lobbying by party politics and open mass mobilization. This was not part of the Integrist action plan, but defending “God, the Nation and Family” against “communism” was welcomed at a historical moment of maximum alert—especially looking at Spain—in the mid-1930s (Pinto 2018, p. 131).

After the failed Integralist revolt to grasp immediate power in 1938, both Integrists and Integralists dropped the term Integrism to avoid any association with the debacle. However, they managed to maintain their position of power throughout most of the 20th century. In the post-war period, this was achieved through newly founded parties and even government participation (in the case of Salgado and others) or through the well-established principle of elite lobbying and ideological indoctrination, especially in journals like Catolicismo. After CDV became too “progressive” under the influence of the Vatican’s aggiornamento, the latter created their new hub: the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), founded in 1960 by the former Integrist, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, which developed strong political protagonism before and during the civilian-military dictatorship (Zanotto 2007). During redemocratization in the 1980s, the same Integrist ideas contributed again to the reorganization of discretely anti-democratic forces (Power 2010; Casimiro 2020; Cowan 2021) and they still provide the premises and ideological framework for New Right discourses in the 21st century (Wink 2021a). This means that besides the well-studied Pentecostalism and other fundamentalist branches of Protestantism (see, for example, Burity 2018), the New Right has a second religious dimension with “neo-Integrist” Catholicism, although this might be less visible in current political processes and obscured by the historical commitment of part of the lower Catholic clergy with progressive Liberation Theology.

4. Inequality as a Principle of the Divine Order

The founder of CDV, Jackson de Figueiredo, once wrote in a letter that “neither the joys which money may give nor the sorrows of poverty have any particular relationship to our destiny […] there is nothing more certain than that inequality is a work of God, and of all inequalities, it is inequality of material resources which shocks me the least” (quoted by Todaro Williams 1971, p. 110). This certainly gives us some insight into the elitist character of this institution. Yet, if Integrism is based on a new reading of Thomist thought, what does this neo-Thomism tell us about inequality? To start with, the belief in a God-given order already excludes the right of existence of any alternative order, only imaginable as “utopia.” This sole divine order is total, containing the whole universe, and rigidly based on the principle of hierarchy. At the top are “angels” and at the bottom are “rocks,” an allegory that was the origin of the title of this article. If the basic principle of creation is inequality, so the reasoning goes, we must also accept that God himself created in this world the rich and the poor (Proverbs 22, 2), and that the poor should always exist (John 12, 8). Given the perfection of God’s creation, this makes inequality good in itself.

But the religious argument also conveniently helps to avoid any discussion about any thinkable improvement in this sublime order. Based on the idea of original sin, man must be considered in need of redemption and not improvement. The whole Catholic eschatology implies that this world is opposed to paradise and only doubting it induces error. This stands in sharp contrast to the civilizing idea that man is in principle capable of improvement through education, rationality, science, and sociopolitical organization, in which we easily recognize not only Enlightenment but the positivist State doctrine of Brazil’s First Republic (Lins 1984). In the neo-Thomist interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’ reading of Aristotle, human imperfection, redemption, and the expectation for a better world in the afterlife justifies human inequality. Men are born equal, nevertheless not equal regarding their abilities and opportunities. Interfering, for example through Affirmative Action Policies, would violate natural justice. In the last instance, we are expected to understand God-given wealth and social position as equal to being born “better looking or more intelligent” (Scruton [1980] 2001, p. 80). This is a common comparison in conservative thought until today, which Karl Mannheim called in his classic study a “romantic-conservative” perspective: everybody has the freedom to develop unequal talents within unequal structures (Mannheim [1925/1927] 1984, pp. 114–15).

A paradigmatic case of how this religious argument was used to block social reformism in Brazil is TFP’s campaign against land reform. Given the country’s size, agrarian potential, and exacerbated land concentration, and many successful examples in other countries, opposing this kind of reform has always been notoriously difficult. For good reason, in an economy shaped through enslaved work, the redistribution of land in tandem with abolition was already a claim of the political agenda during Independence (see Bonifácio 1821). In the mid-20th century, it was perceived as the most basic and urgent measure to give a populational majority of marginalized sub-citizens the means for economic survival. Even part of the clergy sympathized with giving land to the landless, at least to maintain order, as Bishop Inocêncio Engelke suggests when he recommends redistribution so that “the man of the countryside can defend himself against the dangerous seductions of those who see in him fecund breeding ground for the bacillus of riots and violent revolutions” (quoted in Mainwaring [1986] 1989, p. 77).

TFP’s activism peaked in combatting exactly these tendencies. Testimonies of their large campaign in the early 1960s and during redemocratization in the 1980s are bestselling books, which were also given as free copies to decision- and opinion-makers (see Zanotto 2003, 2007). Reforma agraria, questão de consciência [Agrarian Reform, a Matter of Conscience] was the most sold book of the year 1960 (TFP 1988, p. 67). It was jointly written by the bishops Geraldo de Proença Sigaud and Antônio de Castro Mayer, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, and the economist Luiz Mendonça de Freitas. A few years later, the same authors (Sigaud et al. 1964) disseminated again free copies of the shortened version Declaração do Morro Alto [Declaration of Morro Alto; the title refers to a TFP anti-communist training center located in the São Paulo hinterland]. In 1981, another publication was top ranked with over 20,000 copies sold in a few months: Sou Católico: Posso ser contra a reforma agrária? [I am Catholic: Can I be against the Land Reform?]. This is of course a rhetorical question and TFP answers in two parts, not only affirming but obliging readers to be against land reform, both from a doctrinarian and economic perspective (Oliveira and Campo 1981). In 1995, the last TFP campaign, SOS Farmers, condemned the Movement of Landless Workers (MST) for invading unproductive private land.4

If we examine how these publications build their arguments, they all start with the (pseudo) concession that TFP was not interested in any economic or social issues. Their campaigning only followed the theocratic logic of the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal world, which was why they had the sacred duty to defend the Eighth Commandment that says “Thou shalt not steal.” A reform would steal lands because they were “acquired through hard, honored work or through a legitimate hereditary succession,” and as such, they were protected by the “natural and immutable” right to property. This is to defend the interests of the haves. But as divinely-ordained social inequality is by definition good for everyone, the have-nots must also benefit: proprietaries, motivated by “a noble desire for increasing well-being and cultural ascension,” employ them on their lands and give them “food, housing, clothes and means of saving” (Sigaud et al. 1960, pp. 7, 11, 94). Land reform, as we should understand, would deprive the landless from this privilege.

According to TFP’s publications, creation meant not only natural hierarchy but a functionally divided class system. Every man is equally dignified, but not equal in dignity. If the spiritual (angel) was superior to the material (rocks), the intellectual has been created naturally superior to the manual worker. Labeled as “harmonic inequality,” this allows the “more capable and industrious” to improve their material conditions, ideally with a trickle-down effect to avoid all others from remaining in misery. But besides that, any redistributional interference would imply the sin of “stealing,” even if the income of the majority is not sufficient to provide minimum living standards (as in the case of Brazilian minimum salaries). If one thinks of a conflict with the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Mathew 22, 37–39), one was wrong again: conveniently, TFP defined one’s own family members as the closest neighbors to love and take care for financially (Sigaud et al. 1960, pp. 17, 33, 37, 42, 56).

As it has become clear, TFP’s reading of the Holy Scripture refuted all land redistribution policy as illegitimate (in spite of financial compensations, as planned in then president Goulart’s basic reforms). Even more, any fiscal policy to mitigate inequality, for example through the taxation of income or wealth, would imply in illegitimate “plundering of the richer.” This is especially valid for taxing inheritance, as this would demotivate the more capable and industrious men to accumulate wealth for their beloved neighboring heirs, provoking economic decadence for all, and especially impoverishing the poor (Sigaud et al. 1960, pp. 61, 76). The defense of the “order” as a question of principle does not leave room for any gradations. It is not relevant if the inheritance tax should be 1% or 99%, how much unproductive land should be acquired by the state at what prices, or under what conditions to carry out land reform. At stake was the principle as such and just to think about changing it implied “white heresy,” as Oliveira ([1943] 1983, p. 230) called any sentimentalist charity or relativist position.

The way TFP addressed a social question through an apparently irrefutable Catholic doctrine shows the organization’s capability to lobby for very concrete material interests in the name of timeless spiritual values. Certainly, many theological objections can be made to this interpretation of God’s mysterious will. But any other reading of the Bible, such as, for example, regarding periodical leveling through the Jubilee, release from debt and slavery, and redistribution of capital in every third generation (Cavalcanti [1985] 1994, p. 28; Cox 2016, pp. 71–88), could not compete with TFP’s manipulation of public opinion. While an inheritance tax was finally introduced in 1988, albeit with a relatively modest maximum rate of 8%, the popular demand for land reform was stalled in the National Constitutional Assembly through all possible legal and illegal means (Silva 1989, p. 86). TFP was doubtlessly the principal agent in this process (Faoro 1987, pp. VII–VIII) and even prepared the grounds for making this reform impossible until the present moment (Maia and Oliveira 2017).

5. The Invention of the Thomistic Roots of Neoliberalism

If the TFP campaigns somehow reminded the reader of neoliberal praise of entrepreneurial attitude, the impression was accurate. The Catholic reconquest of the Weberian spirit of capitalism from Protestant Ethic is a core element in Brazilian conservatism. It goes hand in hand with the claim for a “natural order” and is well synthesized and expressed in the New Right’s battle cry for more “Brazil” and less “State.” The sublime order serves both as a placeholder for promoting an abstract entity of a supposed authentic “Brazil,” which has been alienated by progressist social engineering, and a carte blanche for implementing economic laissez-faire. For the former, the conservative tradition draws heavily on the monarchic past of the country and its vocation as “Fifth Empire” and “Land of the Future.” For the latter, it engenders an ingenious reinvention of the late scholastics as a coherent “School of Thought” in economic terms, based at Salamanca and Alcalá and dominant roughly from the XIII to the XVI centuries, which supposedly anticipated the neoliberal theories of the Austrian School of Economics.

This narrative of neo-Thomist neoliberalism has had a considerable impact on the Brazilian far right. The branding builds on the already mistaken assumption (see, for example, Perdices de Blas and Ramos Gorostiza 2023) of a pre-modern think tank under the leadership of the already mentioned Doctor Angelicus. As mentioned above, the very basis of neo-Thomism is that the principles of supreme divine reason are transformed by natural law into social institutions, and this now should also include economic theory (Light and Block 2017). Allegedly, the economic legacy of scholastic thought was the unknown basis of Anglo-Saxon classical liberalism, such as developed by Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, and then further developed by the writings of Mises and Hayek, the founding fathers of contemporary “neoliberalism.” Though lacking evidence and refuted by specialist scholars (see, for example, Langholm 1998; Denis 2015; Cox 2016), this “discovery” of proto-capitalist, market-friendly, and state-skeptical wisdom deep in medieval Catholic thought was prominently incorporated into contemporary New Rightist thought in Brazil.

However, we deal again with an idea recycled by the New Right, as the narrative was part of TFP’s ideology well before. For the state of the art, it was arguably the Irish politician, George A. O’Brien, who first came up with this idea in his Essay on Mediæval Economic Teaching (1920), yet not with any known repercussions. Among the first to pick it up and disseminate “medieval economics” in political circles was Manuel Lubambo (1904–1943), Secretary of Finance of Pernambuco and member of the Integrist group Fronteiras [Frontiers], who refers to O’Brian in his 1940 book Capitaes e Grandeza Nacional [Capital and National Greatness]. This reception was relatively early, if we compare it to the concurrent niche reception in Spain (Perdices de Blas and Ramos Gorostiza 2023, pp. 525–26). In broader Western academia, the idea only caught major attention in the late 1970s after being promoted by libertarian reference in the U.S., Murray N. Rothbard (1976, see about reception D’Emic 2014). Lubambo inferred from the late scholastics that in Brazil, where no wealth at all existed to be distributed, to discuss “social justice” would be simply obsolete. Instead, the political class should invest in the “creation and defense of capitals,” which then would allow the economic elite to engage in voluntary individual charity (Lubambo 1940, pp. 3, 13). What makes this version of cake theory remarkable is the argument that any redistribution policy was incompatible with the economic authority of Thomism:

Why did St. Thomas found the concept of private property on that interest, on that individual super-excitement, on that fertile spirit, as it were, of greed, which animates man when he possesses something as his own? Simply because of this: the Christian or Thomist economic doctrine is a doctrine of life, a doctrine whose laws were established at the moment of “be fruitful and multiply”—laws of growth, expansion, creation, of “mass production”, so to speak, in a humanization of the term; and a concept of wealth that started by stealing the property of its individualist stimulus and turning the workshop into a beneficent institution […] is a doctrine of death.

(Lubambo 1940, pp. 9–10 footnote 7)

Lubambo allegorized and nationalized his neo-Thomist Social Darwinism as the “new bandeirantes,” inspired by the slavers, explorers, adventurers, and fortune hunters in early colonial Brazil. The rhetoric was not coincidental. In his eyes, what made Brazil the perfect playground for laissez-faire economics was its perpetuated and idealized colonial condition: “Emerging societies […] can’t avoid suffering from that evil—their law is that of freedom; its wealth principle are free initiative, ambition, the taste for adventure, the courage of risking.” (Lubambo 1940, pp. 79–80, 99, 167). Only four years later, Lubambo’s book became a standard reference for TFP (Oliveira 1944; Campos Filho 1980, p. 382; Macedo 1979) when scrutinizing Brazil’s social realities, as we have seen above in the case of land reform.

Evidently, despite the pioneering role of Lubambo and TFP, the reception of this meritocratic Catholic-neoliberal free market doctrine was not limited to Brazil. After Rothbard’s article, it was included in the neoliberal indoctrination efforts of the 1980s. Alejandro Chafuen, president of the libertarian Atlas Network from 1991 to 2018 and, as such, central intermediator between neoliberal think tanks in the U.S. and Latin America (Carlotto 2018), launched in 1986 his work Christians for Freedom: Late Scholastic Economics (Chafuen 1986) and in 2003 a revised and extended version, titled Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics. In his books, it seems as if old Christian sages had signed under the Washington Consensus. To give just a few examples (Chafuen 2003, pp. 13, 19–22, 43, 69, 76, 106–7): Francisco de Vitoria stated the eighth commandment (“Thou shall not steal!”), the same argument TFP used against agrarian reform, implied the absolute right to private property, only temporarily alienable in case “life threat” (and even then, obliged to immediate restitution). Natural law guaranteed the right to armed self-defense to protect private property. State interference into market mechanisms, like the fixing of prices, would ipso facto provoke the excommunication of the responsible administrators. Finally, to get back to fiscal policies and the sin of redistribution, in Chafuen’s reading of Bernardino de Siena, the late scholastics defined taxation strictly as confiscation and restricted its use to “neutral taxes,” which means restoring to contributors exactly the equivalent value in public goods. If the state failed to do so (and in Brazil’s de facto regressive tax system, it does, distributing from the poor to the rich, see Lins 2021), it would be morally justifiable to evade taxes—which is of course the main message to entrepreneurs in Brazil, responsible for a yearly tax gap of around BRL 500 billion. Also convenient for employers is how Chafuen infers from Luis de Molina that work should be remunerated only according to market prices of services, independent of any minimum living wage considerations.

In the liberal democracy of the New Republic, the symbiosis of free market and Catholic traditionalism was again systematically explored as an argument against social policies (Wink 2020). In the 1990s, several books were published on this topic and recently re-published to satisfy the demands of New Right readers. Among the most famous is Adolpho Lindenberg’s Os católicos e a economia de mercado [Catholics and Market Economy] from 1999, relaunched in 2017 with the more ecumenic title Uma visão cristã da economia de mercado [A Christian Vision of Market Economy], in which the building tycoon and president of the Institute Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira claims that more social equality plays into Satan’s claws:

Lucifer’s sin was his indignation against God’s superiority. For that reason, each situation of discord, grudge, hostility before natural hierarchies, structures desired and instituted by the Creator, shares somehow the sin committed by the first angel. The hierarchical orders among human beings express the various forms and aspects of divine perfection.

(Lindenberg 2017, p. 82)

Thinkable objections to this, for example the metaphor of the camel and the needle’s eye (Matthew’s 19, 24) and other sections in the Bible with a “bias for the poor,” Lindenberg rejects as arbitrary communist interpretations. These imaginary communists he also holds responsible for “the population’s moral vices—indolence, laziness, neglect, lack of providence in expenses, drugs” as this is the result of their “nationalizing, populist, Bolivarian economic politics” (Lindenberg 2017, pp. 10–11, 212). For him, the only way to achieve non-heretical poverty reduction was to politically recreate “a healthy economy, based on natural laws, that is, on private property and a market economy” and, in terms of personal work relations, to incentivize employers to oversee the moral conduct and religious assiduity of their employers (Lindenberg 2017, pp. 38–39, 50). We certainly recognize in this combination of religious zeal and laissez-faire capitalism the conservatism of customs and market liberalism of the Bolsonaro–Guedes government, not forgetting the necessary defense of the natural order as guaranteed by the authoritarian wing of his government.

One could ask if these texts, written exclusively by members of the tiny Brazilian elite, ever show any sign of empathy towards the poor. The answer is that they pretend to do so—and that this makes it even worse. At some point, Lindenberg admits that philanthropy and charity are not that bad—at least for donors who through this symbolic gesture imitate “divine life.” The real privilege of the poor, we must understand, is that they can look up to the rich: “We state that inequality is beneficial to those who find themselves at the bottom of the social pyramid. Indeed, the ones who occupy the highest positions serve as an inspiration and example to people who occupy an inferior place in the social ladder” (Lindenberg 2017, pp. 83, 153). The only sentences in his writings where strictly limited and proportional solidarity seems legitimate are the following:

Let us consider the case of a relatively rich country where, for various reasons, part of the population ended up, through no fault of its own and without the means to remedy it, relegated to inhuman conditions. In that distressing situation, it has the right, in the name of the solidarity the whole must have with its parts, to demand the authorities, as representatives of society, to take measure for its improvement so that it can have a dignified standard of living.

(Lindenberg 2017, p. 141)

From this we must understand that in Brazil the chronic problem of misery is self-inflicted and could easily be resolved by the miserable themselves if they only wished to do so. To motivate them, one could remind them of the idea expressed by O’Brien (1920, p. 78), that poorness might bear risks and is not desirable per se: “‘The occasions of sin are to be avoided,’ says Aquinas, ‘but poverty is an occasion of evil because theft, perjury, and flattery are frequently brought about by it. Therefore, poverty should not be voluntarily undertaken but rather avoided.’” But this would not be pseudo-emphatic but cynical.

The Catholic-neoliberal synthesis, if one can call it so, seems to be a new variety and stage of liberal-conservative fusion dynamics, as theorized by Carey (1984) in his edited volume Freedom and Virtue. In the Brazilian context, the fusion did not only attend concrete economic interests but strengthened the conservative Catholic thought, which in fact was still connected—through the Integrist tradition—to neo-Thomism. When the known American libertarian author Thomas E. Woods (2005, p. 216) became aware that “a profound philosophical commonality exists between Catholicism and the brilliant edifice of truth to be found within the Austrian School of Economics,” he simply repeated what Brazilian liberal-conservatives had been aware of for half a century before him.

6. The Neo-Thomist Prophets of the New Right

Most scholars who specialize in the New Right’s ideological formation agree on the central role of the philosopher and online influencer Olavo de Carvalho (Chaloub and Perlatto 2016; Patschiki 2012; Patschiki et al. 2016; Puglia 2020; Chaloub 2022). What is less discussed is how strongly Carvalho’s oeuvre is committed to Thomism (see Wink 2024) and how much of what is commonly called “Olavism” is indeed a fashionable new version of Integrist thought—any basic intertextual analysis of the writings of Olavo de Carvalho, Plínio Salgado, and Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira immediately reveals astonishing similarity. The role of Olavism is central not because of any original contribution of new ideas, but for applying them to contemporary issues and systematically disseminating them since the early 1990s in a new fashionable way, first through polemical journalism and later through cyberactivism.

As any neo-Thomist, Carvalho embraces the ipso facto irrefutable diagnosis of the crisis of modernity since the Middle Ages. Trying to put utopian ideas into practice means challenging the perfection of God’s creation. “Political religions” such as—without any distinction—progressivism, positivism, Marxism, communism, Freudianism, fascism, and National Socialism brought into power “satanic” regimes (Carvalho 2001, [1995] 2015). He summarizes the phenomenon as “Gnosticism,” a term he borrows from the political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), one of Bolsonaro’s few academic references. In his The New Science of Politics (Voegelin 1952), a theological approach to politics, Gnosticism made man a spiritual eunuch and what could complete man again would be a reorientation from mundane existence towards transcendent reality. This completeness would be the only basis for a stable political organization and Voegelin used to call it (in German) Ordnungswissen, the knowledge of the sublime order. If one thinks about current desecularization and re-enchantment tendencies worldwide, as prophesized by Peter L. Berger (1999) and confirmed by Cloke et al. (2019), he might have a point here.

From this perspective, all sociopolitical phenomena—among them inequality—become intrinsically religious and must be treated as such. This explains the disdain Carvalho shows for any problematization of sociopolitical realities in Brazil. If the main battle is between Good and Evil, those with God against those with the Devil, those who follow the order against those who destroy the order by pointing to relativity and complexity, all other problems “like racism, misery, social inequality, violence, corruption are just trivial inconveniences,” as stated by Olavo de Carvalho ([1995] 2015, p. 117). When compelled to deal with trivialities, as in his remarkable article ”A miséria no mundo” [Misery in the World], Carvalho (2005) naturalizes both poverty and inequality as “most general and permanent conditions of mankind on earth” and recommends concentrating on one’s own moral strengthening and trusting divine providence. This somehow convenient position for somebody who belongs to a privileged elite causes no moral conflict, as Carvalho (2013) argues in a later article: Due to the ubiquity of poverty and inequality, unfair societies do not exist, because logically the poor cannot claim any right to justice, simply because any consecrated right would have to be universal and unconditional, but in this case, the redistribution of wealth would be conditioned by the universally scarce availability of resources. We understand by this that the concession of rights to all is a matter of the willingness of the privileged (literally those who hold personal or group rights) to share what these rights entitle them—with predictable results.

The ideas of Olavism, often in form of catchphrases compatible with social media communication, are omnipresent in New Right thought: that the Brazilian State was corrupted by cultural Marxism; that this corruption was the final effect of Gnosticism; and that behind this were satanic forces fighting God in a globalist alliance of metacapitalists, communists, and Islamists (Rocha 2021; Wink 2021a). Also, the resistance strategy is copied from Olavism, especially the main lesson learned that, as Bolsonaro said himself side by side with Olavo de Carvalho at the legendary meeting at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, DC: “Brazil is not an open land where we intend to build things for our people. We must deconstruct a lot of things, undo a lot of things.”5 To dismantle the evil State to resurrect the “true order” is the core message of the New Right and gives continuity to a quest conservatives have been fighting since the beginning of modern state-building in Brazil.

7. Conclusions

The Brazilian people, especially the millions of sub-citizens who suffer the consequences of these deconstruction politics, might imagine different priorities and here we get to the conundrum I mentioned at the beginning. I guess, for many of them, the vision of the world as “an immense English-speaking Sweden” is slightly less dystopian than for the well-to-do philosopher Carvalho (1998). At least if those sub-citizens, who in principle would agree on traditional values in the private sphere, were made aware that the “order” the New Right wishes to establish in the public sphere was exhumed from the medieval past and blames the modern State for a civilizational progress of which sub-citizens would benefit most: the redistribution of accumulated wealth, participation in privileged power, and their symbolic recognition as egalitarian members of a social contract. What could hinder them from using their voting power in a liberal democracy in order to claim their rights as full citizens? It might be precisely the Rightist persuasion that behind this very civilizing process lurks communism to destroy their spirituality, their values, and their freedom. The powerful narrative continuously elaborated through Integrism, Tefepism, and Olavism, which I traced in this article with all the due shortage the format allows, seems to have contributed considerably to this reactionary indoctrination. Measuring influence is a notorious challenge in social science, especially regarding political impact. Neo-Integrist ideology, as we could call it, might be just a fundamentalist niche phenomenon without relevant expression in voting and a weaker voice on the open political stage, but it is arguably a strong voice backstage. Above all, if we understand that this thought is the basis of Olavism and how Olavism (as a banalized form of neo-Thomism) infiltrated the New Right, its influence on Brazilian politics becomes more palpable.

But why all of this effort to preserve inequality? What is most worrying in my analysis is how reluctant Brazilian liberal-conservatives are against literally any attempt to mitigate the extreme social inequality. In 19th century Europe, minimal social reform was the standard recipe to prevent revolutions, such as the 19th century Bismarckian social policies or British Tory “One-Nationism.” The latter became famous through Benjamin Disraeli, in principle a conservative who was twice elected as prime minister. In his novel Sybil, or The Two Nations (Disraeli [1845] 1999, p. 66), a book well-received by Brazilian conservatives, he problematizes social segregation in Britain as the major obstacle to social cohesion, political stability, and economic growth. Brazil had many Disraelis who denounced the division of the nation into rich and poor “Brazils,” even well before famous Florestan Fernandes in the 1950s. But the point is that these voices were marginalized as “threat to the order” and social questions were never seriously taken up by the Brazilian version of liberal-conservatism. To explain this perplexing incapacity for social inclusion, not even instrumentally as a palliative measure or as part of a development path towards a mass consumption economy that would offer Brazilian businesses interesting opportunities, my argument on neo-Integrism can possibly contribute by revealing an old but apparently still functional justification of naturalized inequality. My hypothesis for further research is that this resilience may be explained by the racialized character of social inequality in Brazil itself (see Paixão 2013). It seems to be a perpetuation of Haitianism of the 19th century, i.e., the elite’s chronic phobia of setting free their slaves (even if economically interesting) without any guarantee that they would not start a revolution against their ex-masters, as occurred in Haiti in 1791, now fearing a system of real meritocracy which could provide social mobility to non-white Brazilians.

The rise of the New Right was coincident with a reduction in the Gini-Index of income inequality and the introduction of affirmative action policies with a racial dimension. The narrative of a “natural order,” together with related narratives about Brazil’s exceptional racial democracy (see Wink 2018), helped to blur a possible correlation with this incipient structural change. The experience of the last decade shows how important it is to resolutely address the country’s racialized social inequality and the New Right’s real attitudes towards it, especially if we think about a post-Lula 2.0 future. One way to start challenging the New Right’s discursive power would be to put into question the “less State, more Brazil” narrative, spell out what is really meant by society’s implicit “natural order” and unmask its very basis in naturalized inequality.