The far-right family tree has borne its most recent poisoned fruits of ignorance and hatred in the form of Eduarda Campopiano and Lucas Pavanato, who were among the most voted candidates in the Brazilian elections of 4 October. They follow, in reverse chronological order, transphobic and disinformation delinquent, Nikolas Ferreira; the gun-enthusiast transphobic, evangelical, Christian-values, misinformation ace, actor Juliano Cazarré (who claimed that more men are killed by women in Brazil than vice versa); the violent, toxic members of the “liberal towards economics, conservative towards habits” Free Brazil Movement (MBL) and other political startups that sprang up after the coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016; the abominable “Church Militant” Allan dos Santos; putsch planner Paulo Figueiredo; the unfunny scourge-of-the-left comedian Danilo Gentili; the thuggish Bolsonaro clan; and the vociferous charlatan guru of Jair Bolsonaro, Olavo de Carvalho.

But the lineages are much older. They are rooted in late-nineteenth-century European fascist ideology (rejection of liberal democracy, anti-rationalism, social Darwinism, anti-socialism, proto-nationalism, and Bismarckian and Napoleonic authoritarianism), which survived the defeat of Nazi-fascism in the Second World War, to extend into the brutal Franco and Salazar dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. “Bland fanatics”, as used in the title of Pankaj Mishra’s book Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire”, is one way to describe these malefactors, and it’s an expression that goes back a long way to American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s book The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959) in which he warns of the “bland fanatics of western civilisation who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

Before giving a closer look to this particular genealogy of fascist derangement, I should say that I’m using the concept of “genealogy” in the sense given to it by Michel Foucault whose “genealogy of the subject” accounts for “the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, and so on, without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history”. In other words, it’s a way of........

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