Beyond Polarization: An Ethnographic Theory of Political Antagonism in Brazil and the United States

Abstract (English)

How, in recent Brazilian and US elections, were right-wing figures with notorious histories of venality able to present themselves to many as repudiating corruption? Generally, how do political figures come to stand in for the repudiation of the very things they embody? This paper argues that the answer to this question helps us understand contemporary forms of political antagonism, and some of the bases of popularity for contemporary right-wing politics, in Brazil, the US, and perhaps beyond. The last decade of Brazilian and US history has witnessed a popularization of forms of political sentiment invested with increasingly antagonistic affect--from rifts over the legacies of recent governments, to those involving ethnoracial, religious and other forms of identification and affiliation. Many of my interlocutors who were uninterested in politics two decades ago now describe certain others as threats to the nation. This is usually glossed with the spatial metaphor of polarization, depicting the polity as pulled from the center by two radicalizing extremes. This metaphor can be useful, but it neither captures the cross-cutting nature of these political antagonisms, nor the sometime radicalism of the self-styled center, nor the dialectical process through which seeming opposites structure a transforming totality. Drawing on many years of ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro and Maranhão, as well as extensive experience in the United States, this paper offers an alternate theory of political antagonism, focused on this relation of seeming opposites.