“We can’t just hand Brazil over,” said Elenildes dos Reis, a 60-year-old lawyer in São Paulo who voted for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and said his victory would be a way of standing up to Trump and what she described as a rising wave of fascism. This was said on the eve of the election.
The election, held yesterday, resulted in a Lula victory. Lula lost the first election (October 4) by more than two million votes, but because both candidates fell below 50 percent (several other candidates were running), a runoff was ordered. Lula found more than four million votes this time. This is how The New York Times put the matter. Not gained. Found.
To find these votes, Lula’s personal attorney, now a Supreme Court justice, ordered an extension focused heavily on areas of Lula’s traditional strength (especially Bahia/Northeast). Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign also requested extensions in specific municipalities hit by heavy rain, flooding, or related disruptions in São Paulo, Paraná, and Santa Catarina. However, for the most part, Bolsonaro’s requests didn’t happen. Predictably, the Northeast, where the extensions took place, delivered strong margins for the incumbent.
A pattern of right/center-right gains across several South American countries since roughly 2023–2025 overlaps with a sharp reduction and practical closure of USAID. This is no accident. Under the second Trump administration, USAID was effectively dismantled starting in early 2025. The administration terminated programs and contracts, staff numbers dropped sharply, and the State Department absorbed remaining USAID functions. Cutting USAID funding disrupted networks, NGOs, and political financing for left-leaning groups, e.g., the São Paulo Forum.
Flávio Bolsonaro has publicly refused to recognize the results of the October 25, 2026 presidential runoff and announced that his legal team seeks annulment of the election. Make no mistake, this will happen in the United States in November if the Trump administration does not move to secure the election. The Democrats are already mobilizing to prevent election integrity.
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Returning to the top of the essay, this fascism charge is absurd and so tiresome. Populist nationalism is not fascism. When socialists redefine capitalism and economic nationalism as fascist, they are projecting onto patriots their own authoritarian desire. When dos Reis said, “We can’t just hand Brazil over” to the rising wave of fascism, she is referring to populist nationalism. The left in Brazil rigged the election to stop the wave of populist nationalism sweeping South America.
The irony is blatant. Socialism—total or near-total government control over the means of production—is inherently authoritarian because it requires the state to manage populations for the ends authoritarians seek. Under socialism, there’s no free market of ideas and behaviors in which individuals compete for their own interests. State control of the economy inevitably results in control over every other human behavior, since political economy is the material basis of human freedom. Either the system is open and therefore free, or it is closed and totalitarian.
If you think about it, fascism is essentially the same thing. Under fascism, the state manages the population for the ends fascists seek. Even if we define fascism as totalitarian monopoly capitalism, the effect is the same as state socialism. This is why Ingsoc, Newspeak for English Socialism, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four appears as a fascist state. For Orwell, fighting fascism and state socialism were two sides of the same coin. He did not view them as opposites, but as twin evils that concentrated power into an elite class and reduced ordinary people to serfs.
(Note: Orwell, a democratic socialist, never reconciled the nationalization of industry with his liberal values of autonomy and liberty. He admitted that it was the single greatest dilemma in his thought. He could never get over the similarity between a capitalist boss ordering people around and a socialist bureaucrat ordering people around, but he also valued free thought and the right of the common man to possess firearms. I am certainly sympathetic to this observation.)
When Elon Musk is dogged because he identifies Hitler’s National Socialism as left-wing, he is not wrong—certainly not when the rubber meets the road. Once the left or right abandon liberalism, it crosses over into fascism. Ask yourself, what end of the spectrum has abandoned liberalism? The left. That is why I left the left. Or, more accurately, the left left me. I cannot follow progressives down the fascist path. The left has become my enemy. They are your enemy—if you love freedom.
The identity of fascism is important to clarify. It is reasonable to ask whether the fascist arrangement can even be called capitalist. If capitalism is defined as a liberal arrangement of a mostly free market based on private ownership of capital where value is determined by competition, then fascism is not capitalist. It is a form of socialism organized by corporate power.
More precisely, then, fascism is corporatist—the subsumption of the proletariat under the corporate state. Corporatism is the political-economic arrangement of most of Europe. Commanding Europe’s sense-making institutions, globalists have socialized a general attitude in the European consciousness that capitalism is bad and corporations are good. The corporatist arrangement is what progressives desire for the United States. It’s why they want to censor speech, etc. Call it fascist-light if you will, but it is fascism all the same.
