“The President Does Not Consider March 31, 1964, a Military Coup”: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and the Limits of Historical Revisionism in Postdictatorship Brazil

This paper discusses ways that the far-right movement associated with President Jair Bolsonaro—Bolsonarismo—sought to shape public perception of the country’s last period of military rule (1964-85). I examine how Bolsonaristas talked about Brazilian democracy in contrast with dictatorship as a way of identifying continuities and divergences with previous right-wing movements in Brazilian history. Since Bolsonaro’s 2018 election, there has been a wave of scholarship produced in political science, anthropology, sociology, and communication studies about how Bolsonarismo operates. Historians have been reluctant to publish formal considerations on an administration that has now passed but is not history quite yet. Therefore, I embrace a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing widely from existing research on Bolsonarismowith the aim of homing in on the specific matters of democracy and memory. I draw on published interviews with key figures, official government documents, social media posts, and journalistic accounts to demonstrate how, despite its novelty in many respects, Bolsonarismo incarnates several long-standing authoritarian impulses in Brazilian society. I also argue, however, that Bolsonaro set himself apart from previous anti-democratic figures in how he sought to legitimize his claims to leadership — by appealing to a nostalgic if frustrated view of the last period of dictatorial rule. By insisting that the military regime did well but not enough, Bolsonarismo implicitly embraces a logic of continuity with a political agenda disrupted by the democratic consolidation of the last three decades. I end with tentative conclusions as to why Bolsonaro has failed to bring popular perceptions of democracy in line with his own, using the sixtieth anniversary of the coup to consider how memory of the dictatorship has changed since Bolsonaro’s emergence as a national figure.