If you spent your week reading the dispatches out of London and New York, you would be forgiven for thinking that the clouds had parted and the millennium had arrived over South America. Across the editorial boards of the Anglo-American press, the champagne corks were popping. Brazil’s razor-thin presidential election was immediately framed not as a complicated contest between two deeply flawed political figures, but as a sweeping, moralistic morality play. According to the progressive consensus, the voters of Brazil had saved democracy, rescued the planet, and provided a gleaming new playbook for activists looking to crush conservative populism everywhere from Madrid to Michigan.
Back here in the American Midwest, where we know a thing or two about tight elections and the sanctimony of outside observers, that kind of breathless cheerleading rings hollow. It smacks of the familiar coastal habit of projecting fashionable pet causes onto foreign soil, without ever bothering to understand the folks who actually live there. To call this result a trouncing of the right requires either an extraordinary degree of ideological blindness or an outright refusal to look at an election map.
The cold truth of the matter is that Brazil remains an agonizingly divided country. The challenger may have crossed the finish line first, but tens of millions of working-class and rural citizens cast their ballots for the incumbent. These were not comic-book villains bent on the destruction of the natural world. They were farmers, small business owners, churchgoers, and wage earners who worry about rampant street crime, runaway public corruption, and the suffocating reach of judicial overreach. By painting half of a massive nation as dangerous reactionaries who simply need to be defeated and reeducated, the global commentariat is repeating the exact same blunder that created modern populism in the first place.
Edmund Burke famously warned about the peril of politicians and intellectuals who become infatuated with abstract, universal schemes while ignoring the actual habits, loyalties, and traditions of real communities. When writers thousands of miles away celebrate a foreign election as a mechanism to advance their own preferred energy mandates, they are indulging in precisely that Burkean vice. A nation is not an experimental laboratory for global nongovernmental organizations. It is an inheritance, passed down through generations, shaped by local faiths, family ties, and practical economic survival.
Yet we are told that Brazil has provided a template for the American left. What, exactly, is that template? In practice, it looks like an old, scandal-plagued political machine barely scraping by on the strength of elite media alignment and institutional backing. It relies on treating traditional values with thinly veiled contempt while promising that international bureaucrats know how to manage local resources better than the people whose livelihoods depend on them. If Washington operatives think that strategy is going to win over skeptical families in the Rust Belt or the Sun Belt, they have spent far too much time in university faculty lounges and not enough time talking to people over a cup of black coffee.
There is also a profound disconnect when it comes to the economic realities facing everyday citizens. It is cheap and easy for European columnists to demand total economic restrictions on developing nations from the comfort of heated cafes, but people on the ground need to eat, build, and prosper. The working people who clear land, raise cattle, or drill for resources are often the first to be scolded by international summit-goers who have never gotten their hands dirty in their lives. Whether in the interior of Brazil or the coal counties of Appalachia, people have a natural, healthy resentment toward being treated as collateral damage for someone else’s green utopia.
Elections that end in near-dead heats are not mandates for radical cultural and environmental revolutions. They are loud, unmistakable warnings that a society is straining at the seams. When half the electorate feels alienated from the ruling class, stability requires prudence, modesty, and a willingness to respect the deep-seated convictions of one's neighbors.
Instead, the global left seems eager to declare total victory and press its advantage, treating every election as another battle in an endless global culture war. They see a triumphant turning point, but what they have actually delivered is a fragile reprieve that solves none of the underlying discontent. Until our self-appointed betters learn to listen to the forgotten voters outside their metropolitan bubbles, the populist surge will continue to find its voice, whether in South America or right here at home.