The two candidates left in the run off have sadly offered up the most vacuous contest in living memory. Though keen to defend sovereignty, the Left-wing octogenarian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva talks mostly about his past achievements. The 45-year-old Flavio Bolsonaro principally wants to get his dad, disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, out of jail.

It is Flavio who looks the most likely to prevail, to the delight of US interests, from Donald Trump to Big Tech. However, the emergence of a new force in Brazilian politics — the upstart Missão party, led by the former student activist turned political entrepreneur Renan Santos — offers the possibility that this settlement may not hold forever.

Even if he was knocked out in the first round of the presidential election with 2% of the vote, Renan (politicians are known by their first names in Brazil) had led the field among under-24s with 36% in polling earlier this year. Commentators noted that he possesses a rare commodity in today’s digitalized political landscape: the ability to “break out of the bubble” and reach voters on the other side of the political spectrum. Indeed, the limitations of digital age politics is a core theme: “We have never been so polarized and yet there is so little debate”, he told me in a recent interview. Political alignment has become “automatic” so there is never any need to fight over politics. What he hopes to bring is fresh ideas, and transcend the “asphyxiating” effect of social media — which has done so much to shape the dire character of modern Brazilian politics.

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South America is now dominated by conservative governments — all of whom, despite their differences, adopt MAGA-like themes and are friendly to the US president. A slew of new Right-wing politicians are born-online culture-warrior provocateurs: foremost among them is the Bolsonaro-aligned Nikolas Ferreira, who has 23 million social media followers. Renan is scathing of these figures. “The electoral process has become the end in itself, and the mandate is only an instrument for gaining more fame and attention on social media.”

Younger generations in Brazil have grown up under Workers Party governments — 17 of the past 24 years have been under the party of the center-left — and now increasingly identify as Right-wing. Missão stands apart from its own camp for demonstrating a willingness to rethink Brazil’s role in a post-globalization world and presenting this in a forcefully ideological and programmatic package.

Renan is a constant critic of the Bolsonaro clan, their submissiveness to the US, their links to organized crime, and their self-serving culture wars. “Voters care more about a hypothetical trans person entering their bathroom than public security or corruption,” he says in one video. He repeatedly calls out Bolsonaro junior as a “miliciano“, or paramilitary gangster, for the senator’s alleged associations with Rio de Janeiro extortion rackets. Indeed, since Renan was knocked out of the election, the Left has been happy to amplify many of his critiques of Bolsonaro.

Missão are often called far-Right or even fascist by opponents, mainly due to their stance on crime. Under the party’s Direito Penal do Inimigo — “enemy criminal law” — members of organized crime gangs would be treated as enemy combatants and lose their status as persons under the law, much as has happened in El Salvador. The party has even pushed the slogan Prendeu, Matou (“arrest ‘em, kill ‘em”), implying a willingness to use extrajudicial killings appealing to a growing punitive strain in Latin America (and, indeed, the US).

Still, without wishing to explain away these provocations, Missão bucks convention today and in many respects resembles bourgeois modernizers, promising a politics of substance. In a recent post, Renan talked up the late Left-wing British philosopher Mark Fisher; and his defense of democracy and sovereignty stand out amid all the Right wing politicians who have tolerated or encouraged Bolsonaro’s coup-mongering as well as the clan’s lobbying the US against Brazilian national interests.

It is these themes that lead Renan to believe Missão can potentially appeal to Left-wing voters. Victor Marques, a philosophy professor and popularizer of Mark Fisher who has run for office for Lula’s Workers Party, tells me that Missão are at least “thinking through the global dynamics of the crisis of hegemony” — though he adds that he “disagrees with their entire programme.” The prominent progressive intellectual, Miguel Lago, has also praised their ambition: “Missão’s merit is to have outlined a vision for the country — which others have failed to do,” he argues, welcoming a “Right that thinks”. Still, Lago, who has written extensively about reconstructing Brazil, is at pains to emphasize that not only does he disagree with the content of Missão’s propositions in principle, he also finds many of them impracticable.

Where Renan is novel, at least on the Right, is in his understanding of the end of US hegemony: now the US demands explicit alignment, whereas previously it was presumed to be the only game in town. This imposes choices on Latin American countries. It is in this new world disorder that Missão is now seeking to advance Brazil’s interests.

This much is clear in The Yellow Book, a 500-page manifesto. Instead of focusing on Bolsonarist bugbears, it considers how to maximize the country’s rare earth deposits, clean-energy networks, and its status as the breadbasket of the world, so as to overcome regional inequality and unleash Brazil’s potential.

That starts with redefining what it means to be “Right-wing”. Orlando Lima, the editor of Valete, Missão’s in-house magazine, believes the Brazilian Right is stuck in “an intellectual and creative hole”, too obsessed by ideas of American libertarianism and British conservatism that don’t map on to the unique problems faced by Brazil, while the global Right in general is too fixated on being “anti-Left” on issues such as gender identity or migration.

Yet, Missão’s roots lie in the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), libertarians who were often criticized as Right-wing yuppies. For all their anti-establishment rhetoric, they were a young, business-friendly grouping from upper-middle-class backgrounds — and Missão supporters are still mainly drawn from this milieu. The anti-corruption movement they played a large part in advancing served to delegitimize politics, though Renan disagreed when challenged on this point, defending their record.

Still, today the party is expressly political. On founding Missão in 2023, Renan diluted his economic liberalism — he realized that there were too many problems in Brazil for “less state” to be the solution — and instead focused on remedying deindustrialization, low productivity growth, a dependence on imports, and a decadent elite.

Missão also marks a distinct contrast to the racism that pervades the radical Right globally in its embrace of Brazilian society as it is. Lima puts it grandly: he hopes to overcome the nation’s issues with a big civilizational project that would prove that a miscegenated tropical country can succeed in the new global order — finally making good on the long-promised (and much-derided) idea of itself being the “country of the future”. The Yellow Book argues that the decline of the US has left a power vacuum in the Global South that Brazil is uniquely positioned to exploit. De-dollarization would be pursued through the creation of a basket of South American currencies led by the real, while the BRICS+ would be engaged on a pragmatic basis so the country can extract concrete benefits and retain autonomy.

It would also use Brazil’s three “trump cards”: its possession of 23% of the world’s rare earth deposits, the largest behind China; its extraordinarily clean energy matrix; and the major diplomatic strengths of non-aggression and democratic stability. The vision rests largely on two strategic inputs — food and computing. Brazil is already the breadbasket of the world, but producing its own fertilizer would increase its independence. Meanwhile, reversing the brain drain and building data centers would see it become an AI powerhouse.

Rather more controversial is the plan to rid Brazil of its favelas, or informal settlements, in which 8% of Brazilians live (the figure is as high as 25% in Rio de Janeiro and over 50% in the Amazonian capitals). The favela “is more than an urbanistic problem, it is a civilizational plague”, argues the Yellow Book, seeing the remedy as not just a physical but a “spiritual” transformation. There are concerns that the combination of awarding land titles to residents, public service-provision, and housebuilding would cost a lot more than the projected 1.5% of GDP. Moreover, given Brazil’s authoritarian management of its lower classes, it’s not hard to imagine these plans playing out as violent mass expulsions.

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Moreover, the much vaunted “War on Crime” has still more alarming implications in a country where the police already kill 18 people per day, over 6,000 per year, according to official figures. Many of Brazil’s Military Police are already implicated in the criminal gangs known as “milicias“, who vie for territory with the drug traffickers. Missão’s plan — ostensibly in pursuit of territorial sovereignty, nation-building, and political control — could just as well end up in the violent chaos of a multisided armed conflict. Meanwhile the horrific implications of the Prendeu, Matou slogan hardly need spelling out. “The fact that Renan always explains it away confirms it is opportunistic and demagogic,” Lago tells me.

How much of a break with the neoliberal Right all this is remains an open question. Its development plans are still weak sauce, even by the standards of Brazil’s own past, while fiscal austerity is item one in their manifesto. “Inequality” hardly features in the Yellow Book, despite Brazil being one of the most unequal societies in the world. Renan meanwhile opposes Lula’s recent (incredibly popular) move to legally guarantee two days off a week as opposed to one — which even Senator Flavio Bolsonaro supported, suggesting the libertarian faith remains strong. In this sense, Missão’s departure from their 2010s neoliberal antecedents is only partial.

Still, whether or not Brazilians agree with the content of Missão’s programme — and many do not — there can be some small hope that their political seriousness, ambition and vision speaks to the possibilities of the emerging post-hegemonic world. For all the passivity-inducing brainrot of social media today, the current moment is also about the breakup of world order, which should force hard thinking, where previously complacency reigned. In place of imported ideas, there is an emphasis on taking the Brazilian experience seriously as a starting point.

Should Flavio win on Sunday, the defense of Brazilian sovereignty and democracy will be paramount from day one. Renan sees this as more propitious for his camp: the Lulista project will fall apart and there will be a mass of people who are still politically conscious looking for something new. But even if Lula pulls off another miracle, the prospects for progressives look grim. Missão should serve as a reminder to the Left that idealism and political commitment used to be their domain.

On Sunday, a few thousand supporters of the ex-president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed the Three Powers’ Plaza, invading the (mostly empty) buildings of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace in Brasília. A great deal of vandalism took place, but government is in summer recess and the recently inaugurated President Lula was also away, tending to floods in São Paulo state. Within some hours, the invaders had been cleared.

Was this a credible coup attempt? As shocking as the images of Bolsonaro supporters rampaging through the halls of power are, just as symbolically loaded is the sight of authoritarian militarists seizing the seat of power ­— and then having no idea of how to actually seize power. They shat the bed – almost literally.

There is something deeply adolescent about the whole affair. Sore losers who refuse to accept the election result and then protest by destroying daddy’s belongings. Even the invasion of the Three Powers had something of the teenage tryst to it: they managed to penetrate the sacred site of government but their performance was a mess.

At least since the events of 7 September 2021, when Bolsonaristas threatened to storm the Supreme Court on Brazil’s independence day (but caused chaos a day early leading forces to intervene), there has been widespread concern about a coup. As the October 2022 election drew nearer, these worries grew stronger — though perhaps in inverse proportion to such an event’s likely success. Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters, both institutional and grassroots, might desire a coup, but that doesn’t mean they would take the plunge – whatever they might claim about a “stolen election”.

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In the event, a coup was not even attempted. What we got was a series of illegitimate, anti-democratic but ultimately blunt adventures. On election day, the federal highways police mounted a mass vote-suppression operation by detaining buses in Lula-favouring regions. For a few weeks after the election, Bolsonaro supporters, including truckers, blockaded highways while observers wondered which arm of the security forces would clear them away, given the highway police’s manifest sympathies. But cleared they were. The next phase saw encampments set up around army bases where Bolsonaristas would petition the armed forces to intervene. It was from one such encampment in Brasília that Sunday’s would-be putschists departed for the Three Powers’ Plaza.

None of these points on the way to Sunday’s events was threatening enough on its own. Had they taken place almost simultaneously around the election — or at least prior to the January 1 inauguration — they might have signalled not just serious intent but coordinative capacity.

But the Bolsonarista ultras lack leadership, while institutional support is more circumspect. The clearing of encampments before Sunday’s invasion, led to some pathetic scenes. These are the hardcore of Bolsonaro’s support, infused with messianic and apocalyptic ideas. For them, the Workers’ Party’s return to office is not a mere alternation of government, but a cataclysm. Their behaviour does not testify to a capacity for carefully balanced strategy or tactical nuance.

Bolsonaro-aligned military generals, mostly reservists, have a comfortable arrangement and lack sufficient pull among the active troops. That meant they were not willing to take the risks a coup would imply. Elsewhere in the state — police or politicians — a similar calculus obtained. And of course, Bolsonaro himself absconded to Florida before the inauguration and has now been taken ill. The only other relevant force are the businessmen who fund the operation — including the 100 buses that carried the rioters to the Three Powers. Drawn from agriculture or retail, they probably lack sufficient knowledge of political power and how the Brazilian state works to perform the necessary articulating function a coup would require.

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As a consequence, all these intimations of a coup turned out piecemeal and reactive. There were more emotional outbursts than strategic manoeuvres.

Crucial, then, will be the new government’s reaction. In the US, where the Capitol is already absurdly sacralised, the Democrats’ response to January 6 was to mythologise it. For two years, the party and its media satellites have self-servingly turned the riot into a national trauma. And worse, used it as motive to launch a domestic war on terror.

What is the likelihood the Workers’ Party does the same? Lula’s campaign last year was explicitly constructed as a broad front to save democracy and return the country to a more orderly politics. Throughout, there was a hint of nostalgia for the consensus politics of the 2000s, when one’s bitter rivals supposedly still played by the rules of the game. The temptation to use January 8 as the basis to excise Bolsonarismo from the body politic will be strong. 

But as Bolsonaro’s narrow defeat showed, that is easier said than done. Moreover, the danger is that this gives the Bolsonaristas the narrative of victimhood they crave, while further empowering the judiciary.

We should be clear here: the vandals, hundreds of whom were arrested, should be punished in accordance with the law; the funders should be investigated and prosecuted; and institutional accomplices should be rooted out. Already, the Federal District’s security secretary, an ex-minister of Bolsonaro’s, has been sacked. The governor, himself a Bolsonaro ally, no doubt did so in a move to protect himself, but Governor Rocha has, in turn, been removed from his post for 90 days by the Supreme Court. Both were seemingly complicit in allowing the invasion to happen.

The risk, then, is that this becomes a judicial crusade rather than a political struggle. Lula’s justice minister, Flavio Dino of the centre-Left Socialist Party of Brazil, had already announced in his inauguration speech on January 2 that “terrorist acts, crimes against the democratic rule of law, incitement of animosity between the armed forces and constitutional powers and civil institutions are very serious political crimes… [and] will permanently be on the table of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security.” The fear is that a new anti-extremism law is brought in, a move that would parallel one of the final acts in the last Workers’ Party administration, when Dilma Rousseff signed in a widely criticised anti-terrorism law.

With these riots coming within a week of his inauguration, they may now prove a crucial pivoting point. Lula has, after all, pledged to reconstruct and transform Brazil. But is the aim to transform a rotten state whose constitutional settlement locks in oligarchy and military oversight just as much as it promises social rights? Or is it to defend the limited gains of the past?

Here we can glimpse the vice much of the Left has wedged itself into – not just in Brazil, but across Latin America and beyond. Continually on the defensive in the face of a rebellious and populist Right, the Left has abrogated itself the role of defender of civilisation. Suddenly, it finds itself not far removed from the concerns of the Tony Blair Institute, which has celebrated the decline in the number of “populist” leaders. A recent report commends a new wave of Latin American leaders for having “disavowed populist rhetoric and focused on progressive economic and social rights rather than the populist Left’s historic focus on industrial nationalisation”.

In Brazil, this was reflected in a Lula-led campaign that emphasised consensual deal-making and political nous over maximalist claims, and inclusion over polarisation. Meanwhile, if you squint hard enough, Bolsonarista rhetoric about how the state is not really impartial, and how the only true authority is the people, ends up sounding awfully Leftist, revolutionary even.

How to avoid cementing this political inversion of roles? After all, nothing good will come by allowing the Right to capture the spirit of revolt, given its declared anti-democratic and repressive goals.

But should Lula’s party follow the US Democrats’ lead in trying to make this early January insurrection into a national trauma, to be overcome through a defence of existing institutions, the only “transformation” the President will achieve is to definitively convert his side into the Party of Order.

In elections this Sunday, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is likely to triumph over current President Jair Bolsonaro. But the best way to understand the new Brazil, as well as to shed light on the workings of Brazilian politics, may actually be to leave Bolsonaro and Lula to one side and examine another candidate, a life coach and self-described theologian who, thanks to party wrangling, has been left without a legal candidacy.

Pablo Marçal, 35, has four million social media followers, sells a controversial life-coaching course called “The Worst Year of Your Life”, and is best known for nearly leading a group to their death in an ill-prepared trekking expedition in the service of “mental unblocking”. This year, the marketing-cum-political entrepreneur proposes to “unblock the nation”, and to do so from “neither Right nor Left, but from above”.

Marçal fulminates against the two leading candidates. The election, he argues, is like choosing a product: “there’s a car dealership called politics, and they tell you the most popular models are the little red Fiat or the yellow VW [Lula or Bolsonaro], but behind those you find Mercedes, BMWs… and way at the back there’s one no one talks about, a three-million real McLaren.” Encouraging his audience to choose the McLaren, he argues that “some can’t stand people who take risks; if you don’t, you won’t be able to govern, to reach the top”. It is this mix of opportunism, individualism, braggadocio, and indeed faith, that make Marçal emblematic not only of a style of politics, but of deep changes in Brazilian society.

Marçal is a fiery orator and canny operator, worth a declared R$ 96m (US$ 18.5m). With corporate donations banned in Brazilian politics since 2015, the small centre-Right Republican Party of Social Order (PROS, in its Portuguese acronym) signed up Marçal on the promise that he would contribute R$200m to the party. But following a dispute, a legal ruling has now seen control of the party handed back to its previous president. The PROS is back in Lula’s electoral coalition and Marçal’s candidacy is stillborn.

Marçal became famous in January this year after leading a large group up the Pico dos Marins, a 2,420m-high mountain in the state of São Paulo. Facing 100km/h monsoon winds and near-freezing night-time temperatures at the peak, the group had to be rescued by the fire brigade. In a chest-thumping video posted on social media after the rescue, Marçal gave no indication of having needed help to get down the mountain. Instead, he provoked viewers to “stay home and watch [social media] stories” if they did not feel up to taking risks. “There’ll be a bunch of people in your life, like mountain rescuers, telling you what you can and can’t do in your life. But only you can decide.”

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Marçal is also an entrepreneur whose marriage of New Age woo and business acumen recalls the “California ideology” of figures like Steve Jobs. His “IP method” of life coaching, for instance, includes courses on emotional intelligence based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, with a focus on “brain unlocking, identity activation and purpose clarification”.

To this he adds a dash of evangelical Christianity. His mental unlocking sessions have moments that resemble an exorcism — but in the service of professional advancement. “People are going to criticise you… in the name of Jesus, tell them to go fuck themselves,” he boomed when invited to speak at the Community of Faith church. It was met with a mixture of shock, mirth, and applause.

Marçal’s proposition is not so much religious as earthly. His programmes concern professional success and wealth; his presidential candidacy is an attempt to sell change, good management, and economic growth. His worldly pragmatism, however, is infused with the emotional registers of neo-charismatic Christianity.

In a way, this represents the closing of a circle. Neo-Pentecostalism grew out of post-Sixties New Age milieus. So did life coaching. According to Silas Guerriero, a professor at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, life coaching emerged from a New Age vision in which personal autonomy can be achieved through the development of individual spirituality. Now, evangelicals — in Brazil, but also around the world — are appropriating the techniques and styles of life coaching into their ministry. They blend “counselling, personal consultancy, and psychotherapy” with charismatic Christianity to help followers deal with both religious demands and the challenges of contemporary life.

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With his brand of self-help religiosity, Marçal is representative of the changing face of Brazil. Thanks to budget cuts, Brazil has delayed its decennial census, which should have been due in 2020, until this year, and so we do not know the total number of evangelicals in the country. One recent estimate, however, put it at 31% of the country’s population, up from less than 7% in 1980. As a whole, evangelicals, more than half of whom are Pentecostal, are set to overtake Catholics by 2030.

These numbers are only likely to rise as the country experiences what is, in effect, an economic lost decade. Brazilian researchers have found that for every 1% fall in the country’s GDP, evangelical numbers increase 0.8%. As Christopher Lord has noted, Bolsonaro, though a Catholic himself, “may well prove to be the first president of post-Catholic Brazil”. After all, if evangelicals were to decide the upcoming election, Bolsonaro would win a first-round landslide; they are one of the few demographic groups in which the incumbent holds an incontestable lead.

The evangelical churches “promise people what they want, now: health and wealth. And this is why it’s the faith of the world’s working poor,” explains Elle Hardy, author of an exposé on the religion’s global spread. We are a long way from sociologist Max Weber’s understanding of the way Protestantism sustained capitalism: hard work, duty, sacrifice and delayed gratification, in the name of rewards in the afterlife. Today, it’s the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Grifting. As Hardy tells me, “these people aren’t reading Luther, they’re reading Elon Musk biographies”.

In a context of wide and deep mistrust in institutions, Neo-Pentecostal churches also reject traditional authorities, be they priests or politicians. Its adherents, feeling besieged by the world around them, are told by pastors that only you, the believer, can dig yourself out of this hole. But the church also provides a community amid this individualism. In a precarious economy, the little microenterprise you set up to make ends meet will find willing customers among the faithful — once given endorsement by your pastor. The appeal here to the poor and struggling is obvious.

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These social transformations have clear political consequences. There is a large, multi-party evangelical bench in Congress: 195 federal deputies (38% of the lower house) and 8 senators. Neo-Pentecostals are a fair proportion of them. According to news outlet Metrópoles, 52 deputies elected in 2018 are Neo-Pentecostals.

These churches have their base in the poorest section of the population, but over the past two decades, the ranks of the faithful have steadily ascended into what is referred to in Brazil as the “new middle class”. The “Lulista” years, from 2003 to 2016, saw strong growth, cash transfers to the poor, an expansion of credit, and new private universities sustained by access to student loans. But this was not equalled by improved public services, while at the same time the rate of unionisation fell precipitously. Stagnating formal job creation has resulted in an informality rate exceeding 40%. For poor and lower-middle-class Brazilians, opportunity coexists with extreme precarity.

The result has been a much more individualistic country in which Marçal’s style of self-help has flourished. “Imagine yourself a baby who is taken from a royal family in the castle and given to a poor family. But as you grow, you look up to the castle and think, ‘I belong there,’” Marçal preaches.

One former Marçal follower has sued the life coach for encouraging her to make this vision a reality — by quitting her steady job and starting her own business. In court, the plaintiff alleged that Marçal told her, “we should not be celetista” (a reference to the CLT, Brazil’s labour code that guaranteed employment rights, and thus shorthand for formal employment), given that we are “born to prosper”. “He believes that everyone should choose to become an entrepreneur, that we should listen to our ‘heart’… and not be enslaved,” she explained, arguing that Marçal preys on the vulnerable.

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Marçal leverages this attitude into politics. “I feel like going to every person and yelling, ‘you’re asleep, you’re zombies, don’t you want Brazil to improve? Don’t you want change!?’ What do I want? I want you to prosper,” he exclaims in one recent livestream.

On his official campaign website, there are five keystones. The first is “every Brazilian a governor”. But this is no democratic slogan, it is an individualist one, dovetailing with his broader gospel discourse about prosperity. This becomes evident in another keystone, “every family a nation” — a slogan that could resonate just as well with Bolsonaro’s conservative, evangelical voters. The family is under threat and needs defence against the hostile outside world. Society is nowhere to be found. There is only “my fatherland, my family”, as yet another keystone has it.

The political echoes of Bolsonarismo should be obvious here. Indeed, the sharp-tongued Marçal calls the president merely an “expired antibiotic”: he did his job but now the moment has passed. “I’ll say it until my last days, until Bolsonaro hands me the [presidential] sash. I’ll get down on my knees and wash his feet and thank him for getting rid of the PT [the Workers’ Party],” Marçal explained.

At the same time, Marçal has sought to distance himself from the chaotic Bolsonaro. “I’m the resistance!”, he says. “None of the other ‘third way’ held on, I’m the third way we all dream of!”

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Indeed, a huge range of other, more established politicians have auditioned for the “third way” — between Lula and Bolsonaro — and failed. Previously, at the 2018 election, these politicians, mostly from the establishment Right, backed Bolsonaro in the second round. This year, they believed they had a chance to be president. After all, Bolsonaro can no longer claim to be an outsider, and his “disgovernment” has repelled many.

But the return of Lula — the most popular president in Brazilian history — has swallowed up the anti-Bolsonaro vote. And Brazilians have no love for the uncharismatic politicians of the mainstream Right. These are “cuckservatives”, in American internet parlance, who have seen the bulk of their voters abandon them in favour of the far-Right. Most of them have grudgingly fallen behind Lula in the search of some temporary stability.

Yet if Lula defeats Bolsonaro as expected, the anti-system new Right, with its base in Right-wing YouTube channels, will need a champion. This is undoubtedly terrain Marçal or someone like him can exploit. For instance, Marçal has already warned that Lula’s promise to reverse a grievous rollback of workers’ rights “will enable huge corruption”. The message here? Embrace precarity, throw yourself into the market, trust only yourself, your family, and God.

And so, across the country, the growing uncertainty of Brazilian life means the country will continue to be fertile ground for the pastor-coach type. Violent crime forces a recoil into a defensive posture inside the family unit. Economic informality means the lure of entrepreneurship pulls harder than that of a steady job, itself a growing rarity. The discrediting of mainstream institutions creates a demand for new sources of authority. The waning of tradition and Catholicism — with its more collective bent — should be providing an opening for progressive, secular politics. But for many, absent some big new idea to fill the void of meaning, it also represents a seemingly existential threat. If the public realm promises little, why not see if a little “mental unblocking” can make you rich?