He later described the episode as like something out of a soap opera. But at the time, it was far from entertaining: it was the beginning of a decade-long nightmare. After spending his early childhood pampered by his mother’s extended family, the respectable and haphazardly social-climbing Llosas, he moved to Lima, where he suffered under a controlling domestic regime imposed by his father, with only his mother for company.

For Gerald Martin, the author of an impressive new biography, Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life, his parents’ reunion was the hinge point of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s life. This brutal end to his innocence left him with an inexhaustible supply of resentment — and a magnified set of Oedipal complexes — which he spent a lifetime converting into fiction.

Judging by his worldly success, the results were tremendous. When Vargas Llosa died last year, it was with a full trophy cabinet, including the Nobel in literature. The Spanish-language world’s best-known public intellectual, he was the last survivor of the great “Boom” generation of Latin American literature, and the sole member of that cohort who lived to see his politics triumphant across the globe. Revolutionary Cuba, having commanded the loyalty of Cortázar and García Márquez, stands today at death’s door — while the Right-wing politicians Vargas Llosa endorsed in his final years have charged to power in Argentina, Chile, and Peru.

Yet there is a strange hollowness to Vargas Llosa’s victory — first of all, in politics. Even as figures such as Javier Milei (who earned the writer’s endorsement) triumph across Latin America and the world, Vargas Llosa seems to be nowhere, in death no longer useful as a prestigious cheerleader. Far from reflecting Vargas Llosa’s gentlemanly version of neoliberal politics, the Argentine president, with his sideburns and his calibrated displays of mania, is the perfect embodiment of the “society of the spectacle” Vargas Llosa so decried toward the end of his life — and of the distortion of the latter’s neoliberal politics into ever more carnivalesque shapes.

Literary posterity, too, has so far been less kind than the prize juries Vargas Llosa rarely struggled to impress. His old rivals are read more widely and fondly, their political stances, having passed into history, lending them the romantic sheen of the lovable loser. Will death reverse all the victories Vargas Llosa enjoyed in life?

That would be a fittingly melodramatic coda to the telenovela of his life — one in which Vargas Llosa could play the merciless social climber whose journey to the top, like those of the dictators in his novels, left an ever-rising tally of victims in his wake.

His ascent began with his adolescent search for a means of escape from the house of his teetotaling, self-made father — efforts which actually afforded him a wider understanding of Peruvian society than middle-class life in Lima would have otherwise lent him. These included years at the Leoncio Prado military boarding school outside Lima, with a racially diverse student body drawn from across Peru; a stint in the communist underground while an undergraduate at San Marcos University; and work at a local newspaper covering the city’s underworld of seedy nightclubs and brothels — a rare encounter with bohemia in his outwardly abstemious life.

These experiences were fastidiously strip-mined for material across his early novels, starting with his 1963 debut, The Time of the Hero, a murder mystery set in the boarding school. But despite his student organizing stint, Vargas Llosa “was never a genuinely convinced leftist”, writes Martin. “All his gut instincts moved in the opposite direction.”

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Still, in those years a Latin American writer had to support Cuba to have any hope of success. Everyone understood then — though many have since forgotten — that Cuba was the political-social-moral motor that launched the great Latin American Boom, even if it was the United States that underwrote the wild commercial success of its leading authors.

So Vargas Llosa made several trips to pay his dues to the cultural brokers of the revolutionary island, visits paid with ever-growing reluctance, Martin argues, until he was able to cut his ties in 1971, when the poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned by the Cuban government for counter-revolutionary writing. Vargas Llosa helped organize the furious denunciations from Left-wing writers and intellectuals in the rich world, which all but ended a period during which the European Left had extended its hand in friendship to the revolutionary government that had brought communism to within 90 miles of the United States.

But breaking with Cuba also meant breaking with the Latin American Left, and with his fellow Boom writers, who remained sympathetic to Havana to varying degrees. Vargas Llosa would never again receive a warm welcome in Latin American universities and other literary spaces where the Left held sway, a fact that would feed his resentment and, many of his defenders claim, drive him further toward the free-market Right.

By this point, Vargas Llosa had already made a similarly dramatic break in his personal life, divorcing his aunt in 1964 in order to marry his cousin. He had married his uncle Lucho’s sister-in-law, Julia, in 1955, only to leave her for his daughter, Patricia, in 1965, after falling for her while she was staying at Mario’s and Julia’s apartment in Paris. And there was more melodrama to come. On the boat back to Lima to set up his life there, accompanied by Patricia and their three children, Vargas Llosa started an affair with a fellow passenger and left his family to travel with her to the Caribbean. The romance burned out within months, but not before it set in motion the most famous punch in literary history.

Patricia returned without Mario to Barcelona, where she accepted a ride home one night from Gabriel García Márquez. When Patricia later mentioned the encounter to Mario, it left her husband seething with resentment. Loath as he would ever be to admit it, he had a controlling tendency and a jealousy reminiscent of the father whom he detested so deeply.

When Vargas Llosa and García Márquez next crossed paths, at a film premiere in Mexico City, Vargas Llosa yelled something — was it “for what you said to Patricia” or “what you did to Patricia”? — and floored him with a sucker punch. The two never spoke again. Martin reconstructs the scene and forensically weighs up the motivations, but like the mysteries in Vargas Llosa’s novels, we never get a definitive answer.

Whatever the motive, it was a gesture that belonged in the macho world of the Leoncio Prado of Vargas Llosa’s youth. Wasn’t The Time of the Hero supposed to be an indictment of that? Martin suggests the punch was Vargas Llosa playing the part of the sore loser, grasping that he had lost his long-running battle with García Márquez for first place among writers of the Boom. His next great loss would not occasion a more generous response.

By 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Vargas Llosa had decided he was going to be a candidate for president in his native Peru, which had returned to democracy after a military dictatorship. But democracy had failed to deliver on its promise, a sentiment that would become ever more widespread in Latin America over the decades to come.

Vargas Llosa’s platform promised salvation through the kind of deep cuts to state services that then represented something close to a consensus in the rich world. Having embraced the neoliberal gospel of the Eighties with gusto, and guided by Hayek and Thatcher, he was going to free Peru from the failed utopias of the past.

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Everyone told him not to — even his friend, the Mexican writer Octavio Paz. But Vargas Llosa, white and upper-class, a debonair cosmopolitan running for office in a country rancorously divided between white Lima and the poor, largely indigenous-descended inhabitants of the Amazon and the Andes, went ahead. So sure of victory, he saw no reason to wait until after the election to publish an erotic novel, In Praise of the Stepmother — a book that was better received in Paris than in Ayacucho. What Peruvians “could understand in the book disgusted them and what they could not understand humiliated and affronted them”, Martin writes.

Vargas Llosa chose to run in a coalition with two of the old politicians that Peruvians wanted to throw out, ignoring, for one thing, his promise to clean up Peru’s dirty system. He justified this decision by claiming there was not time to build a political machine of his own — not without getting in the way of his plans for his next novel, he might have added. It was a choice many political outsiders would emulate in the decades to come. Though Vargas Llosa’s novels prove he could pay close and respectful attention to the heavily indigenous population of the Peruvian Amazon, he could never entirely dismiss his disdain for the country’s Andean indigenous majority. Such attitudes were clear for anyone to see in his public appearances, helping to sway the election’s result — and were confirmed, in case anyone doubted it, in the talk in his memoir about the “savagery” of crowds of mestizo Peruvians whom he called “indistinguishable” from animals.

Vargas Llosa lost in a landslide to the “darkest of horses”, the Japanese-descended engineer Alberto Fujimori, a win that represented the dawn of a new global era in politics — the age of the Right-wing populist outsider — that would herald both maximum victory for Vargas Llosa’s neoliberal ideals and their warping into ghastly shapes.

To cope with his defeat, Vargas Llosa became Spanish. From 1991 to 2023, he wrote a column, “Touchstone”, for Spain’s El País. Vargas Llosa’s role was as a respectable Right-wing voice in this authoritative center-Left outlet. He offered his services more broadly to a country eagerly at work renovating its reputation after Franco, and reasserting its cultural influence over Latin America. Mario was there to help lend moral support to Spain against Catalan separatists and Latin American indigenists, for which he was soon rewarded with literary prizes, citizenship, and even a marquisate. He soon cast aside his long-suffering wife Patricia for a late-in-life romance with the socialite Isabel Preysler, the ex-wife of Julio Iglesias.

Through Vargas Llosa’s prime years, Martin spins a yarn worthy of his subject, sometimes withholding a bombshell detail until the moment of maximum effect, a tactic he seems consciously to borrow from Vargas Llosa himself. Martin’s politics, which place him in sympathy with the Latin American Left on which Vargas Llosa turned his back, are never hidden in this book, but they do not seem to color his judgment until near the end of the book, where he downplays the frankness with which Vargas Llosa, in his late novel, Harsh Times, addresses the calamitous impact in Guatemala of the misguided US-engineered coup against Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.

For all its insight into his works and life, at the end of this thousand-page biography Vargas Llosa remains, as Martin admits, “an immense conundrum”. In a few short pages in the New York Review of Books, the veteran journalist Alma Guillermoprieto got perhaps closer to the mark, having taken the measure of Vargas Llosa soon before he became a candidate. “I had the impression of a profoundly inhibited man”, she writes, “someone who had spent a lifetime learning that he had a right to be himself, and who, despite his effort, was still trying very hard to behave as was expected of him, to please, to avoid giving offence.”

What did the real Mario believe? Even the received story about the political message of Vargas Llosa’s literature is something of a red herring. His Nobel Prize was awarded for “his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat” against the forces of dictatorship and unfreedom. But what is arguably his greatest novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, is a story about the stony and structural corruption and unaccountability of the ruling elite of a viciously unequal country. It takes place under a dictatorship, but could just as easily have taken place during one of Peru’s periods of democracy. And it is not really about the “individual” struggles of its protagonists, who are aware these can only end in the “defeat” the Nobel committee speaks of, even saying so explicitly in the novel’s first and last sentences.

Vargas Llosa’s legacy may in fact end up being secured by the fact that his novels are to the Left of him (as the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti first said), but not in a narrowly political sense. The first Vargas Llosa novel I read, Harsh Times, impressed me with its demonstration of his gifts as a storyteller and his deep understanding of how politics works in Latin America and elsewhere. But its non-chronological structure seemed to disguise a deeper simplicity and even vulgarity: this was basically a classed-up political thriller, which used all the same exploitative tactics as a Dan Brown novel. The scripted dialog did violence to the real truth of human relationships the way works in such genres often do.

There is much to admire in Vargas Llosa’s more concertedly “serious” earlier works, and several of his later works, especially their social and political perception and frankness: virtues that will last. But I have never quite shed that first impression of him as a writer. There are, it is almost fair to say, no individuals at all in his work, no characters in the higher sense, just ones delivered straight from central casting.

Even in Conversation in the Cathedral, his vaunted formal devices (“communicating vessels” and “Chinese boxes”, he called them) are basically transparent. You can take an anti-Bildungsroman, a political thriller and a Peruvian take on Madame Bovary and riffle-shuffle them together, but that does not make you William Faulkner. The harsh truth — and Vargas Llosa loved harsh truths — is that he is closer to socially attuned but formally pedestrian writers such as Norman Mailer or John Steinbeck than to being a 20th-century, Third World successor to Flaubert or Balzac.

Martin believes that he fell short principally because Vargas Llosa did not truly love his country. And to this obstacle can be added a more serious one: the emotional, psychological and indeed simply human deficiencies of his literature. Martin mentions the “Flaubertian” high points — moments of profound emotional force — in Conversation: the deaths of the protagonist’s father and his wife. These are powerful passages indeed, but across 700 pages, they are the only two that deserve that adjective.

One of the most striking revelations in Martin’s biography was not anything scandalous about Vargas Llosa’s personal life; it was the fact that several of the scenes from Conversation in The Cathedral, which seemed like cliched inventions, were actually real episodes from his life — most memorably, Santiago’s infatuation with a Left-wing student and the ensuing romantic disappointment that leads him away from the organized Left. These passages read like a fifth-rate historical novel about the 20th-century Latin-American university Left: “I’m a Communist.” “Are you really a Communist?” “Actually I am and I’m not. Because where can you find Communists around here?” He thinks: did I fall in love then and there?

How could such an apparently formative personal experience become such lifeless literature? How could a great writer be such an emotional brick wall? Perhaps the simple truth is that Mario Vargas Llosa, having lived a soap opera of a life, could not have hoped to write in any other way.

But victory for the Albiceleste is unlikely to alter the light in which the Argentine team has come to be seen internationally in this edition of the cup — one so different from that of four years ago in Qatar. Then, the Argentines’ pluck, and their star Messi, were easy to love as they wended their way to a third world championship, a journey that ended in a thrilling final against Mbappé’s France. The country was suffering from runaway inflation and seemingly without direction under its hapless Peronist president Alberto Fernández. Argentina deserved a win, it seemed, and its team earned one.

Now, New York magazine dubs Argentina the “surprise villains” of this Cup, while The New York Times reports on how other nations hope they’ll lose. What changed? Under Javier Milei’s new management, Argentines still suffer plenty: both economically, as the effects of Milei’s shock therapy sink in, and in football, where experiencing the trials and tribulations of the national squad is a kind of civic religion. “One must suffer”, fans like to say. “Without suffering, it’s not worth it”.

With the great exception of Messi, Argentina offers little inspiration in the way of tactics or technique. But the grit of its players and fans is boundless and enviable, and as debate spreads over whether Argentina’s neighbor Brazil owes its recent footballing retreat to evangelical Protestantism’s advances, perhaps this secularized Catholic cult — the Stations of the Cross reimagined as knockout-round progression — is helping power Argentine prowess in an age when South American football struggles to compete with the money and training of the European juggernauts.

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But this gospel of suffering is mostly for domestic consumption. Abroad, perceptions of Argentina follow its association, under Milei, with Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel. Latin Americans have long chafed at some Argentines’ superior touting — neither really accurate nor welcome in principle — of their society’s European character. But the current political moment has drawn wider attention to certain darker elements in the national culture.

Back in 2022, in the woke era’s waning years, it was possible to sympathize when, after a Washington Post op-ed asked why Argentina’s national squad lacked black players, the Twitter account of Milei’s party — at the time boasting only three lawmakers — dryly responded: “Because we are a country, not a Disney movie”.

Today, posts like this appear in a more sinister aspect, as another World Cup brings out the worst in Milei’s movement, now in power. “It’s such a drag to be black these days”, top Milei aide Santiago Caputo posted after Brazil lost to Norway, drawing an ugly line under a longstanding racial animosity in some quarters toward Argentina’s northern neighbor, with its large population of African descent.

Just as Argentina’s sclerotic state comes close to resembling the caricature that libertarians elsewhere falsely imagine government to represent, a deep (if far from universal) streak of anti-black racism pervades Argentine society. It creeps into everyday language: negro de mierda (“shitty black person”) is a common term of abuse, directed at people of all races, while quilombo, a colony of runaway slaves, some of which still exist today in Brazil, is a ubiquitous term for chaos and disorder.

A World Cup whose European squads count many non-white players, symbols of the migration of recent decades, has provided further grist for the mill. For an Argentine streaming channel aligned with Milei’s movement, “population replacement” explains Germany’s footballing decline; a provincial official belonging to his party calls France “the African team”. Milei himself recently declared that Europe’s migration policies had brought it “to the brink of extermination”. It’s an irony that a country forged, like all societies in the New World, by the collision of different peoples — indigenous, Spanish, Italian, Lebanese, Jewish, to name a few — could be held up as “conservative” on questions of immigration and national homogeneity against Europe, erstwhile land of the ethnostate.

But if Argentina’s turn to the Right has colored the way the rest of the world sees the team, it has done nothing whatsoever to puncture the love that Argentines, whatever their politics, cherish for their squad. What explains that? After all, other countries in Latin America, where the Right has lately won power, have seen political polarization tear into support for the national team. Many Left-leaning Brazilians are only now returning to old habits of wearing the jerseys and waving the flag, after Jair Bolsonaro’s movement made the yellow-and-green shirt a Right-wing uniform for the better part of a decade.

This year, the same phenomenon arrived in Colombia, when Abelardo de la Espriella — now the country’s president-elect — used the national jersey at his rallies. Espriella’s socialist rival accused him of appropriating a symbol that belonged to the nation at large, and a judge banned him from wearing the shirt, though that didn’t stop him from winning Colombia’s election last month.

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How did Argentina, so long notorious for political grievances that creep into every corner of society, keep politics out of football? Winning is a universal balm, of course, but there is more to the story. The team does its best to stay out of politics, and has kept Milei at arm’s length as he tries to make the squad’s success his own. It helps that not everyone in the Argentine footballing world likes the changes Milei wants to make to the way football is regulated.

Evangelical Christianity, with its emphasis on morals and individual prosperity, is one force that draws players on the Brazilian and Colombian national squads toward Right-wing politicians — but the movement is relatively weak in Argentina, where Christianity has always been a feebler force than elsewhere in South America. Another key difference is that in Argentina, the political Left is dominated not by socialism, with its internationalist tendencies, but by nationalistic Peronism. The old grudge over the Falkland Islands — which resurfaced at the conclusion of last night’s match, when players raised a banner declaring the “Las Malvinas” rightfully belonged to Argentina — is nurtured almost more lovingly on the Peronist Left than on Milei’s Right, with its suspicious sympathies for Margaret Thatcher.

Ironically enough, one historical reason for this nationalistic unity has to do with immigration. As in the United States, socialism flourished in Argentina in the 19th century, but mainly as a second language, among recently arrived immigrants in an industrializing society. It was kept out of the political mainstream by an entrenched native elite, and when popular demands finally broke through decades later, they did so in a version shorn of international commitments. In this sense, Peronism in Argentina was Latin America’s answer to New Deal liberalism in the United States.

Whatever the causes, the effects are clear enough. Right-wing officials and the Peronist opposition jockey to see who can cheer the boys on louder, and no one has a second thought about donning the white and light blue. Countless Argentines who don’t share the views of Right-wing streamers see no reason why they should be associated with them. They want to bring home a fourth trophy, to suffer and celebrate as one. To be loved by your own is to disdain what the rest of the world thinks.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who turned 80 last year, took his chances when he ran for president in 2022 against Jair Bolsonaro and won by a whisker. It was a remarkable renaissance: he had gone from wildly popular as president in the 2000s to jail in the late 2010s with his party in tatters. But he was given far less room to maneuver this time, and while it seemed for much of last year that he would coast to victory and a fourth term in office in elections this October, now polls show him tied with Bolsonaro’s son Flávio. There is still time for him to end up as a Brazilian Biden.

Regardless of how his career ends, Lula will be remembered as an epochal figure by his enemies as much as his friends. While his politics were forged in the great social transformations and political shifts of Brazil’s 20th century, it was in the first decades of the 21st that he left his own mark on the country.

Lula was born in 1945, in the scorched hamlet of Caetés on the edge of Brazil’s northeastern sertão, a drought-stricken world little altered in many ways since the 17th century. When he was seven years old, he and his family joined the millions from their part of the country who migrated to the industrializing southeast of the country in the mid-century. This great movement of rural people from Brazil’s poorest region to its richest — and from the area most shaped by the legacy of plantation slavery to one defined more by recent European immigration — mirrored a simultaneous shift in the US: the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the factories of the Midwest and Northeast.

Dropped into the “hellish cauldron” of the workers’ shanty towns of greater São Paulo, Lula lost a finger operating a lathe and rose to the presidency of a metalworkers’ union that made history with a bold strike under the military dictatorship in the Seventies. His wife died, eight months pregnant, of undiagnosed hepatitis. His communist brother was tortured by the secret police. And the Workers’ Party (PT) that he helped found in 1980 took shape amid the legendary stuff of 20th-century Latin American history: the guerrilla fighters and radical priests of the Sixties and Seventies. The story of Lula’s rise has almost the character of a picaresque novel — with the caveat that he built his career not on the street smarts of the pícaro, but on a combination of stubbornness and openness to negotiation he learned in the union hall.

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It’s ironic, for a party so often tarred in recent years as communist and anti-family by a rising Christian politics of the Right, that it was the Catholic Church that gave the PT its start. Founded in 1980 as a non-communist labor party under constrained elections during the military dictatorship, the PT spread from the car factories of the São Paulo suburbs by taking advantage of groups like the Mothers’ Clubs — where upper-class women taught poor mothers how to knit — that the church had organized during the period of pastoral verve and laity mobilization that followed the Second Vatican Council. No other organization, public or private, had networks that went into so many poor areas. But soon, the PT did, too.

As the party grew, it picked up survivors from the guerrilla movements of the Sixties and early Seventies, which had failed completely to win support from rural populations and were easily and brutally destroyed by the military dictatorship. Many of these veterans of the armed struggle took surprisingly well to Lula’s pragmatic attitude, bent less on revolution than on winning more for workers and the poor.

After the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, in the late Eighties the PT began winning important mayoral elections, burnishing its credentials as a party that could govern. And it added new elements to its political portfolio, including environmental causes, such as the struggle of rubber tappers’ unions in the Amazon, represented by union leader Chico Mendes, to fend off illegal loggers.

In the early Nineties, Brazilian politics looked almost proto-Trumpian. President Fernando Collor was a flashily wealthy leader whose lifestyle had a certain aspirational appeal, and his political style involved creating and then abandoning successive controversies. But after Collor resigned in 1992, Brazilian politics became a contest of a sort that would strike envy into Left-of-center hearts in the developed world: one between the market-friendly social democracy of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (president 1995–2003) and the more old-fashioned, state-centric Leftism of Lula — as if elections were fought between Blair and Benn, or Clinton and Sanders, Lapper argues.

By the turn of the millennium, pundits were dismissing three-time presidential loser Lula as a relic of a vanished age of strong unions and strong states, in an age when privatization was a kind of religion for political elites. He proved them wrong in 2002 when he beat Cardoso’s handpicked successor. Amid a commodity boom powered by the rise of China, he oversaw the expansion of social programs — cash transfers for poor families and university scholarships are some of the best-known — that lifted millions from poverty without making sweeping changes to Brazil’s economic model. That, plus his success in combating deforestation, made Lula a global celebrity, drawing envious comments from Barack Obama.

Still, as Lapper notes, drawing on work by Brazilian sociologist André Singer, there was a grain of truth in the idea that Lula’s old-school social-democratic union politics was a mismatch with what was possible in the 2000s. Between his first term and his second, the core of Lula’s base shifted from the heavily industrialized southeast to the poor northeast, where a “subproletariat” showed its gratitude for the cash from social programs and newly available credit. As Lapper writes:

“Visiting poor areas in the north-east of Brazil ahead of the [2006] election it was easy to find enthusiastic support for Lula. ‘Lula is the only one who’s done anything for the poor,’ Ivandro Santos, a 33-year-old street trader told me, as he sold fruit juice and coxinhas — a minced chicken savory — in a run-down corner of Itapuã. He, his wife, and their two children were receiving monthly payments under Bolsa Família and other income-transfer programs. Helenita Santana, who earned a couple of hundred dollars a month working as a domestic servant, had been convinced to support Lula because of the broader availability of credit. She proudly showed us around her humble house in a down-at-heel neighborhood adorned with new items: a flat-screen TV, a fridge, and a DVD player that she had been able to buy in the previous couple of years.”

Lula took on a different image from that of the union leader — something more like the father of the poor, like that cultivated by contemporaneous “pink tide” Left-wing Latin American politicians like Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner or Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, though Lula’s style was always different from theirs. But that involved a slackening in his appeal to the middle classes and the rich southeast — providing an opening the right would later seize.

Things fell apart under Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, who presided over the ugly end of the 2000s commodity boom and the first stirrings of a new Right-wing politics. Corruption investigations that Dilma herself encouraged boomeranged against the PT, which still bore the stigma of scandals dating from Lula’s first term in office. Dilma was impeached in 2016, and by 2018, Bolsonaro was elected and Lula was in jail, swept up in an anticorruption drive over a luxury apartment he was said to have received as payment in kind. Even Obama turned out to be a fair-weather friend, sniping at Lula’s “scruples” in a 2020 memoir.

These developments, serious as they were, proved temporary. The anticorruption drive fell apart after it was revealed that judges had collaborated with prosecutors, and Lula, freed from jail, returned to beat Bolsonaro in 2022 — perhaps the only politician who could have done so, and by a minuscule margin.

More permanent were the deep social, cultural and political changes, long in the making, that had brought Bolsonaro to office in the first place and still threaten to undo so much of Lula’s legacy — or otherwise make the country unrecognizable to the Brazil of his youth and middle age. These form the subject of Lapper’s previous book, Beef, Bible and Bullets (2021), named after three of these forces: the rise of agribusiness and the cattle-ranching frontier in and around the Amazon— a genuine Wild West, with uncontrolled violence, sumptuous fortunes to be won and nation-altering population shifts — plus evangelical Protestantism and the security lobby (along with broad concerns about crime).

Together, Lapper’s books form a kind of inverted diptych of Brazilian politics, facing its future and past respectively. In Lula!, Lapper adeptly entwines the political blow-by-blow with the economic and social context, combining his theoretical training as a sociologist with years of experience as Latin America editor at the Financial Times to construct a highly approachable yet learned overview.

In an excellent late chapter, Lapper discusses the ways Brazil’s economy and culture have shifted towards the individual in recent years. The unionized industrial workers that formed the original core of the PT have lost relevance as Brazil deindustrializes and pivots to a service-sector model where informal and gig work is more common. Factories accounted for a third of Brazil’s output in 1980, when the PT was founded; today, the figure is only 13%.

The three biggest delivery apps counted a total of over a million workers in Brazil in 2021 — the figure is surely far larger now — and Lapper shows that working for a delivery app is often more lucrative than the minimum-wage formal jobs available to low-skilled workers. The average app worker makes over 2,500 Brazilian reais a month, about $500, while minimum wage is only 1,600 reais, a little more than $300. Lula’s plan to rebuild the country’s battered industry, construct new ones and organize app workers has come to little, as he faces a Congress dominated by the Right, and that has been empowered (since his last stint in office) to bypass him in dispensing patronage. The PT hovers on the brink of irrelevance in local politics outside its northeast fortress, depriving it of new policy ideas to scale up to the national level.

Everywhere the culture seems to be running in directions that bode ill for Lula and his party. Evangelical Protestantism is taking over the poor communities where the PT and militant Catholicism once thrived — preaching not solidarity but entrepreneurship, self-sufficiency and the “prosperity gospel”. The agribusiness boom and accompanying cowboy culture, epitomized in the wildly popular sertanejo country-music genre, have proven irresistible for young people, even in the bastions of environmentalism. In an especially striking moment, Lapper speaks to the cousin of slain rubber tapper unionist Chico Mendes in Acre state and discovers that these iconic defenders of the forest — the tappers — are now themselves cutting down trees in the reserve named after Mendes, in order to tend cattle: the very thing they had fought against for decades.

For Lapper, international diplomatic blunders accompany the mounting obstacles on the domestic front. He raps Lula’s knuckles for condemning Israel over slaughter in Gaza and assigning part of the blame to the Ukrainians for war with Russia. From the remove of 2026, this seems unfair. The Ukraine comments, however clumsy, reflected Lula’s hopes of mediating the conflict — and on Gaza, Lula was nearer to the mark than Europe wanted to admit. International consensus is only now starting to catch up to him.

The question on many observers’ minds as October’s election approaches is whether Brazilian politics will continue to track US politics on a two-year lag, as it has done (very roughly) for much of the last decade. In 2018, two years after Donald Trump was elected in the US, Jair Bolsonaro won the presidency in Brazil. In 2022, two years after Biden’s victory, Lula narrowly beat Bolsonaro, whose reputation was damaged during the pandemic. In 2023, two years after January 6, 2021, Bolsonaro supporters invaded the seat of government in Brasília.

Last year, Brazil diverged from the American script. Lula struck a bargain with Brazil’s political establishment in other branches of government — including Right-wing heads of Congress and the Supreme Court — to insist on firm rejection of bolsonarismo’s anti-democratic drift. Where the cases against Trump fell apart, one after another, clearing the way for his triumphant return, Brazilian authorities pressed the cases against Bolsonaro, sentencing him last September to 27 years in jail.

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Bolsonaro is beyond rescue

By Christopher de Bellaigue

Since then, many liberal Americans have looked to Brazil as an example of what their country should have done with Trump when they had the chance. “Brazil Just Succeeded Where America Failed,” argued two professors in the New York Times after Bolsonaro’s sentence came down. Last month, Vox published a major feature by Zack Beauchamp on “How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks.” Many Brazilians are happy to agree.

But the story in Brazil is hardly over. Things may still go the way they did in the US — and on schedule. War in Iran jeopardizes Brazil’s vital fertilizer imports and could tip the country into recession if the conflict drags on (although higher gas prices stand to benefit the country, a major producer). At home, a major scandal over ties between Brazilian institutions and an alleged fraudster who headed up a liquidated bank is battering the Brazilian Supreme Court, including the reputation of the justice, Alexandre de Moraes, who led the efforts to block election meddling and punish Bolsonaro and his allies for plotting a coup. Should Moraes fall, the anti-Bolsonaro bargain that took shape in 2022 could collapse.

Victory for Flávio, amnesty for his father and their allies, and an overall Trump 2.0 scenario for Brazil — i.e., return of the populist Right, strengthened and bent on revenge — all of it looks distinctly possible. Much of the progressive legislation on the books in Brazil, some of it thanks to the PT, some the product of the 1988 constitution itself, could go on the chopping block. The chaos and impotence of the Bolsonaro administration may be remembered as a mere foretaste of more serious things to come, in an inversion of Marx’s dictum — first as farce, then as tragedy (for the Left, at least).

Or Lula may win a fourth mandate this October, beating out Bolsonaro’s son Flávio and ensuring their family remains on the sidelines of Brazilian politics for another four years. He is more vigorous than Biden was at the end of his term — as he is eager to demonstrate in carefully arranged videos showing him jogging, beachgoing and partying at Carnival. The economy is doing relatively well. Lula has been dismissed as a walking museum piece before and has proven his doubters wrong. But the longer-term future still looks bleak for the Left, which has few, if any, potential successors with comparable stature and electoral appeal. Barring an unforeseen shift, one vision of Brazil will be buried with Lula, and a very different one is already waiting in the wings.

Did the spirit of the decade, first liberal and optimistic and later radical and enraged, die with the assassination of JFK in 1963, or of Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968? Did it end with the bloody Democratic convention in Chicago later that year? Or with the disastrous Altamont concert at the very end of the decade? For Joan Didion, it was the Manson murders: “the Sixties,” she wrote, “ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.”

A common move in this game, one made by François Furet, is to claim that the revolution in question never ended. And one can certainly make such an argument about the legacy of the Sixties in American life and domestic politics — on issues ranging from race to immigration, environmentalism, drugs and the politics of sexuality. Shorn of its radicalism, Sixties liberalism and its descendants have in many ways become a hegemonic governing worldview on issues like gay rights or drug legalization. Moments of conservative retrenchment like the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which forbade gay marriage, or the Reagan-era War on Drugs, have proved temporary (at least within American borders, in the latter case).

Today, even solidly red states such as Ohio and Missouri have legalized marijuana as the old moralizing stigma around the drug has vanished, and the Republican administration is now planning to reclassify the drug under a less restrictive category. Gay marriage is the law of the land, codified in 2022 with 39 Republican votes in the House, and the Trump administration has the most openly gay officials of any Republican administration in history.

A better answer, though, to the question of when the Sixties ended may be — right now.

At one level, the reasons to think so are obvious. Where past Republican administrations have held back, Trump has dealt fierce blows to the liberal factions, clamping down on immigration, targeting minority preferences and tearing up Biden’s green energy and transgender policies. The private sector has gone along with him too, with universities shuttering DEI offices en masse for fear of losing their federal money, Wall Street jettisoning ESG, and trans clinics closing their doors.

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How to save the Democrats

By Henry Tonks

Regarding America’s enduring racial inequalities, there is a sense of a cycle closing. Sixties liberals were too slow to realize that guaranteeing legal rights does not resolve material inequalities, discovering to their confusion and chagrin that neither civil rights nor the massive legal bureaucracy it originated abolished black poverty and discontent. Affirmative action — the awkward concession that took shape in the wake of their too-late realization, still today the centerpiece of liberalism’s remedy for racial inequality — reached new heights in the 2010s and early 2020s, and now has been brought violently to earth by the Supreme Court and the Trump administration.

All these things might be reversible under a future Democratic administration. But at the same time, a bitter split within liberalism has opened up on several fronts, putting a possible restoration in doubt — and, ironically, mirroring some of the events of the Sixties. Like Vietnam before it, Gaza broke liberalism into two, setting young pro-Palestinian Democrats against their pro-Israel seniors across media, academia, activism and politics. For the first time in more than a decade, liberal divisions could not be papered over, and just as before, the resulting acrimony and disaffection helped deliver power into the hands of the Right, which ironically took the lead in tamping down the very conflict that brought the split into the open.

The discontent goes beyond foreign policy — in fact, criticism from liberals has started to weaken consensus on several of the topics where the legacy of the Sixties appears most solid. Drug legalization is a good example. No less weighty a liberal voice than The New York Times editorial board stated a few weeks ago that “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem”. “More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol,” the article states, citing the 2.8 million who suffer annually from a painful vomiting condition caused by smoking marijuana, and the helplessness of the authorities to combat a wave of people driving high. The Atlantic last year struck a similar note when it published an article contending that “Legal Weed Didn’t Deliver on Its Promises”.

This discomfort within the bastions of liberalism comes as marijuana has exploded in popularity and potency. Its users have grown sevenfold since the turn of the millennium, and the American landscape has become dotted with billboards advertising the drug and its derivatives. Weed is suffering from its own success, and no one has any ideas for what to do now. Few advocate a return to the old prohibitionist regime, but there is a growing awareness that haphazard legalization gave rise to a massive vice industry without eradicating illegal dealers, weakening promised tax revenues and putting an ever more powerful drug in the hands of everyone from teenagers to seniors. That bodes ill for the strand of political thought that, since the Sixties, has advocated for the liberalization of drug laws. It is surely true that a more competent rollout of legal weed would have brought better results, but the damage is done.

Deinstitutionalization is another issue where a previously ironclad — and in this case bipartisan — Sixties-ist consensus seems to be breaking down, even if the structural reality seems, at this point, difficult to alter. The reasons for closing down America’s abuse-laden mental institutions from the Sixties onward had seemed obvious. They were cruel and they were expensive to run. New drugs seemed to offer a technological fix for the social problem of mental illness.

In the undeniably grim and often dangerous reality on America’s streets and public spaces — most dangerous for sufferers from mental illnesses left to languish there — lies the bleak harvest of that hope. The killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway in 2023 occasioned reflection in The New Yorker on “the system that failed” him: the cash-strapped psychiatric system that discharges patients before their condition can be meaningfully improved and the “alphabet soup” of outreach groups, dedicated yet overwhelmed and uncoordinated, that failed to keep him from making the angry outburst on the subway that prompted Daniel Penny to put him in a deadly chokehold.

“Slipped through the cracks” is the term that is often used for these cases — but who imagines that the archipelago of nonprofits, hospitals, jails and courts offers any substitute for the long-term mental institutions they replaced? As studies on “psychiatric boarding” and rates of mental illness in jails and on the streets indicate, and as any regular rider of the New York City subway can tell you, the system is all cracks.

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Is Newsom man enough to win?

By Matt Feeney

In a recent Times opinion article, a psychotherapist describes how the authorities are unable or unwilling to keep her child from risking harm to himself and others on the streets. “We do not need to return to the large, abusive psychiatric asylums of the past,” she writes, “but the law has swung so far toward individual autonomy that the concept of ‘do no harm’ has all but vanished… Being left to die on the street is not freedom.”

The old Sixties-era convictions about the rampant abuse and unnecessary coercion involved in the old mental institutions might still be with us, yet no one believes anymore in the old remedy. Here too, there’s little sense of a way forward: the Right does not want to pay for more psychiatric beds, and the Left does not want to force anyone to stay in them.

On environmental review, on the other hand, liberalism’s break with the Sixties has become decisive and unapologetic. Advocates like Ezra Klein lead the charge for “abundance”, which assails environmental review and aims to cast aside this key plank of Environmentalism 1.0 (as well as the unions that have traditionally been a key element in the Democratic coalition), in an effort to escape the stagnancy in which blue states have been mired. Klein’s California is not alone in finding itself unable to construct ambitious public projects, build adequate quantities of housing for its population or achieve the green energy buildout necessary for Environmentalism 2.0.

Here there is a clearer idea of a remedy for the ills bequeathed to us by the Sixties, though not, at least as of yet, the political constituency to accomplish it. Developers would doubtless be delighted, but a building frenzy would involve casting aside the by-now long-entrenched class compact in blue states, where rich homeowners agree to pay high taxes and receive paltry state services in exchange for the appreciation in home values that is the inevitable consequence of not building. Abrogate that pact, dysfunctional as it clearly is, and wealthy lawyers in blue-state suburbs, faced with high-rises breaking ground across the street, will swallow their pride and move to Florida.

The abundance liberals are right, however, to think that elements of Sixties liberalism (as opposed to Sixties radicalism) deserve to share in the blame for America’s hollowed-out state capacity, for having set up elaborate roadblocks to government action. While they were not anti-statist in the way of the neoliberals who succeeded them, the decade’s liberals went all in on anti-institutional thinking while taking little account of the institutions they created. One of their major themes was that government — at least when it builds nuclear plants, or runs mental institutions, or forbids drugs, or makes war in Vietnam — is bad. The reply articulated in much of the current liberal backlash is that government that does bad things may be preferable to government that is capable of doing nothing at all.

In retrospect, now seems like the most likely time for the Sixties to truly end, as the Baby Boomers who dominated the political, media, academic and business establishment for decades, and whose worldview was deeply shaped by that decade, have grudgingly begun to retire from public office. The best way to move on is not by rejecting the decade wholesale, which would be impossible and morally wrong. Instead, we should reevaluate its legacy, discarding what has served its purpose and reclaiming what has been neglected but shouldn’t have been.

Most importantly, liberals should shed their fear of the state, a feeling that became a dogmatism in the Eighties and Nineties but that had its first stirrings in the Sixties-era anti-system posture, and which exists among both the Left and the center, from “defund the police” to Joe Manchin’s insistent gutting of Biden-era legislation. Doing so will help dispel some of the confusion over what to do about the miscarriage of projects like drug legalization and help Democratic cities reclaim key governance functions from the expensive and incompetent potpourri of nonprofits which often exercise them today. In doing so, liberals can draw from a parallel legacy of the Sixties, one that has had far fewer legatees in subsequent decades: the Great Society program of welfare-state expansion under Lyndon Johnson, which gave the country healthcare for the old and food for the poor. Young Leftists such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani have learned this lesson already, proclaiming that “there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about”. Mamdani has a difficult task in managing a Right ready to blame him for disorder and a Left-wing base deeply skeptical of police. But if challenges like these prove manageable, perhaps a new and less dysfunctional approach to government can rise from the ashes of Sixties liberalism.