Missionary populism against nativist populism: The debate between Olavo de Carvalho and Alexander Dugin

Abstract

The present article discusses populism and the far-right, suggesting that these issues should not be studied in hermetic, per se, fields. It is proposed that populism could be a thinner or thicker ideology, while far-right should be divided into analytical sub-fields. Since adjacent topics, such as nationalism, can also be thinner or thicker, the idea is to study both themes intertwining these adjacent topics. The aim is to clarify keenly one of the most important points in populism, the ‘people’. What the ‘people’ really is, varies widely from case to case, and according to the article at hand, also within the far-right phenomena. Thus, studies on right-wing populisms should be undertaken by assuming populism as a secondary feature of these phenomena, due to various styles of right-wing politics and the respective types of society, or ‘people’, they aim to maintain. To demonstrate this, the main differences between the ideological lines of Brazilian author Olavo de Carvalho and Russian author Alexander Dugin are elucidated, analysing specifically their debate-turned-book that attracted strong interest internationally. Most evidently, the Olavist right-wing thought recovers the American Christian Right ideology, while, in contrast, Dugin’s nativist ideologies aim at a world divided into ethno-cultural spaces.