Everything Changes While Nothing Changes In Brazil

It’s all kind of anticlimactic, given dramatic recent events, but things don’t change drastically overnight just because a lot of people stormed Congress.

Up until now, I’ve been relying on Ommar Fabian of The Organic Prepper website for analysis and insight into recent events in Brazil. By now, you should be aware of how important I regard events in the world’s seventh-largest country by population due to it’s presence in the Western Hemisphere and the commonalities shared between it and the United States. Of course, the deeper you dig, the more differences you find. Still, parallels of greater relevance are going to come from a country like Brazil than from a European country, to which the U.S. is almost always compared, mostly inaccurately, without a second thought.

Today, I want to get a second opinion from Alexander Loengarov, a scholar at the University of Leuven in Belgium. Unlike Fabian, Loengarov isn’t Brazilian, but what he lacks in terms of a lived, man-on-the-ground experience, he offers a big-picture perspective, to use his own words, to show what’s happening in Brazil, though concerning, isn’t some dramatic departure from the past. He shares his thoughts in an article written for The National Interest, one of the world’s premier foreign policy and national security magazines.

First, he explains what the political climate in Brazil is like:

In the run-up to the January 1 inauguration of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva to his third term as president, it was not surprising to hear supporters of his adversary, Jair Bolsonaro, claim that the situation in the country was getting out of hand. The fact that Brazilians were eager to comment and share their views could be seen as a sign of a healthy democracy. Nevertheless, public and social discourse seemed very polarized—also through amplification by contemporary media platforms—and, in some cases, drove wedges between family members and friends. While certain aspects of this state of affairs may be similar to other countries, it is useful to zoom out from the recent presidential election and look at the bigger picture of Brazil’s past and present.

Hmm. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Brazilian media is difficult to access unless you speak Portuguese, so I can’t tell how it compares to American media. However, it seems Brazil is suffering from a level of partisanship similar to what we’re suffering here. Hyper-polarization is oft-cited as cause for concern, but I also believe, on some level, it’s just something that happens in a democracy. When people are allowed to have their say, there’s going to be millions of different opinions out there and those opinions all need to sort themselves out, somehow. We value our individualism, but we also seek safety in numbers.

How do we sort ourselves out? More from Loengarov:

In a speech to the public following his investiture in the National Congress, Lula repeatedly struck a conciliatory tone, stating that “there are no two Brazils” and that all Brazilians belong to one country. While a seasoned politician like Lula is certainly aware of the responsibilities that come with the highest public office, it is probably also his real intention to improve national consensus during his term. In democratic countries worldwide, it is not unusual to see left- and right-wing governments alternate, especially in states with presidential and/or majority-based systems. As a result, a certain bifurcation of the political landscape is not uncommon. However, Brazil, like most Latin American countries, has always been characterized by sharp socio-economic gaps, often resulting in clear divisions in the political realm. [bold mine]

Again, this should sound familiar. The irony of countries like Brazil and the U.S. is that there are hundreds of millions of differing viewpoints and plenty of venues for people to express their sentiments, yet everyone ends up picking one of two sides. This is likely just the nature of the political system, but it’s also likely the result of underlying issues that divide the populace in the first place. In much of Latin America, it’s socio-economics, as Loengarov explains, but in the U.S. and the Anglosphere, the divide is cultural. Politics are, in some ways, a vehicle for manifesting our differences, as opposed to the differences themselves. If the story of Brazil and Latin America is one of the “haves vs. the have-nots,” the story of the U.S. and the Anglosphere has consistently been one of “who are we?” as a country.

More:

In truth, Brazil faces a more fundamental problem: a lack of societal cohesion, as well as a clear need to strengthen a sense of shared responsibility among the public. Indeed, while most Brazilians do not appear to lack a sense of national identity, in practice, their belonging to the nation takes forms that can be as different as night and day. Access to education, jobs, and leisure, as well as health and nutrition, can be extremely different from one Brazilian to the other, impacting one’s day-to-day for a lifetime. In such a situation, it is not unsurprising that individuals are less inclined to see themselves and their actions as part of a larger society. It is not uncommon to hear Brazilians refer to the social and political situation in their country by quipping that “in Brazil, laws are Swiss, yet the population is Brazilian.” While this tendency is particularly striking in the light of the usual Brazilian amiability in interpersonal contacts, it affects political and economic powers in their decision-making, as well as people in their daily lives. Many of Brazil’s pains—corruption, violence, and ecological challenges—are linked to it.

Once more, what ails Brazil is what ails America. A lack of social cohesion and the absence of a shared sense of responsibility has been an ongoing problem throughout our history, though some of this can be attributed to the fact that nationalism has always been something of a work in progress in the U.S. Perhaps the same can be said of Brazil. Both countries have massive, diverse populations. It’s not easy to cultivate a sense of nationhood, commonality, and shared destiny with so many different people. At some point, for this relationship to continue, we’ll need to decide what, if anything, we have in common and whether it’s enough to hold it all together.

I recommend you read the entire article to receive Loengarov’s complete argument. He seems to have an ambivalent sense of where Brazil is headed, on one hand seeing that democracy isn’t in any more or less danger than it was before the election of Lula da Silva, while also seeing that Brazil’s problems are more or less intractable and well beyond the capacity of Lula or Bolsonaro before him to resolve. It’s all kind of anticlimactic, given dramatic recent events, but things don’t change drastically overnight just because a lot of people stormed Congress.

Or does it? As Ommar Fabian warned, civil liberties are now under threat in Brazil in the wake of the events of 1/8. Perhaps they always intended to be curtailed by the emerging regime in Brasilia, but 1/8 certainly gave them a perfect excuse for doing so, emphasizing the costliness and self-destructiveness of the riot.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady explains:

Video of the smashing and trashing of federal government offices in Brasilia is apparently a horror show too good to waste on Brazilians alone. Since those who descended on the capital were backers of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Trump-style former president, there are easy points to be scored against the Donald. The working narrative is that the Brazilian democracy is under threat from a populist right inspired by the 45th U.S. president.

This may be convenient for hammers that want to nail Mr. Trump. But it misses the imminent danger to liberty now lurking in Brazil: a Supreme Court that is gagging its critics, freezing their assets and even jailing some, all without due process.

The Jan. 8 events deserve unequivocal condemnation. Bringing those responsible for the destruction of government property to justice is a fundamental responsibility of the state. Failure to disabuse vandals of the idea that their sense of disenfranchisement is justification for violence will lead to more of it.

But spare me the pearl-clutching in Washington. The claim that the Brasilia riot is the fruit of Jan. 6, 2021, smacks of selective moralizing. When hard-left extremists vandalized Colombia for months in 2021, I don’t recall the D.C. chattering classes blaming it on the summer 2020 rampages linked to Black Lives Matter in the U.S.

Mobs sent to the streets, either from the right in Brazil or from the left as is happening now in Peru, threaten representative government. But liberty can also be strangled from within the government.

If democracy is under threat from anyone, it’s more likely to be from the state than it is from political dissidents. It’s also likely to be threatened more by dissidents who have state-backing, like Black Lives Matter, than from those who have no state support. I’ve been critical of our own 1/6 Capitol riot, but I’m also never going to pretend like it was the greatest assault on our democracy ever. It wasn’t and anyone who thinks so is drunk with the Regime’s Kool-Aid.

O’Grady is troubled where all this is headed for Brazil:

I have long held that the memory of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-85) and its robust political economy, free press and civil society would be enough to keep the country from backsliding into one-party rule. Now I’m not so sure.

We often hear about “democratic backsliding” in America - there’s even a Wikipedia article dedicated to the topic - but it’s something of a misnomer, since we’ve never been anything other than a democracy. For the U.S. to become authoritarian would be a first and, though we all have our ideas about what it’d look like, nobody really knows for sure. I believe the U.S. will become an authoritarianism at least once during my lifetime, but until it actually happens, I’d rather give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.

Brazil, on the other hand, has been an authoritarianism once before within living memory. In retrospect, the military dictatorship described by O’Grady was just a moment in an over 200-year period, yet if you told a Brazilian in the 1960s the regime would relinquish power in 20 years, I don’t know how many would’ve believed you. Outside the global East, authoritarianism tends to not last very long, though this doesn’t really mean much in the context of a human lifetime. A lot can happen in 20 years, as I’m certain all of us Americans would agree.

O’Grady explains why Lula da Silva is such a controversial figure and why his return to office is received with great hostility by millions of Brazilians:

Starting around 2007 President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva and his Workers’ Party orchestrated the largest corruption scheme in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The Brazilian construction company Odebrecht was at the center of it all and even had a bribery department. Lots of people in business and government went to jail for padding contracts and kickbacks that robbed the public purse of billions of dollars—and for money laundering. Lula, who was convicted in 2017, was one of them.

Brazilians were relieved, believing that justice, even for the powerful, was finally possible. They were mistaken. In 2021 the Supreme Court vacated Lula’s conviction on a technicality. He was released and cleared to run for president, though he was never exonerated. He defeated Mr. Bolsonaro and took office Jan. 1.

Many Brazilians continue to consider him a thief who avoided justice because the high court played politics. On independent news platforms, in social media and in private chat groups, his crimes remain a hot topic.

It’s really not a matter of petty politics. Millions of Brazilians fear and loathe Lula’s return to power because he really was that bad. It’s difficult for Americans to relate because we don’t hold our politicians accountable at all, whereas the Brazilians at least tried. But just imagine a president going to jail for serious crimes, only to be released on a technicality, then being voted back into power. Would you feel better or worse about “democracy” in your country? Would the word have any meaning left to it?

It’s not just Lula Brazilians are concerned about. In fact, the greatest threat to Brazil’s liberty may not even come from Lula himself:

This doesn’t sit well with Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has a pronounced authoritarian streak. Under his leadership as head of the electoral tribunal, which governed the campaign and the election year, a resolution was passed to criminalize “misinformation” and “fake news” even though there is no such law.

In The New York Times, Jack Nicas wrote a long article explaining why de Moraes’ actions are viewed with both glee and derision:

As a result, in the face of antidemocratic attacks from Brazil’s former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters, Mr. de Moraes cleared the way for the transfer of power. To many on Brazil’s left, that made him the man who saved Brazil’s young democracy.

Yet to many others in Brazil, he is threatening it. Mr. de Moraes’s aggressive approach and expanding authority have made him one of the nation’s most powerful people, and also put him at the center of a complicated debate in Brazil over how far is too far to fight the far right.

He has jailed people without trial for posting threats on social media; helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison for threatening the court; ordered raids on businessmen with little evidence of wrongdoing; suspended an elected governor from his job; and unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of posts on social media, with virtually no transparency or room for appeal.

In the hunt for justice after the riot this month, he has become further emboldened. His orders to ban prominent voices online have proliferated, and now he has the man accused of fanning Brazil’s extremist flames, Mr. Bolsonaro, in his cross hairs. Last week, Mr. de Moraes included Mr. Bolsonaro in a federal investigation of the riot, which he is overseeing, suggesting that the former president inspired the violence.

His moves fit into a broader trend of Brazil’s Supreme Court increasing its power — and taking what critics have called a more repressive turn in the process.

Many legal and political analysts are now sparring over Mr. de Moraes’s long-term impact. Some argue that his actions are necessary, extraordinary measures in the face of an extraordinary threat. Others say that, acting under the banner of safeguarding democracy, he is instead harming the nation’s balance of power.

“We cannot disrespect democracy in order to protect it,” said Irapuã Santana, a lawyer and legal columnist for O Globo, one of Brazil’s biggest newspapers.

When even NYT suggests yes, one can go too far in fighting the far-right, perhaps there’s substance to the argument. A big part of the problem is how self-reinforcing it all becomes: we have to upend democracy to fight the anti-democrats. Maybe on some level this argument makes sense, but there’s no consensus on when upending democracy is appropriate and against whom. Without that, it turns into an existential, zero-sum struggle between autocrats.

I don’t want to get too philosophical, but I often wonder if maybe none of us are really as committed to democracy as we like to believe. Sure, we want everyone to vote - as long as they vote as we would. If given the choice, we’d rather our side retain power permanently and we’d be hard-pressed to give it away. Sometimes, things get so bad, we’d rather an autocrat simply force the issue on our behalf instead of having it go through some bureaucratic process that ends with nothing changing in the end. The deeper a crisis gets, the stronger these feelings become.

Brazil’s problems aren’t necessarily our problems, but I think what’s happening down there is a sign of what’s to come here. The 2024 presidential election is certain to be the most contentious of my lifetime and what happens is going to be a serious stress test of how resilient the system is. I’m not anticipating a political crisis that results in the dissolution of the union, but I am anticipating a crisis that could take us down a road similar to that of Brazil. The United States will remain united, just as Brazil and its constituent states remain united.

However, we’ll all find ourselves more isolated by the divisions which are certain to deepen, and come to the realization that, at some point, we might just have to pick a side. We might also begin to wonder if maybe democracy isn’t the answer and we need people in power who can simply “get things done.” Sure, we’ll still pay due lip service to democracy - you can bet the Democrats will call everything they do “democracy” and everything Republicans do “authoritarianism.” Yet about the only aspect of our system that’ll remain democratic is voting. Otherwise, we’ll be expected to keep our mouths shut and allow the “adults in the room,” the “experts,” whatever term the intelligentsia wants to use, to do the governing. If they want our opinion, I’m sure they’ll ask for it.

But hey, we’ve got at least a full year before things really start getting crazy. Enjoy the relative tranquility while we still have it.

Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.

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