Last night, I rang up a few politically savvy friends in Brazil to ask their impressions of what is happening in Brazil. My concern is that the English-language renderings of events there were being too closely read through the U.S. experience and thus distorting the main narrative.
What I found was the opposite. If anything, my Brazilian friends gave me a rendering that more closely tracks the U.S. experience with the same, except (as usual) with a bit more drama. At some point, I just had to laugh at how much politics in Brazil today reads like a more exciting version of the U.S. case.
Begin with the furor we saw over the weekend, with a mass storming of the presidential palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Yes, they are supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro and they doubt the fairness of the election that elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who took office a week ago. More broadly, the wild actions reflect tremendous public discontent with the political system in general. They rally around Bolsonaro as the best symbol at hand.
But of course Bolsonaro has now been labeled as “far right”—even in mainstream American media stories—in part because of his friendship with Trump but also because he did his best to dial back the push for COVID lockdowns in Brazil nearly three years ago. The president has limited power to control the states, many of which pursued a hard lockdown despite Bolsonaro’s more laissez-faire approach.
No one has successfully established any statistical relationship between lockdowns and lowered deaths over the long term. One might suppose this undeniable reality would be a grave source of embarrassment to the champions of China-style virus mitigation that even China itself has now abandoned! But at this point in history, facts do not matter in politics anymore. The left—implausibly as it may seem—all over the world has seized on the willingness to lock down society as a litmus test of ideological attachment.
Which is to say that the only real consistent marker of left-wing politics in most places in the world concerns only the willingness to deploy brutal tactics to suppress people’s freedoms. Who precisely is the fascist, then?
Regardless, because Bolsonaro was not the biggest fan of lockdowns, because this is Brazil and so lacks the filter of American politics, the left has further claimed that he is guilty of “genocide.” Incredibly, that label has actually stuck!
Consider for a moment how strange this is: if you believe that government should engage in totalitarian measures for a virus that somehow grants you a passing grade from the left. However, if you prefer to preserve civil liberties and human rights to speak and associate even during a pandemic that somehow gets you branded with the moniker “far right.” It’s utterly bizarre and historians somehow will be scratching their heads about that!
But as with the U.S. case, so too in Brazil did the pandemic give the excuse for a huge shift in voting rules in Brazil which enabled a mass use of mail-in ballots and other shenanigans that have raised serious questions about the accuracy of ballot counts. And many people believe that the pandemic was used therefore to install a fake president in place of the legitimate winner of the election. No one can prove this of course but the point is there: there is a huge loss of trust.
This is why these protestors are doubting the fairness of the election results and insist that Bolsonaro is the legitimate president. But they are being decried by the Brazilian media as “far right” and fascists and so on—all predictable labels that have been deployed in the U.S. context over the past two years.
And of course they are also being called “insurrectionists” who are trying to overthrow a legitimately elected government. In this case, there is perhaps a sense in which it is true. It is certainly more true in this instance than it was in the U.S. case of January 6.
And of course, they have failed to achieve their aims and instead given the Lula regime the ideal pretext for further crackdown, which is exactly what has happened only one day after the upheaval. There have already been mass arrests and there will be months of witch hunts that will ensnare ever more. And every tool will be used, from facial recognition technology to digital surveillance.
A big structural difference between the United States and Brazil concerns the Supreme Court, which in Brazil is aggressively political and cares nothing for the civil liberties that Americans expect to be part of the legal core of American life. The Supreme Court in Brazil has wholly approved of censorship, surveillance, and mass spying along the model established by China. As a result, the Lula crackdown will likely succeed and the jails will be overthrowing with political dissidents.
This will go on for two more years but will give further life to the genuine dissident movement in this country and eventually lead to a victory over the left, just as it will in the U.S. case. The left in both countries has become so aggressive, so totalitarian in its tactics, so intense in its crackdowns on free speech and free association that every civilized country over the long term will have to reject their political parties and candidates lest they end up like China.
This is well known in Brazil. So the blowback being fomented by the Lula administration now will only create another blowback in a few years that will bring back not only Bolsonaro but many other political leaders that will rally around basic freedoms as the core of the good life. But in this process, the major media will fight at every step and seek to brand any non-left movement or candidate as a “fascist” and “insurrectionist” and otherwise dox and denounce them. But over time this will wear thin as it becomes perfectly obvious that the left offers only more economic decline and more government controls.
On this point, he was precisely right. I would say prophetic but actually it was perfectly obvious at the time what kind of global disaster was unfolding. Many people saw it at the time.
And here we are with the results. People no longer trust once respected institutions, from academia to corporate leadership. Public health is discredited and so is the major media in most countries, which is so biased and so obviously captured.
Politicians can no longer take office without mass suspicion that the vote was rigged. In democratic countries, there are movements alive that see no recourse to changing the system other than storming official buildings and making their voices heard, but that quite often ends in crackdowns and other forms of intensified political oppression.
As America goes, apparently, so goes Brazil. All the dissidents are really asking in both countries is that neither country goes the way of China.
