WHERE‘S THE REVOLUTION

It’s no news that the entire world is undergoing some sort of crisis of democracy. It’s as if principles we adopted way back and have been polishing and upgrading ever since the Age of Enlightenment are being thrown out of the window at the speed of a piece of fake news being shared on social media. Some fundamental rights that we deemed absolutely unbreakable were now being bent. You could quote the “eternal vigilance” line. And I won’t dispute the world today faces challenges that were not there some 2 or 3 centuries ago. And in some sort of twisted seesaw of politics, people are being polarized against each other. But the rise of the “alt-right” (just a rebranding of what had been happening here in Germany circa 1920’s and 1930’s) is worrisome. The book “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt is the base of what I’m talking about here. If you haven’t read it (or don’t have time to), just watch this review. It’s somewhat based on American democracy, but it draws examples from everywhere and several periods in history. If democracy in the US is in danger, imagine countries with still young democratic periods like Brazil, Poland, Hungary…

I could make an ever-growing list of jabs and uppercuts democracy suffered in just a couple of years. But I’ll just name drop Brexit and Trump before moving to the current Brazilian president. You can all say all three were democratically chosen.  But all three had shady events surrounding them. Brexit, for exemple, in my opinion, is something you shouldn’t even put up for vote. It’s like having a referendum on bringing back slavery, ending marriage equality or human rights altogether. You just don’t. We’re not supposed to be going backwards. Yet we are.

Now, my home country is being governed by a dude who sold himself as an outsider, despite having been a congressman for nearly 30 years. He openly praises the military dictatorship the country freed itself from in 1985. Ironically, he had to retire form the army before he could suffer some severe punishment for insubordination. The reason? He was an active voice for a raise in the armed forces’ salaries and threatened to bomb away water reservoirs that serve Rio de Janeiro if his demands were not met (yes, you read that right, just plain terrorism). Between being punished in a first trial and appealing form this decision, he retired and back then it got swept under the rug as he first got elected as a city counselor in 1988. He defines himself as the voice of the right wing in Brazil and won, basically, because he antagonized against the left-wing Workers’ Party (who also has its big share of skeletons in the closet). But he is, in a way, a union leader for the military. Much like his biggest opponent, former presidente Luís Inácio Lula da Silva rose to power for being a union leader and founder of the Workers’ Party.

But that was 30 years ago. Fast forward to the beginning of this decade and he went from just local nut that Rio de Janeiro sent to the Congress every 4 years to some sort of troll which we fed and now we have to deal with. In 2013, there was a certain turmoil in Brazil as people started to realize the World Cup and the Olympics were NOT gonna leave “the legacy” politicians spoke so proudly of in their speeches. It started as protests against a raise in the bus fares in major cities, but it soon escalated to protests “against-all-of-what’s-going-on”. Without any centralized command, the Brazilian alt-right also surfed on these protests. The Workers’ Party government (now under president Dilma Rousseff) was caught short with its pants down and did too little, too late. She got reelected a year later in an election that never really ended. She won, but the Congress was no longer on her side. Along with a massive corruption scandal involving her party (but not her and not just her party), they came up with some technicality that didn’t even exist and ousted her in 2016 with hopes to also halt the investigation where it was. Too many politicians had been waking up with the police on their doors with arrest warrants. Her vice president, Michel Temer, took over, however, his political capital turned into ashes as he was also caught in a secret recording negotiating shush money to members of his party that were already in jail. He gave up any positive agenda in exchange of not being ousted himself. Pointless. He is also in jail right now, by the way, since he’s no longer president. So the country was drifting ashore these 4 years between the last election and this one. The price drop in commodities was not managed by anyone. The country starts to dwindle further down into economical crisis along with the political one. We have to blame someone. And we have to find a hero who will come and save us. Who will know how to take up these roles? Who is gonna walk in their shoes?

So this was the recipe: blame it all on the previous government. Demonize them. And sell yourself as the remedy for that. Adopt the most populist speech you can. Can you talk about economy, pension reform, tax reform, or human rights without sounding like the ignorant you are? No? No problem! A convenient stab on your bowels during the ONLY day in your campaign that you were not wearing a bullet proof vest will guarantee you won’t have to open your dirty mouth during the campaign or attend any debater have to speak to journalists. Add some fake news in a context where social media played a major role for the first time (yes, they were there before, but this time people didn’t bother with conventional media – their messiah was talking to them from the hospital bed directly to their phones on their hands). Communication only goes in one way. You don’t listen. They have to listen to you. And that’s how we got where we are.

This post is already too long, so I’m giving you a break for now. But we’ll resume on this topic sometime soon, you patriotic junkies.