The Danger of Ridicule: Cultural War and public policies of the Bolsonaro government

by Karine Rodrigues Firmino, Master’s candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil.

Translated by Karoline Rodrigues Firmino

Reviewed by Matheus Lucas Hebling

 

Authoritarianism, in a sort of symbiosis with radical groups, has been arising in the world exponentially in the last years, with little attention or effort to the facts that flood the news. We can analyze and compare it with the most common and visible indicators of liberal democracy according to the pareadign of western societies.

As all the social questions, there is a myriad of combined and intricate elements that we can only didactically separate to put some order on the reasoning of the social motifs of contemporary life, politics, and disputes that irradiate to all areas of our shared lives and in all the edges of the possibilities of who we are on the political, cultural and economic grounds.

Advances in telecommunications have accelerated the temporary sensation itself, as well as creating a world that changes rapidly and where the uncertainty of the future is magnified. In the economic sphere, work becomes increasingly precarious and rare, and full employment is practically a mirage. Brazil has returned to the map of hunger and misery reaching new depressing levels. The future of the youth is also becoming more and more obscure without what their parents once had, that promise of a reward for more education and work^[2]. In 2012, IBGE (acronym in Portuguese which stands for  Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) created the category of “discouraged“, those who did not find employment and who stopped looking for it due to the belief that they will not succeed.

In this environment, conservatism seems to have created shelter and expanded to a large part of the population its ideas about all these misfortunes. Social inequality is seen as “divine will” and the promise of prosperity, according to the prosperity theory^[3], seems to have taken the State’s^[4] place. Here we could dedicate pages and pages to all these extremely relevant topics that in a structural and circumstantial way created and allowed the rise of conspiracy theories, enabling the supporters of these theories to be placed in strategic and top-level positions of the Executive and Legislative branches of the State.

While trying to understand the dramatic rupture and the erosion process of the young and fragile Brazilian democracy, as if it could even be considered one in such a brutally unequal country, especially with the “surprising” election of Jair Bolsonaro at that time elected by the PSL (Social Liberal Party) and who today due to tensions has no Party, experts, especially from Political Science, need to combine and draw on other areas to understand this process. Putting together discussions, for example, about the important role of the internet – since his entire campaign was practically online the advance of populism, studies on authoritarianism, political psychology, and so on to be able to understand this contemporary phenomenon better.

In this direction, an important contribution is a famous study “The authoritarian personality” by Theodor Adorno and his team of psychologists from Berkeley that was translated to Portuguese, as well as the “Aspects of the new right radicalism“, a lecture also by Adorno in 1967 on the creation of a Nazi party in 1964 in a period that was considered a time of full “democratic normality”. In this sense, we should think about what we are calling democracy and if it has been fully alive to have its death announced recently in the face of the liberal democracies crisis until then taken as consolidated.

Perhaps the great success of radicalized groups rising in Brazilian current politics is that these were not taken seriously and even received by progressives politicians, academics, and intellectuals as just jokes and treated as curious subjects with abominable postures and speeches and out of the democratic atmosphere at all, believing that most what they could do were to draw good laughs from their appearances and absurdly eccentric theories. But the fact is that these “eccentric” and “ridicule” figures perceived the public dissatisfaction as no one was able to and were also capable to mobilize them about politics. The scenario was essentially fostered with corruption scandals and gave rise to such conservatism movements and that also gave coherence to other very different groups on the Brazilian political and social grounds. This was materialized in the huge protests of 2013 alongside the growing engagement on social media – which are the events that are considered as the starting point to explain these current facts of the rise of conservatism in Brazil.

The presumption that is still present even with scholars who deal with the current state of Brazilian politics does not allow us to seriously evaluate these processes of Brazilian politics. The irony and apathy of such figures have been putting a blindfold on the eyes of many analysts. Not all of them, because many scholars knew that “the jokes” were not jokes, and needed to be investigated thoroughly.

The curious figure of Olavo de Carvalho, for example, who gained strength on the Internet in recent years, always seen by “serious” people as ridiculous and harmless, had created his disciples and these same people are the ones that make the public policies of the current Brazilian government, including the disastrous policies related to the covid-19 health crisis which are not seen as terrible by the many groups, that we call generally with the label of “conspiracy theorists”.

Olavo de Carvalho, known as ”the professor” indicated names for Brazilian ministries with an essential theme for supporters of the “Cultural War” theory such as Culture and Foreign Relations. His ideas also support the policies of the Ministry of Education, from History revisionism – textbooks to homeschooling which is with the project underway^[5], from climate negationism – to denialism of the pandemic situation. His theories also supported all the diplomatic practices of Ernesto Araújo^[6] who with his “templar diplomacy” put Brazil in an extremely delicate and unprecedented situation in the field of foreign relations^[7], precisely because of its “anti-globalist” position inspired and based on olavismo^[8], strongly anti-communist and which helped to justify hostile attitudes to some of Brazil’s main partners: China and Argentina under Alberto Fernández government.

The Secretariat of Culture is now occupied by bolsolavist ideology carrying the idea that it is necessary to “clean up” the things “deteriorated by the left ”, and promote the “true” national culture. We see it from Roberto Alvim ex-secretary of culture who was fired after the repercussions of his speech in which he copied Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels idea, until the current secretary, Mario Frias, who walks armed and tries to intimidate employees.

In addition to government officials, formed by the “Olavo de Carvalho” school, there are of course several initiatives on the Internet, including, audiovisual ones that disseminate his ideas, which is between two more initiatives, as demonstrated in the text “Olavista cinema is born“, by Ethel Rudnitzki and Rafael Oliveira, published in 2019 by the Agência Pública^[9].

We need to take this whole movement seriously and understand what transformations have allowed and enabled the advance of ultraconservative and ultraliberal radicals in Brazilian politics. It has to be said that the joke is no longer funny. However, as much as the reality sounds absurd to the ears of the “enlightened“, it is necessary to investigate (earnestly as I said before) the olavismo or rather the bolsolavism, which has led thousands of Brazilians to misery and death.

The policies to face the pandemic have not escaped the  “Cultural War” ideology, Brazil has already reached half a million preventable deaths. Choices were made. Public policies were made. The conspiracy theories that base the current government’s actions may be responsible for the current Brazilian tragedy. We must take it all seriously.

In the search for the solution or remedy to the critical situation we live in, one has to be careful with the analyses and realize what is happening, one has to be serious to recognize that it is necessary to redesign the instruments of analysis, recognizing the very limitation, the blindspots, and arbitraries that are in the orbit of the rules of the field of social analysis and, specifically, of Political Science.

Nowadays, Brazil teaches us that “ridiculous” can be extremely powerful and harmful. In the words of João Camilo de Oliveira Torres “It seems not very elegant, but it is the national reality“. The tragic national reality.

 

References

Adorno, Theodor. 2020. “Aspectos do novo radicalismo de direita”.  São Paulo. Editora Unesp.

Adorno, Theodor. 2019. “Estudos sobre a  personalidade autoritária”. São Paulo. Editora Unesp.

FVG-Fundação Getúlio Vargas. Jovens: Projeções Populacionais, Percepções e Políticas Públicas. https://cps.fgv.br/pesquisas/jovens-projecoes-populacionais-percepcoes-e-politicas-publicas

Goldstein, Ariel. 2020. “O SUCESSO DAS ‘GUERRAS CULTURAIS’ NA CAMPANHA 2018: ”. Revista Inter-Legere 2 (26), c20148. https://doi.org/10.21680/1982-1662.2019v2n26ID20148

Lilla, Mark. 2018. “A mente naufragada: sobre o espírito reacionário”. Rio de Janeiro. Editora Record

MOUNK, Yascha. (2018). O povo contra a democracia: por que a nossa liberdade corre perigo e como salvá-la. São Paulo. Companhia das Letras. Cap 1, 2 e 3

Nicolau, Jairo. 2018. “O triunfo do bolsonarismo: Como os eleitores criaram o maior partido de extrema direita da história do país”. Revista Piauí https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/materia/o-triunfo-do-bolsonarismo/

Nunes, Rodrigo. 2020. “Of what is Bolsonaro the name?”. Radical Philosophy. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/of-what-is-bolsonaro-the-name

Rocha, Camila. 2019. “‘Menos Marx, mais Mises’: uma gênese da nova direita brasileira (2006-2018)”. São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo Doi:10.11606/T.8.2019.de-19092019-174426.

Rudnitzki, Ethel; Oliveira, Rafael. 2019. “Nasce o cinema olavista: Produtoras se engajam em “guerra cultural” e ganham apoio de empresas ligadas à direita”. Agência Pública. https://apublica.org/2019/08/nasce-o-cinema-olavista/

Troyano, Sergio Gamboa. 2020. “Jair Bolsonaro: entre el repliegue reaccionario y el populismo de extrema derecha”. Revista Sociedad.  40 (May-October):(132-156) https://publicaciones.sociales.uba.ar/index.php/revistasociedad/article/view/5606

Ximenes, Verônica Morais; Cidade, Elívia Camurça. 2016. Juventude e pobreza: implicações psicossociais do fatalismo. Revista Interamericana de Psicología/Interamerican Journal of Psychology (IJP) Vol., 50, No. 1, pp. 128-136.

Wink, Georg. 2021. “A mão invisível de Deus: Sobre a aliança entre liberais e conservadores na nova Direita brasileira”. Diálogos Latinoamericanos 29 (March):71-87. https://tidsskrift.dk/dialogos/article/view/122205.

 

Notes

^[1] I especially thank Karoline Rodrigues Firmino for the support, inspiration, and careful assistance in correcting and translating this text.

^[2] Several studies have shown how economic and social conditions have affected political preferences. Adorno indicated that this feeling of unemployment and discouragement is explored by extremist groups, which give simple, straightforward, and radical answers to problems affecting the population. “(…) the very complex and difficult relationship that occurs here with the feeling of social catastrophe. We could speak of a distortion of Marx’s theory of collapse“(p. 51, 2020).  In this sense, we can ask ourselves, like Jasha Monk, if we have the same social, economic conditions that made democratic “stability” possible in the last century. Here I want to indicate a specific sector, the youth, more impoverished, sadder, and without prospects. The future is no longer as in the past. Interesting and important studies have been carried out on this, I highlight here the article by Ximenes and Cidade “ Youth and Poverty: Psychosocial implications of fatalism” (2016) and the research ‘Jovens: Projeções Populacionais, Percepções e Políticas Públicas’, of the Center for Public Policies of FGV Social.

^[3] Prosperity theology is a religious doctrine that preaches that having financial resources and being prosperous depends on the will of God.

^[4] In the “Manifesto Bolsolavista: elogio ao palavrão“, published by the People’s Gazette, represented the notion of bolsolavist- a mixture of the name of Bolsonaro and Olavo de Carvalho- on the intellectual and political elite of the country, as well as its conservative view on social inequalities in the country, that inequalities are the natural order, that expresses the divine will, therefore it would be a human presumption and perhaps even a heresy fight against this order, clearly opposing progressive and left views. It is worth saying that this manifesto was written after the media reaction about the ministerial meeting on May 22, 2022, in which the president and his ministers failed in their decorum and expressed themselves with insults and low-key words.

^[5] See more: https://outraspalavras.net/outrasmidias/governo-corre-para-aprovar-o-homeschooling-no-brasil/

^[6] Former Brazilian Minister of Foreign Relations

^[7]https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/politica/2020/07/05/interna_politica,1162881/itamaraty-vira-bunker-de-olavistas-no-governo.shtml

^[8] I understand the olavismo was a cultural and political  movement that follows the ideas of Olavo de Carvalho

^[9] https://apublica.org/2019/08/nasce-o-cinema-olavista/