Or maybe both.
Maybe voters are ignorant and are suckers enough to believe that a superman can fix the problems that incompetent democratically-elected leaders cause. The challenge that democracy faces is that people can vote for leaders who aren’t that good at governing, and they can become disillusioned by this over time. So disillusioned that they decide to take their chances with people who promise to be effective in exchange for loyalty.
Your point is well taken. I don’t think we can argue against the idea that the mismanagement and incompetence can erode faith in self-governance. It’s just unfortunate that things are to the point that their best option is to take a chance on a man who espouses anti-democratic ideas.
But to your point, and what people need to remember is that socioeconomic inequality is a major reason why democracies can fail. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a nation with extreme with inequality to produce a true democracy, because you have disproportionate power, disproportionate access to the machinery of power, and a great divergence of political interests. The top 1-2% live in fear of everyone else, gripped by the fear that they will be displaced by a political revolution (whether it’s a hard, violent one or a softer, quiet example). At the opposite end, you have the extreme poor, who are trying to survive, and you have the middle class that’s fighting not to slip into the bottom rungs of society. And yes, there is typically a lot of violence.
My understanding is that Bolsonaro wants to clean up corruption, tamp down on the crime epidemic, get the economy growing again, and more closely align Brazil with the USA. All of those sound like good things.
I also understand that he’s more than a bit Duterte-esque in his lack of respect for things like due process. That’s not a good thing.
If he seeks extra-legal powers, I hope the other components of the Brazilian government (which I’m not particularly familiar with) rein in those excesses.
I hope he succeeds at accomplishing the things on the first list.
He will replace existing corruption with his own. He will deal with crime with mass incarceration and extrajudicial killings in crime “raids”. He will get the economy going again by growing the economy, which means that the rich will reap the rewards and the middle class and poor will pay the most when the economy contracts. No wonder he wants better ties with the United States. South and Central America’s elite usually do.
Meh, the people of Brazil felt like giving him a chance. I’ll defer to their judgement on the matter. If he makes a hash of it, I hope they’ll find someone better. If the fears expressed in this thread turn out to be largely hyperbole and hysterics, and he does actually improve the country, then I hope they give him a second term (if that’s a thing in Brazil).
Nobody can foretell the future with certainty, but what I do know is that the people of Brazil voted - convincingly - to give someone power who has already made statements that show contempt for democratic values. They have given their consent to have their democracy replaced with something else - whether they realize it now or not doesn’t matter. They elected someone who said he wouldn’t accept the results if he lost – 55% of the electorate voted for that guy.
He’s also a far-right populist strongman with a poor opinion of democracy. At that point, what he claims to want to do should be greatly secondary - we’ve all seen how this story ends. It’s never a good thing. Even if it’s a nominally left-wing populist strongman, shit goes tits-up real fuckin’ fast.
Because, y’know, this has, historically, gone so well. We’ve had countless object lessons in recent years about how democracies die. One important lesson to take is expecting people within the government to rein in a strongman is foolish. The strongman will typically fire those people involved that he doesn’t like. Regardless of precedent, who’s going to stop him? If you don’t have a clear, obvious answer on hand, the answer is typically “nobody”. It happened in Hungary, it happened in Turkey, it happened in Venezuela, it’s currently happening in the Philipines, and nobody is stopping it. Because there’s nobody to stop it. When populist strongmen take the helm, things end badly.
Or hell, look at the USA. Trump didn’t lose support when he fired the head of the FBI who was investigating him for serious crimes. The rumbling on the right indicates that should he attempt to fire Robert Muller, republicans in the house and senate will probably support him. And that’s in America, a country which wasn’t a military dictatorship a mere 29 years ago, with a president who wasn’t explicit in his support of a return to said military dictatorship. And, big surprise, you still support him. I have little doubt you would still support him were he to fire Robert Muller.
I predict that, if there is not drastic and immediate pushback the moment Bolsonaro touches democratic norms, we will see the same democratic backsliding in Brazil we’re seeing around the world. Because that’s what happens when you elect a populist strongman. And if your democracy is already so broken that people will vote for this kind of person, it’s probably already to weak to fend off their attacks.
I’ve tried to discern the broad strokes about Bolsonaro. He seems very similar to Duterte, with one big exception. Duterte is a true native Malay Filipino descended from the indigenous people of the islands, which for a long time were controlled by a ruling class of Chinese-descended elites, who were often resented by the common folk especially in Mindanao where Duterte comes from. It doesn’t excuse any of his policies or behavior, but it’s different from Bolsonaro, who is of 100% European (mostly Italian) ancestry in a country with an extremely diverse population including many of African and indigenous descent. If he holds racist beliefs, which seems likely from his Wikipedia write-up, race relations in Brazil could suffer some major problems.
His attitude about homosexuality is a real throwback to darker times…even Trump has never said anything half as hateful about it as this guy has. In a 2017 speech, Bolsonaro stated, “God above everything. There is no such thing as this secular state. The state is Christian and the minority will have to change, if they can.” They will have to change? That…doesn’t sound good.
I never thought of Brazil as being, in the main, a very socially conservative country, at least not to the point where they’d elect what seems closer to a theocratic dictator in the Middle East than a leader of a major power of the Western Hemisphere. However - if he ran on a platform of “law and order”, I can kind of see it, because I understand the crime in Brazil is extremely problematic. “I’m going to clean up the crime” is a pretty compelling campaign in a place where there’s a lot of crime. I think people are willing to give a lot of leeway when it comes to everything else, if the candidate is able to make them really and truly believe he will crack down on the crime. Because you can think whatever you want to about high-minded civic ideals, but they’re very abstract concepts when you look around you and see people being robbed and murdered everywhere.
I’ve got a vague feeling that the current Bolsonaro situation could turn out like the mirror image of Venezuela’s socialism “adventure”. I remember not many years ago when righties were warning ‘this socialism shit is going to end badly’ and lefties were singing Hugo’s praises. Wikipedia tells me that Brazil’s president is term-limited to two consecutive four-year terms, so I guess we’ll see within the next decade if your dire warnings come true or not.
If there was a way in which lefties were singing Chavez’s praises, it was only in the sense that the United States would do well not to intervene in the affairs of another country…lest other countries try to intervene in the affairs of the United States. Nobody argued that Chavez was good or that his brand of authoritarianism was more palatable to leftists – few people agreed that his assaults on civil liberties and democracy were warranted.
Wrong.
Please note that by that point it will already be far too late.
Meanwhile, this sure seems fucking worrying: Brazilian media report that police are entering university classrooms to interrogate professors - Vox
One guy, huh? That’s all it takes, one guy? Shit, its a shame we can’t think of one guy, ourselves, somebody who praised a murderous thug like Duterte. Putin. Kim Il-Jong.
Darn, if we only had one, like you got! Worse, yours is such a major leader, who’s name everybody immediately recognizes! No fair!
Or to put it another, another way. A murder rate per 100 thousand lower than that of South Africa (29.53 vs 33.97) wiki.
And I would never vote for a far-right candidate on the basis that they could solve the problem with more violence. You can vote the fascist right into power democratically but good luck getting them out the same way.
But it may just be my experience living in a country fucked over by fascists clouding my judgement.
Ehhh… It’s still 12th in the world, with a rate 50% higher than Mexico and 6 times higher than the US. It’s a real problem. That said, this is right on the money:
This ^
As I said earlier, this guy will replace current corruption with his own. Authoritarians don’t respect or operate on democratic norms; they operate on loyalty, and punish anyone who doesn’t operate that way. It would be one thing if this guy came to power using illegitimate means, but the fact that he was apparently voted into power in an entirely legitimate election is perhaps the worst outcome of all. He has the full weight of a democratic vote to sanction whatever undemocratic action he takes going forward. And he knows that many of the people who voted for him, though they might occasionally have questions or feel uneasy about his rhetoric and policies, will ultimately judge him on the basis of how ‘successful’ they perceive him to be, whatever ‘success’ means. Modest economic ‘success’ can obscure the disasters that will inevitably follow in the future.
Yes. Trump, Brexit, et al are all part of the same thing. The elites treat the proles with contempt and then are surprised that they get rejected at the ballot box.
Again, most leftists who ‘supported’ Chavez did so in the context (we’re talking early 2000s) of whether the United States should intervene in Venezuelan affairs in an attempt to undermine Chavez, which the Bush administration had been doing at that point. It wasn’t that leftists wanted Chavez’ revolution to come to America; they just wanted Americans to understand that Chavez had been democratically elected and that we might want to think twice about trying to overthrow him.
Obviously, since that time, economic conditions have worsened in no small part to the Chavez / Maduro regimes failure to diversify their economy - few leftists would disagree with that. And few leftists would disagree now that the authoritarian nature of the Chavez/Maduro era has led to the very kinds of problems that impact any authoritarian regime - right or left. Authoritarians tend to make bad decisions because they promote people based on their loyalty, not their competence - a warning to all of us living in the Trump era.
I think you’re viewing right wing populism as an American does. Yes, the American version is populist only on social issues. On economic issues it’s all about making the rich richer. That is not the case with right wing populism outside the US. There, it’s basically ranges from Bernie Sanders combined with Donald Trump to Bill Clinton combined with Donald Trump. There are few small government, free market right wing populists outside the US.
If he undermines democracy in Brazil, the primary remedy is that the military takes over. Hopefully that’s a deterrent to him, but if it gets that bad that this step is taken, Brazil’s democracy dies for at least ten years.