Strange false dilemma there. Those are far from the only choices.
We can express our quite reasonable concerns about this particular election without giving up the belief in the general usefulness of democracy. It doesn’t have to be universally perfect to be the best thing currently on the table, even in a country with many problems. Likewise, we can believe that a people who mistakenly vote for an anti-democratic authoritarian – someone who might strip their right to vote soon enough – might nevertheless deserve more democratic choice in the future. Whether “stupid” or not, a current election result doesn’t imply they deserve a permanent loss in the franchise.
In the actual election, especially the runoff, they were the only two choices, the only realistic ones.
Although I think your fears are largely unfounded, yes, Bolsonaro is not unicorns, rainbows and lollipops, definitely. And yes, you can think that Brazilians made a mistake, heck, maybe they did.
What is also necessary, however, is reflecting on the other realistic choices. If your options are “cut my right hand or cut my left hand” you can’t say “that guy’s dumb for having his non-writing hand cut because having your hand cut is stupid” without accepting that the other option was worse.
Maybe at the outset it wasn’t a binary choice, but by the runoff it was.
And when a nation has 60,000 murders a year, what do you expect the voters to do except for the “law and order” guy, even if he’s another Duterte type?
I’m not sure what you mean by “largely unfounded”.
The man literally said “I am in favor of a dictatorship, a regime of exception.” My concerns about his anti-democratic bent are founded directly on his words. The man literally said he would have wanted “30,000” more killings, because the previous wave of killings didn’t go far enough. My concerns about Duterte-style extra-judicial murder squads are founded directly on his words. He said those things. My concerns are founded directly on the things he said.
Now, maybe the concerns of the people about 60,000 murders a year outweighs all this. They made their choice, as you keep emphasizing. But even supposing we acknowledge the full validity of those concerns, it nevertheless makes sense to be concerned about literally tens of thousands of murders by the government in the near future, and the potential end of democratic institutions in Brazil. Even if most Brazilians thought the other path was worse, I can still harbor concerns about the path they chose, and those concerns strike me as amazingly well founded, since they rest on his own words. If the choice was, genuinely, between extraordinarily terrible, and even more extraordinarily terrible, I can still openly lament the extraordinary terribleness that might be in store. A “lesser evil” – if that’s even genuinely the case – can still be quite appallingly evil.
But the question put to me, personally, was not binary. I’m free to believe that people who vote in an anti-democratic authoritarian don’t deserve to have the franchise stripped from them, regardless of whether or not I think they’re “stupid”.
My goal was to dispel the ignorant notion that “Nobody argued that Chavez was good”. I don’t think that’s a “gotcha”, but of course opinions may vary. I’d call my posts #23, 25 & 29 attempts at meaningful discussion.