We are on campaign. And, therefore, as distressed as they are engaged.
Those who were startled by the results of the 2018 elections are at least now more aware of what Jair Bolsonaro and Bolsonarism represent for Brazil.
For those who bet until the last second that an important fraction of Brazilian society would not align itself with totalitarianism and fascism, today, with each electoral poll released, the fear arises of looking at the dance of the numbers of voting intentions and thinking that maybe it is not in 2022 that we will be able to say goodbye to Bolsonaro.
However, even if we can, it is good that we are clear: the farewell will be to Bolsonaro as president, but not to Bolsonaro as an authoritarian, disloyal and violent popular leader. Even less (which is more worrying) to Bolsonarism as a long-term presence in Brazilian society.
After redemocratization, despite the many social achievements and the guarantee of important social rights, it is important to remember that the daily life of our peripheries continued to be marked by violence and social insecurity.
The poorest workers, despite the possibility of ascension and social inclusion, which essentially took place through consumption, were forced to adapt to the voracity and exploitation of informal, precarious, uberized work.
The poor, forced to fend for themselves in order to survive, found support in some public policies, but above all in networks within their communities, within churches and militias.
Frustration with unrealized attempts at social integration generated a resentful reaction, in a frayed social fabric. The reaction was structured in the peripheries, it was strengthened in the churches – mainly the neo-Pentecostal ones, in the corners of the internet.
The reaction also came from fractions of the middle classes, who felt threatened with the movement of social ascension of the lower classes (observed from 2003 to 2014), and from the financial and conservative elites, disgusted with the political and economic directions of the country, until the outbreak of on the streets and in the pages of newspapers in 2013.
A war whose contours became clearer only after 2016 and, especially, after 2018.
Violence, abandonment, indignation, injustice and resentment. These are the affections that guide political action by hatred of the other (different) and by a primary sense of justice, which requires that the wronged take justice into their own hands.
Social resentment generated by the feeling of injustice caused by a broken promise is a challenging collective manifestation, difficult to solve, because the resentful person places the blame for their situation on the other, for what they lost or did not conquer.
In this case, those who feel harmed do not perceive themselves as authors of the social pact, nor capable of altering it. Without political power, they also unconsciously tend to look for rulers who can protect them, an authority such as childhood parental figures.
They search for a redeeming messiah.
The continuity of Bolsonarism beyond Bolsonaro
These feelings are more alive than ever in Brazilian society and they tend to surface again, strong, making politics –just it, for whom Brazilians have never had much appreciation– return even more resentful to Facebook profiles, to family groups. WhatsApp, but also at Sunday lunch tables, at the supermarket, bakery, bus, subway, train queues.
Through opinions formed on social networks, in WhatsApp groups, by YouTube influencers, or by authority figures totally uncommitted to the facts, to the data released by research institutes, to science, with any foundation of truth.
Certainly one of the great problems that we will need to face is the socially generalized discredit in the formal means of communication, in institutions, in science, in schools and teachers (accused of indoctrinators).
Over the last few years, in the wave of hatred for politics, we have seen a mass of people angry with the media – many of them even aligned with right-wing values – grow, some associated with derogatory hashtags, such as the term “garbage”, and the “Communist indoctrinator leftists”. “Garbage!” they shouted.
In the midst of a cultural and political war, media outlets were burned at the stake of denialism, and opinion makers, public intellectuals and “influencers” (they too) began to burn at the fires of cancellation.
Universities, schools and professors found themselves publicly derided, accused of ideological indoctrination, “party takers”.
Having and publicly expressing a political opinion has become an abominable act, a reason for a deep split between “we, good citizens” and “them, leftists, cultural Marxists, bandits”.
My point is: this scenario has not been dismantled, and the opinions and actions it creates and nurtures do not establish any relationship with science, data, economic facts or the politics of cabinets and parties.
They are informed by microperceptions of the world and by theological conceptions of what is good, which are presented as uncontested truths. Thus, there is no discourse, no argument capable of facing what one feels and the indignant reaction that is built, justified from redemptive values and slogans.
In this logic, it is necessary to resist the problems and to be persevering, because to rescue the values of the homeland and to save Brazil it is still necessary a lot of fight.
Meanwhile, reality challenges.
Data and newspaper headlines insist: inflation has skyrocketed, unemployment too, hunger has returned. The shopping cart is empty, and the dimensions of the products on the shelves (despite the price increase) have shrunk. Gasoline and cooking gas are at impractical prices.
Diseases have returned: measles, polio, the explosion of dengue in 2022. Social mobility has regressed, in the last five years we have experienced a socio-occupational decline, we have returned to the levels of the lost decades, the 1980s and 1990s.
It is never too much to remember the pandemic management decisions taken by the Bolsonaro government and the complaints contained in the Covid CPI report.
Let us not forget the collective mourning and the dead and orphans of the pandemic, or the delays in schooling and deprivation of socialization of our children, the traumas that will be faced by an entire generation marked by the management of a government that has turned its back on the collective, for the social and for suffering.
The bet is that the pains of reality will prevent Bolsonaro from being reelected, but Bolsonarism and all the social resentment on which it feeds will continue to be alive, pulsing. We have a historic duty to face them.
