By GABRIEL BRITO*
With Donald Trump in power at the center of the country, a siege seems to be closing in. Liberals can no longer pretend to oppose the neo-fascist politician.
Donald Trump's victory in the US elections seems to symbolize the agony of an entire historical period. As has not been seen for some time, two US presidents, himself included, have failed to win reelection, almost a formality at a time when democratic political and institutional arrangements were able to operate with greater stability and indicators of popular satisfaction.
His victory reveals a brutal fiasco for the Democratic Party, supposedly more progressive and inclusive in its governance. The malaise of our civilization is an inescapable reality, which cannot be stopped by right-wing or “less right-wing” governments, subjugated to the financial logic of a capital that has consecrated the supremacy of rentiers over the very sphere of production.
This key to the current political economy is essential to understanding the inefficiency of governments of both types, to the point where a reactionary right wing that blatantly falsifies the reasons for the historical crisis manages to sell itself as “anti-system”, when it is nothing more than an anchor that enters the game to fix the foundations of this system once and for all.
Market “consensuses” have turned representative liberal democracies into mere business counters for big capitalists who, in their rentier-financial phase, increasingly operate the State from within. This is clear in Brazil with the false autonomy of the Central Bank and the advancement of a ridiculous package of privatizations that include the management of traffic lights or a public school in a large city.
Anything goes to raid the public coffers. As Élida Graziano defines it, the oligarchy has entered a phase of “extractivism in the State”, that is, it digs any hole in the public administration in order to take over State functions, which it outsources and pays any economic groups to carry out its duties.
In São Paulo, there are no limits to this pseudo-administrative swindle. Now, public schools can be managed by an agrarian capital manager from Mato Grosso and are an asset traded on the stock exchange. In exchange, the businessmen in the public sphere receive generous financing for electoral campaigns. The age-old give and take never stopped by the electoral reform that prohibited corporate campaign financing.
The neoliberal management of life is expanding exponentially. And as a video of a classic “yuppie” from Faria Lima made clear, with a frighteningly angry tone directed at ordinary workers of public facilities that have been underfunded for decades, there is no shame in disguising good intentions.
Before, they claimed that there was an interest in improving a certain service and making it more efficient. Now, there is not even this mask and the mockery is openly staged in hammer blows from the governor surrounded by businessmen, while a police force politicized by a fascist officer who is cleaning up his internal hierarchy unleashes the dogs on the bodies that will have their work routine directly affected by the PPPs.
Still in Brazil, municipal elections also record an advance in this oligarchization of democracies. The model of unacknowledged parliamentarism installed by the plutocratic experiment of Eduardo Cunha and Michel Temer continues to bear fruit. After all, there is no such thing as austerity for parliamentary amendments.
And the money that should expand and perpetuate social welfare policies becomes a source of neo-clientelism and neo-coronelism, flowing from the hands of the corrupt politicians who tie up the political scene in Brazilian cities, with benefits addressed to dominant economic groups and their best local agents. As we can see, the brake on private campaign financing has already been circumvented.
The Lula government is an outlier in this linear process of distancing governments (and their budgets) from the real demands of the population and from the constitutional pacts themselves. It is no wonder that the municipal elections had barely ended and, given the favorable results for the old masters of Brazil, a siege began on the final half of his term. This Monday, the newspaper Folha de S. Paul allowed Jair Bolsonaro to write an article entitled “Accept democracy”, with all the shamelessness that God granted to the greatest political criminal in the history of the country, is a definitive confession that the Brazilian oligarchy has broken with any trivial notion of democracy.
It is therefore interesting to note that the impact of Donald Trump's election on the Brazilian media and his false cosmopolitanism seemed much smaller than in 2016. So-called liberalism adapts easily to the fascistization of the world, as the Israeli massacre in Gaza, addressed with all possible bad faith by conservative groups, makes clear. Anything goes to maintain the structure of socioeconomic privileges of elites who inherited a world founded on colonialism and slavery.
Our elite is the Republican Party
It has always been paradoxical that the fanatical media, which is a fan of neoliberal doctrine, has aligned itself with the Democratic Party, which was historically responsible for the welfare policies that created the conditions for the so-called Golden Age of the post-war period. Here, its program has always been similar to that of the Republican Party. The war over the 2025 budget and its agenda that aims to destroy any welfare state once and for all are exactly what Donald Trump would do if he were president of Brazil.
So Jair Bolsonaro's article in Folha de S. Paul, and the muffled cry for amnesty that all commercial media has already granted to the numerous crimes of his government – starting with the genocide of the pandemic, which completes three years without indictments of a cowardly and sabotaging Attorney General's Office –, corroborate the thesis that the Brazilian elite is in the process of developing an authoritarian neoliberal order with a democratic facade.
A permanent Temer government is the great dream. A profoundly anti-social and anti-environmental order, symbolized by the confluence of an ecocidal agrarian-export model with rentierism, whose profits are artificially increased by capital managers, based on an interest rate policy that makes servicing the public debt and financial investments without social and productive compensation an end in themselves. This explains why these sectors defend indecent interest rates, which depress any economic development at the base of the pyramid, to which the business community in the productive sectors ends up submitting, both due to ideological lukewarmness and also because their savings are deposited there.
“There is no money for small businesses”, as Paulo Guedes would say, and the real economy is left with nothing left to do but move sideways, with no real prospects of redemption, submissive to the monopolistic logic of sectors whose maintenance of profit rates quickly consumes any increase in the minimum wage, public investment in social areas and growth rates that cannot exceed 2 or 3%, except through an intensification of the overexploitation of human and natural resources.
Thus, the average Brazilian is left with exhausting work hours, complemented by the search for additional income in random activities, from illicit activities – after all, the criminal economy is boosted by financialization – to the insanity symbolized by betting and gambling that have become a collective addiction. The murder of a businessman who was supposed to be escorted by Tarcísio and Derrite's police at Guarulhos Airport symbolizes the advance of organized crime far beyond the old drug dealings in the unhealthy slums of the big city.
Speaking of which, it is curious to note how the security secretary who launched Operation Summer under the claim of “choking the financial sources of organized crime” ignores any criticism from the media that is now willing to publish “columns” by the biggest political delinquent in the history of the country. While Ryans are being murdered in the outskirts of the city, the financial sources of organized crime are proving to be more robust than ever. And the governor who invented a PCC voting guide for Guilherme Boulos is not bothered either.
With Donald Trump in power at the center of the country, a siege seems to be closing in. Liberals can no longer pretend to oppose the neo-fascist politician. For the simple fact that, at the end of the day, they defend the same model of wealth management (which, it is worth remembering, is socially produced). To continue their insatiable plundering, scientific denialism will be an ally, since it is no longer possible to respect environmental standards, preservation pacts, emissions reduction and the UN's sustainable development goals.
Liberalism surrenders to barbarism
"Make America Great Again “This is an iconoclastic move against the kind of benign internationalists who have occupied the White House for 70 years. This week, most voters embraced it with open eyes. Our hope is that Mr. Trump will avoid these pitfalls, and we recognize that in his first term he has done so,” the newspaper’s first editorial analyzed. The Economist, after his victory over Kamala Harris.
The editorial reveals the inability to deal with this phenomenon among the economic elite. It calls an imperialist hegemony that has filled the world with wars and dictatorships and is leading us to a collapse of civilization and, above all, of the environment, benign. Furthermore, it lumps together a historical process that is clearly divided into two parts in a “70-year” package: the era of the expansion of liberal democracies based on the public investment agenda that established welfare states in the post-war period, and the “neoliberal revolution” of the 70s and 80s, which began to act in the opposite direction and undermined the foundations of this same welfare.
And in the end the editorial of The Economist, gives a vote of confidence to the so-called “deep state”, that is, to the reasons of State, strong enough to contain particularities of a ruler on duty and capable of maintaining the logic of the capitalist project in its deepest meaning. The exact formula that drives the social electoral bases of “anti-system fascism” crazy.
Both sides are playing on the same team and the circle is closing in. The oligarchic advance over political systems and their mechanisms for distributing income and creating policies that make democracy effective on the social level is here to stay. Progressive governments have increasingly insignificant crumbs at their disposal to mitigate brutal inequalities, relations of submission and social, labor and ecological exploitation.
Donald Trump will take societies to the height of their polarization. All the ruling classes in the US sphere of influence will be swept away by the current of his authoritarian neoliberal political movement. After all, his agenda aims to cut taxes for the ultra-rich, advance privatizations, following the example of the already mercantile US healthcare model, and deregulate oligopolistic economic sectors.
Its promises of protectionism and local reindustrialization are unrealizable from a productive point of view, so that any policy of contentment of the domestic public will have to be based on the increase of the country's public debt and probably on breaking the budget ceiling, this long tradition of the "greatest democracy in the world" that its Brazilian admirers forget to inform our public and can only remain minimally stable through the maintenance of dollarized globalization, in turn inhibiting the promised recovery of national industry.
With the rise of China and its overwhelming economic influence, with new business flows and exchange relations, such dollarized globalization is under threat and its maintenance would require destabilizing and warmongering coercion mechanisms.
In the rest of the Western world where this representative political model has been applied, the depressing picture is the same. Endless austerity for the people, who will sink into 19th century workdays, multimillion-dollar concessions to local oligarchies and their financial representatives, privatization of what remains of the State and authoritarian experiments in managing social dissatisfaction.
It should be noted that such polarizations are older than they seem. This is the contemporary version of the dispute between capital and labor. The good old class struggle. Which is currently only being played by one side. Those who live will see.
*Gabriel Brito He is a journalist, reporter for the website Outra Saúde and editor of the newspaper Correio da Cidadania.
Originally published on Citizenship Mail.
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