By TARSO GENRO*
Lula's speech and the democracy that will come from combat, with Kant with everything
The important coverage that the Globo “system” has made of the massacre that the “Coronavirus 19” has produced in Brazil, is part of one of those corners of History that will remain as icons of Political Science. On this corner, the main purpose of a communicational political group, which in the current context unified fascism and liberal-rentism, was to obtain its political legitimacy with the condemnation of a sanitary genocide. With this strategy, he did not have to worry about hiding his essential position: support for the demolition policy of the Social State, which identifies him with Guedes' political leadership and, consequently, with President Bolsonaro's own mandate.
How these facts will influence the theory cannot yet be known precisely, but it will certainly be a very rich moment in political theory, which will have to cover, on the one hand, the final crisis of this type of representative democracy and, on the other, the complicated relations between morality and politics in modern democracy. How does this tormented alliance between Globo, Bolsonaro and Guedes work in practice? Separating the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by Bolsonaro's genocidal health policy from the "reformist" essence of his government. Globo is interested in financial “rentismo” reforms, for which it is interested in destroying the Welfare State, and Bolsonaro is interested in protecting his family.
Globo’s ambiguity or ambiguous “moral autonomy” is so evident that it allows itself the luxury of treating Lula as a political outcast and Bolsonaro as a “head of state”, just misguided on a health issue. It allows itself the luxury -in its moral relativism- of hiding the pronouncement of a true Head of State that Lula was, expressed without resentment and with extraordinary political grandeur, at the same time that it supports the destructive “reforms” of the Welfare State. And it does so with iron and fire, using the privilege of having helped Bolsonaro to be elected, with the manipulative falsehoods of the “two extremes” and with their condescension with the “fake news”, until these too were thrown back. equally criminal and cowardly way against its most important journalists.
The allied “villain” -of this moral ambiguity of Globo- who from the Planalto Palace dominates the national political scene, will be preserved if he promotes the demolition reforms of the “Social State”, but will be defenestrated if he proves to be impotent to carry them out. It is a necrophilic macro-compensatory policy”, which can only become dominant when the politics of darkness suppresses the politics of light. It is when De Maistre, a medievalist sworn against the French Revolution, assassinates Kant, in a period that is -at the same time- of tragedy and perplexity.
The Globo “system” does not want and does not have the moral autonomy to “judge” Bolsonaro “as a whole” -as it did with Lula- because in the split personality of the current President, there is a fragment that interests him a lot. The same can be said about FHC, who supported Lula's arrest and with his refusal to support Haddad also helped in the birth of the monster that misgoverns us. The “fragment” that interests both is Bolsonaro’s frivolous reformist side. It is the one that allows you to visualize, in his attitudes, a concern that structures all his political thought and moves him as a petty and particularistic “boss”: the defense of his family, which impels him to any negotiation to maintain power, mainly to transact any reforms as long as they can be done “on the back of others”.
Kant always defended that the most completely “human” characteristic is “moral autonomy” and that, when the human being allows himself “to be manipulated” -as a consequence- he “allows himself to be enslaved”. Manipulation brings dependence on the “favor”, because it suppresses moral autonomy and freedom, generating servility and degradation. The influences of Kantian criticism on modern politics are not only relevant, but necessary for any emancipationist struggle, whether within the scope of social democratic reformism or within the scope of socialist struggles based on Marxian work. Just as De Maistre is not directly Hitler -he is much worse because he theorized and did- the autonomy of “moral” subjectivity, seen by Kant on the other side of History, can be located in gestures of great revolutionaries and conservatives of the 19th and 20th Centuries Mandela, Lenin, Allende, Churchill, Roosevelt and Getúlio, in their respective contexts and State responsibilities, demonstrate this clearly.
De Maistre's (1753 – 1821) hatred of the “traffic of ideas” and the rage he devoted to intellectuals of any kind who did not agree with his extremism even encompassed thinkers who only rejected the radical medievalist meaning of his doctrinal preaching. . The French Revolution caused him fear and indignation, which made him a depressing being who embodied the ideas propagated by the Holy Inquisition and by what is now contemporary fascism, later expressed in figures such as Hitler and Mussolini.
The reactions of this Count, writer and lawyer, in relation to the intellectuals who defended the Revolution or opposed his ideas of hatred and contempt for any democratic controversy, is more or less similar -for example- to the hatred that Bolsonaro exhales against the current formulators Globo politicians, such as Bonner, Merval and Gabeira. For Bolsonaro and his most committed followers, these -his former allies- are the "satanic forces" that should be eliminated from what he understands as "democratic" life. That life, which entails the closing of the STF and also the physical elimination of its opponents.
Let's see some affinities: in a letter to a secular leader of the Orthodox Church -Isaiah Berlin recalls- De Maistre points out the three threats to the stability of the Tsarist Empire, summarized as follows: threat of the “spirit of skeptical investigation stimulated by the teaching of natural sciences”; “Protestantism, which asserts that all men are born free and equal” (…) and that “all power resides in the people”; and, finally, the threat of “immediate demands for the release of the serfs”. Let’s see the Bolsonaro counterpart: scientific denialism, the permanent attack on the autonomy and sovereignty of the Republic (where popular sovereignty is contained) and the hatred of “servants”, now represented by the Unions, by the original communities and their natural living environments, and the quilombolas.
Lula's speech on September 7th was much more than a demonstration of his political and moral superiority in relation to the current President and those who persecuted him through the manipulation of judicial processes, his previous judgment made by the oligopolized media and the omission of this , of the reasons for his defense, at all times during judicial and police proceedings, followed by the coup d'état that brought us to the abyss: high prices, fear of uncertainty and a return to open absolute misery, the new genocide of the corners of misery and unemployment.
Lula spoke to the future, beyond the fascism that one day will pass, to make way for Brazilians and Latin Americans, reconciled in the good fight against the darkness and moral misery that blinded -for a certain period of history- a nation that was being reborn .
*Tarsus-in-law he was Governor of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil.
