By VLADIMIR SAFATLE*
The extreme right has already been normalized by politicians and opinion makers
On July 16th, Wilson Gomes published, in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul, an article in which he urged us to accept the supposedly inevitable normalization of the extreme right.
Calling the reactions to such a process “dogmas” animated by some form of moral crusade against often hegemonic sectors of the world's populations, the author thought it worth remembering that, “if voting is the means consecrated by democracies to legitimize political pretensions”, there would be no reason to act as if the extreme right were not democratically legitimate.
Finally, there was no lack of stigmatizing those who speak of “fascism” when currently referring to such currents.
This article is not an isolated piece, but represents a certain strong trend among liberal and conservative analysts around the world. This tendency consists of rejecting the thesis of the global rise of the extreme right as a catastrophic global movement of authoritarian consolidation and terminal exhaustion of the illusions of liberal democracy.
We saw something similar a little while ago, when political commentators tried to explain that a party like the French National Rally, with its organic racism and xenophobia, its links with France's collaborationist and colonial past, its police apparatus ready to shoot at anything that resembles an Arab, it wasn't such a big problem after all and the party shouldn't even be called “extreme right”.
Positions like these are not just wrong. There is no political catastrophe that has not been minimized by those who, in times of structural crises, present themselves as “anti-dogmatic”, “balanced” and “averse to slogans”. I would say, in fact, that this so-called “balance” is a fundamental part of the problem and its extension.
Well, to those who preach the normalization of the extreme right, I would say that it would never have such great strength today if it hadn't been normalized a long time ago. Not by voters, but by liberal politicians and opinion makers. There is an objective alliance between the two groups.
Anti-immigration policies must initially be implemented by the “democratic center” for the far right to grow.
Security paranoia needs to be on the lips of “liberal” political analysts on a daily basis for the extreme right to win over its voters.
Ditto for the equalization between social movement activists and troops of Bolsonarists, Trumpists and the like. In other words, when the extreme right finally comes to power, it usually just needs to kick in a rotten door. Real normalization had already set the agenda for political debate.
Against this trend, I would say that the intellectual class is expected to at least be able to call a cat a cat. Insisting, for example, that a discourse marked by the cult of violence, by indifference towards more vulnerable groups, by the paranoid conception of borders and identity, by congenital anti-communism, by the transfer of power to a figure that is both authoritarian and caricatured, has a precise analytical name, namely, “fascism”. It is a way of raising society's awareness of the real risks and trends it currently faces.
Remember this in a country like Brazil, which had one of the largest fascist parties outside of Europe in the 1930s, which had two integralist soldiers in the 1969 military junta, which had a president who a few years ago signed letters to the nation with the motto “ God, country, family”, is a sign of minimal intellectual honesty.
The Brazilian university already has an enormous responsibility for having treated structural fascism in our society with ridicule until a government marked by indigenous genocides, spectacular massacres in favelas and 700 deaths in the pandemic came in the name of preserving the dynamics of capitalist accumulation.
Refusing the normalization of the extreme right does not mean ignoring the real suffering of its voters and the chronic precariousness of the social situation of those who support it. Much less does it mean imposing moral discourses in place of political decisions.
It means not compromising in any way with the solutions of the extreme right and having the ability to absolutely reject their way of defining the debate.
It also means tensioning society with an alternative vision of transformation and rupture. But perhaps that is exactly what some fear most.
*Vladimir Safatle He is a professor of philosophy at USP. author, among other books, of Ways of transforming worlds: Lacan, politics and emancipation (Authentic) [https://amzn.to/3r7nhlo]
Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.
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