By TARSUS GENUS*
States of law, whether “liberal” or authoritarian, have lost the shame of emptying their standards of legitimacy of their constitutional fabric, worn out by the failure to fulfill their promises of equality and freedom.
As conservative governments eliminated, with the destruction of the Participatory Budget, the co-responsibility between state and society, for taking major public decisions within the municipality, the rulers themselves — personally — are responsible for the views and omissions that led us to the dramatic situation we find ourselves in in Porto Alegre.
Throughout the world, that experience was seen, and still is, as the most edifying process of renewal and advancement of liberal democracy in the world in this city that is now governed to serve the interests of a few big businessmen in the real estate sector, who have made the city hall their special management for big business.
The Hungry Man in Knut Hamsun's novel, Hunger, goes to the port and asks the captain of a ship to let him board. And he says to him: “I can do anything” (…) “do more if necessary, I can handle it.” The captain replies that he is fine, but that if “things don’t go well we can part ways in England”. The acceptance of the precarious employee of the modern era marks the type of subjectivity of those who say goodbye to their past lives and throw themselves into uncertainty: “all the light” — says the character who says goodbye — “shone in the windows of all those houses, of all those homes”.
The narrator, at the beginning of Knut Hamsun’s novel, says “that it was the time when I wandered, with an empty stomach” (…) in this “unique city that no one can leave without leaving its mark…”. It is a libertarian suburb of the Danish capital, which was occupied by alternative anti-capitalist movements in 1971, perhaps as an instinctive homage to the starving families who, in other times, passed through there looking for an opportunity to resist their lives blocked by hunger.
2024. In Argentina, a madman is democratically elected with the authorization to “destroy” the State, as advised by the ghost of his dead dog, to bring 51% of the population to the lowest levels of misery and social abandonment. In the Gaza Strip, the homicidal government of Benjamin Netanyahu displaces hungry crowds—pursued with fire and sword in their territory, without any serious obstacle from the countries and companies that, merged in all military operations, profit and accumulate reserves for the next wars already in production.
Hungry crowds are fleeing the so-called “socialist” government of Nicolás Maduro, who received recommendations from a little bird that impersonated President Hugo Chávez on a happy morning of his authoritarian and disastrous term. Let us remember, however: Javier Milei is no more legitimate than Nicolás Maduro, who is no less legitimate than Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in turn, is no less legitimate than Donald Trump, who attempted a coup d’état in the United States, who is free and who has already reaffirmed, in turn, that he likes Vladimir Putin a lot.
The fact is that the states of law, whether “liberal” or authoritarian, have lost the shame of emptying their standards of legitimacy of their constitutional fabric, worn out by the failure to fulfill their promises of equality and freedom, which have gone down the drain of neoliberalism and enriched the richest, consecrating their wars and privileges at the top of their pyramid. To be continued.
Vladimir Putin, a product of the disruptive destruction of the Soviet bureaucracy, has ties to internal fascist groups that support his government, which in turn also opposes the Nazis and fascists who control Volodymyr Zelensky's Ministry of the Interior. Zelensky, who came to power through a coup d'état as an ally of the United States, built his legitimacy on war and servitude to his American patrons.
These, in turn, interested in provocatively approaching Russia's borders to threaten the survival of that country, are growing their arms industry, which increases the volume of GDP in their increasingly unequal country.
Traditional democratic institutions have been losing two central elements that are necessary for citizens to trust the community (the “common life”) to which they belong, and through which the State forms the nation. The first element that is being lost is the political legitimacy of institutions, within which struggles of interest take place, the most structural disagreements are identified and pacts of minimum political “cohesion” are negotiated, with the rules of the game being respected by the majority.
The second element in the process of being lost is the democratic functionality (transparency and effectiveness) of the fundamental institutions of the Republic, which are subject to rituals conceived during the Second Industrial Revolution, a time when the rhythm of life was set by industries, railways, weaving mills, telephones and telegraphs, non-commutative communications, long love letters and typed novels.
Two examples are sufficient to show the degree of danger to liberal democracy, which has reigned until now, but is in accelerated decline. First example: the brutal separation between the represented and the representative in a society of fragmented masses and very rich classes, which is increasingly perverse and exclusionary. Second example: the superfluity and temporary nature of emotions provoked “from outside” the social environments in which people live daily, whose individual consciences, if they do not react, become deposits of cultural detritus without defined authenticity.
As is the case here in our country and in Rio Grande do Sul, the crisis of humanity, including affective sociality in times of catastrophe; the crisis of democratic politics, of loneliness not perverted into sociopathy; the crisis of “good” through social equality and human solidarity, through the rejection of catastrophes, all combine with the explosion of the climate issue that is knocking on our door. The absence of minimal consensual proposals to confront it takes us to the edge of an endless abyss: and if it ends, there we will find the serpent’s egg.
If these elections do not punish those most closely responsible for the potentialization of the catastrophe that struck us in Porto Alegre — at least — those responsible will be freer to promote their omissions and manipulations and we will all be more trapped in the snakes' coils. And already inside the abyss that they built.
*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. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
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