By EUGENIO BUCCI*

Behind the performative chaos of the President of the United States, with intercontinental lies and histrionic factoids, there is a cold and cruel logic

In his Sunday column in The Globe, journalist Dorrit Harazim has been helping us scrutinize the inconceivable. The articles she wrote about the pulverizing of Gaza make up a definitive anthology. Soon, someone will remember to publish it in book form. Now, Dorrit Harazim has deciphered the vulgar sphinx that is Donald Trump.

Last Sunday, in a text entitled “With method”, she demonstrated that, behind the performative chaos of the President of the United States, with intercontinental lies and histrionic factoids, there is a cold and cruel logic.

In the words of the columnist of Globe, “Donald Trump’s ultimate and ultimate goal” is to “take full, systematic and lasting control of the federal machine.” What’s more, “the set of executive orders and measures adopted in this regard are not chaotic at all – they are effective, precise and reveal years of planning to dismantle the qualified bureaucracy.”

There you have it. Dorrit Harazim did not use the word, but the name for it is Caesarism. To which you ask: “But what is Caesarism?” I beg your permission to answer your kind question with the help of a brief reminiscence.

In early 1988, sociologist Eder Sader and I interviewed Professor Antonio Candido for the magazine Theory and Debate. I was the editor of the magazine, which we had launched at the end of 1987. Eder Sader was a member of our editorial board. He would die a few months later, in May 1988, at the age of 46.

A hemophiliac, he had contracted the AIDS virus through a blood transfusion, probably in 1985, and was unable to overcome the disease (at that time, no one could). I have a luminous image of him as a good-humored, easy-going, intelligent man who, above all, was generous with the younger generation. He had white hair, black eyebrows, and a detached smile.

Our conversation with Antonio Candido was also enlightening: it was light, intelligent and generous. When we asked him about the magazine Climate, which he and Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes edited in the 1940s, he told us quite a story. It was in this answer that he spoke about Caesarism. I never forgot it.

Here is what he said: “In the beginning [the magazine] was deliberately apolitical, even having integralist contributors. The turning point came in 1942, when Brazil entered the war. We signed a manifesto written by Paulo Emílio, indicating our anti-fascist position and saying that now the impartiality had ended and the fight had begun, even attacking the integralists. Some of our contributors of this ilk argued with us. Our manifesto caused some uproar and was commented on, among others, by Astrojildo Pereira, who pointed out its purely negative nature. So we decided to try a positive definition, which was the work of Paulo Emílio, in the form of a “Commentary” published in issue 12, in 1942.”

“This document is still of interest, and for me it was the fixer of ideas, the defining of my political position. It was certainly this document that led me to become neither Stalinist nor Trotskyist, but to accept the position advocated by Paulo, of a democratic socialism uninterested in the Internationals, seeking solutions appropriate to the country, committed to the fight against fascism, because this was the contemporary manifestation of Caesarism opposed to the humanist tradition, which came from Christianity through the revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. (…) This document was decisive for me and others. From it onwards I entered into militancy in earnest.”

Antonio Candido became an activist to fight fascism. Good reason. He was the first to teach me about Caesarism: a type of arbitrariness that is the opposite of the “humanist tradition, which came from Christianity.” Some say that Caesarism constitutes state authoritarianism, but this concept is flawed, because it loses sight of the dark sore that Paulo Emílio denounced. The Roman Caesar (from whom the words “Kaiser” and “Czar” descend) exercised his command in permanent warlike readiness, like a gang leader.

Caesarism, therefore, is not woven through the State, but above the State and against the institutionality of a non-savage State. Caesarism is the “dismantling of the qualified bureaucracy” (I quote Dorrit Harazim again), the same bureaucracy in which Max Weber identified a positive point of the modern State. Caesarism founds the genealogy of fascism and Trumpism.

Now, Donald Trump has announced that he will intervene in Gaza. On another front, he has already begun sending deported immigrants to the dungeons of Guantanamo, where torture sessions have been documented. Guantanamo will be Trump's version of concentration camps.

What does he want with all this? To disorient his allies? Yes, but not only. Does he want to frighten the international community? That too. And for what? Well, to say that nothing will be a limit to the abuses he invents. He wants to be not only the king of America, but its Caesar. He will reduce America to a name for a gulf. Isolated. It's incredible how there are still people who look at it naturally (fake) for such outrageous attacks.

Long live Eder Sader. Long live Antonio Candido.

* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]

Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.

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