By TARSUS GENUS *
Dtwo compulsive liars in a dirty age
Seeing the faces and mouths and the paranoid grimace of Trump, speaking for the American State and checking his reflection on the networks, I saw all the decadence of the Empire: its impossibility to explore as in the “old days”, within the “liberal democracy” falsified by military dictatorships, without making society sick with the virus of fascism and without using the authoritarian “exception” as a permanent rule. I remembered Machiavelli's genius with his statement that "(modern) politics is an independent and autonomous activity, which has its principles and laws, different from those of morality and religion in general".
When Bolsonaro said, as a political statement on TV – in all his mentally disturbed simplicity – that God is the “most important person”, he only demonstrated his purely instrumental view of the Christian religions. By equating God, with him and Trump, as a “person” (only people more important in the context of his speech about the powers of both) he also demonstrated that he is unaware of the ways that Christianity recognizes (or constructs) the idea of God. Bolsonaro's vision dissolves this idea as a universal idea of the unity of humans and builds another, that of the earthly myth – himself – on a step or scale slightly lower than the Divine Being. It composes, with this elementary logic, the idea that the challenge to the “myth” -earthly god that he pretends to be- replaced, as political content, the idea of the challenge -atheist and communist- that was made to the Christian civilization, which weakened with the end of the Cold War.
Even if at some point in the XNUMXth century there could be some probability of a socialist revolution in Brazil (or in any country in Latin America) -which is highly doubtful- thinking about this hypothesis after the fall of the USSR and the radical change in the model Chinese, is not only a primary historical error, but an evident sociopathy, generated by the extreme right in social networks, to deliberately close any gaps in political democracy that could allow some progress in public actions to combat inequality that, evidently , will only be viable with the taxation of the richest and with public policies of a social democratic nature. The same experienced in countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark and, to a certain extent, in Portugal, Spain and France.
Nothing is further from a socialist revolution than the policies of social inclusion and the “defense of rights” policies of the Lula and Dilma governments. Nothing is further from the moral foundations of original Christianity than a fascist “Christian”, revering the myths of racial superiority and social violence against the poor. Nothing is further from Kant and Hegel than anal-fixation Olavism, spread by “intellectuals” chartered by ultraliberal ideology. Nothing is more decadent than Trump's attachment to power and his false respect for democracy, considered by him as a mere artifice, which can be put on the fire when its forms no longer support his stay in power.
I remembered -besides Machiavelli- also a text I read many years ago in the Revista Humanidades (n. 20, year VI, 1989, N. Armony) about the film by Jeannot Szaware, “Somewhere in the Past”. In it, Richard, its main character, goes back in time 68 years, to find the love of his life and thus romanticize his unresolved existence, in emotional terms. Jeannot introduces in the film the “timelessness of the unconscious and the appeal of the archaic experience of satisfaction\dazzlement”: the search for “truth, the absolute, the philosopher's stone, human completeness”, in which happiness is realized in a perfect way.
Richard tried to review his existence, buried by real experience – where all human beings live and their dramas in sequence – and reborn in an imaginary time that emerges from frustration. Fascist, misogynistic, racist and militaristic leaders, at a time when political democracy no longer seems to support their follies – with their intentions of remaining in power – seek their mythical legitimation in a romanticized past. And they propose imaginary primitive happiness. around the “myths” they bring to the present, whose foundations of community unity have been dissolved by life that has already been radically commodified: everyday life that fictionally unites, in community life, but separates people -due to their different consumption capacities- to unify them magically around the one who was fixed a little lower than God, who is also a person after all.
This is the permanent conflict in alienated human beings, where real experiences that frustrate happiness are confronted - then replaced by the comparison of their misery with the wealth of others - of their sadness with the happiness of others, of their domination caused by the violence of others, or based on your own consent. This conflict runs through the system of capital in democracy, in its moments of peaceful and consensual domination, but “accommodation” and its acceptance in moments of crisis is what allows for a more predictable functioning of political institutions. In the decadence of this way of living and being controlled, however, life is detached from the norms and is installed in the “exception”, which becomes permanent government policy: it is the conscious action of Trump, at the moment when the crisis crystallizes of the liberal-representative system in the US.
Gramsci, who had a posture of respect-denial for the idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce, admired his conception of political science, through which he demonstrated – completely – the “autonomy” of the political-economic moment. This could acquire prominence in right-wing regimes of force, both being moved from the inspiring formulas of Nazism, with Carl Schmitt and his friend-enemy dialectic, as well as from the establishment of a national-popular hegemony, as in “Mussolinian” fascism. ”, which Croce observed with a certain tolerant irony.
Against a very evident tendency of the English aristocracy and part of its ruling classes, which were outside the scope of the nobility, Winston Churchill – conservative and lover of the colonial Empire “where the sun never sets” – said that, “if Hitler invaded the hell, I would consider an alliance with the Devil”. The same political and moral impulse as Churchill – in defense of the British Empire – led Stalin to defend the “non-aggression” agreement with Nazi Germany (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which included ownership agreements of Poland and the Baltic States, considering its dominance as a strategic necessity of the USSR, to prepare the Soviet war industry for a future German aggression.
Churchill fulfilled his promise to the letter to fight Hitler with all possible alliances and Stalin proved that his “pact” – cursed by the world left – gave breath to the USSR, for the epic preparation of its defeat in the bloodied soil of Stalingrad. With the strategic objectives of the period fulfilled, the moment of “policy autonomy” then returns to its bed of predictability.
Regardless of the conscious intentions of each of the great leaders of the last century, their decisions, in the historical context of crisis in which they “decided” to face Hitler as a Demon or to wake up with him to – later – achieve their final defeat, were correct to achieve its political and military objectives. When Hitler's defeat became a crucial moment for capitalist civilization on the European continent, each of these leaders returned to the path of their original ideas, whether those of a colonial-imperialist character by Winston Churchill or those based on state socialism, from the “Guide People's Genius", Stalin's title given to him by the CPSU.
The autonomy of politics – in its constitutive power in economics and war – has increased in globalized society. With the new war production technologies, the ability to manipulate information and transmit signals and data, which succeed each other more quickly, began to reduce the time that separates crises and emotions. These emotions are now formed and dissolved in immediate life, consciousness becomes more evanescent and dialogue, between opposites, can more easily radicalize: it quickly passes from incendiary words to the actions of the strongest – in physical terms – to exercise by violence its own reasons.
Biden's victory against Trump has already taken place by more than 5 million votes and may occur, outside the ′′ carpet ′′ in the number of delegates. What is strange and new is not -as traditional commentators say- the emergence of a divided country, which is natural and healthy in a stable democracy, but it is surprising, on the one hand, the emergence of a fascism that was held back in the fantasies of the market perfect and the emergence -in the “model” country of global neoliberalism- of a renewed left in the sectors of the lower middle classes, in the workers dispersed in the networks of instrumentalization of the bodies, in the fights of the women grouped in the new world of the work and in the new movements eco -environmentalists and sexual identity, already exposed as collective acts in defense of the extension of political freedoms.
This victory, however, is not only a victory for the left, but for an entire democratic and republican political field, which transcends bipartisanship and which still bets on the values of the “founding fathers”, which “trumpism” – successfully – came to play in the deep end. For us, whose democracy is tainted by primate fascism, by the denialism that makes fun of science and by the evangelism of money – which uses God and his Prophets to operate the politics of the temple moneylenders – this victory, if it occurs in its fullness, will be magnificent, for it may be a symbol to encourage a change from our dark times. Just that, but that's a lot, at a time when you saw a friendship between two compulsive liars meet to socialize the misfortune of two great nations.
*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.
