By MARCELO GUIMARÃES LIMA*
In the current context, naturalizing the extreme right and its Führer is naturalizing the coup regime under which the majority lives and suffers.
About the recent debates, I have read various assessments, especially in the progressive field, which reveal some frustration with Lula's “moderate” performance in front of the Unspeakable leader (for how much longer?) of the Brazilian extreme right. It seems to me that most of these assessments take for granted what is, in my understanding, the essence of the issue: the debate itself in its form and content.
The television network and its associates who promoted the last debate of the candidates for president (17/10) repeatedly congratulate themselves on (their) triumph of Brazilian “democracy”. Which democracy? The question would perhaps be interesting or perhaps it would be a simple, naive question, therefore to be avoided.
The uproar of journalists openly parading the spectacular narcissism of the media spectacle serves at least to make clear that the effective subject of these debates is not “the political process, democracy, public opinion”, but it is the monopolized media itself that replaces that which which appears to simply present as it is.
In the historic Brazilian sub-democracy, the essential role of the so-called mainstream media, the family monopolies of mass communication, is to contribute to naturalize pseudo-politics, the general illusion of so-called representative power, which it certainly is with regard to the minority of the nation's owners. . Jair Bolsonaro, it bears repeating once again, is the unadorned, unadorned portrait of the Brazilian ruling class. The mythomaniac and his accomplices expose too openly the fracture, the apartheid Brazilian social-racial, the relentless violence of class relations in Brazil today.
Hence perhaps the need on the part of the bourgeoisie to “soften” the abject face of exploitation, to remove the Captain of the Lower Clergy from the presidency so that the plundering of the people and the nation can continue “neoliberally”. Faria Lima, the “modern” wing of agribusiness, the jurists jealous of their prerogatives, among many others, seem to finally recognize that the traditional representatives of the native kleptocracy, by joyfully and recklessly joining the neo-fascist adventurer, have taken a step bigger than their legs and run the risk of ruining the current coup regime in the challenges of the Brazilian and world crisis.
In the current context, naturalizing the extreme right and its Führer is naturalizing the coup regime under which the majority lives and suffers. This is the role of the media, its trained journalists and other collaborators in the face of the difficulties that arise internally and externally for the continuity of the current fractured regime between the various bands of robbers and parasites of the national treasure that compete with each other.
In such a scenario, believing that the debate could bear other fruits is expecting too much, it is perhaps ignoring or underestimating the impositions of the current context and structures. Which, as they are not eternal, seek to adapt to the contradictory winds that blow inside and outside the country, changing so that everything remains the same.
*Marcelo Guimaraes Lima is an artist, researcher, writer and teacher.