The neoliberal ethos

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By MOYSES PINTO NETO*

The left's idea is that people are empty vessels searching for meaning in their material tensions, but this underestimates the realm of desire and the myths that revolve around it.

On January 20, Donald Trump took office as president-elect of the United States, after a substantial victory at the polls, with an explicitly fascist program, and without the excuse that Americans voted deceived by Russian interference and ignorance of the character, as in 2016. We can no longer even count on the hypothesis that it was just an anti-systemic null vote migrated to a character. outsider. No? Well, let's first examine the circumstances to better explain the problem.

The Waldo Hypothesis

In 2016, Trump was the underdog in the race. Hillary Clinton represented neoliberalism more rooted in the progressivism of political correctness, today called Woke, in its most caricatured version. That is, in its version of establishment, always ready to dehydrate decisive social struggles in forms that fit the label of a market product. Clinton-feminism, the condescension towards the black movement and the so-called “Latino” population, the readiness to label as “deplorable” those who oppose them, placing themselves in a bubble of moral superiority and virtue signaling were the central characteristics of the Clinton-Obama-Clinton triad, those who continued Ronald Reagan’s work in the economy (like Blair that of Thatcher, according to her), colluding with or failing to resist the economic oligarchies, but at the same time maintaining an aura of cultural progressivism.  

At that time, many of us, faced with the perplexity of the choice, understood that there was a demand for someone who would break the bubble of protection of the elites, appearing as a outsider capable of accumulating social revolt, especially in light of the attitudes of the powerful after the 2008 crisis. Trumpism followed in the wake of the Arab Spring, the revolts in Europe – such as the indignados in Spain and the uprisings in Greece –, June 2013 in Brazil, and, of course, Occupy Wall Street itself, which went through the Obama administration in the same way that 2013 went through Dilma (or Haddad, locally): like nothing. Just as Dilma launched herself into 2014 as if nothing had happened – it is enough to do a little empirical research to remember the immense silence of those elections about June –, Hillary also had very little to do with the desired rupture of the 99% against the 1% of Wall Street.

But neither Trump nor Bolsonaro, elected two years later, represent truly anti-establishment. In fact, it is the opposite: if anyone represents the establishment in its most vehement, cruel and obtuse form, it is precisely Trump and Bolsonaro. Trump is the force of the parasitic elite that works little and lives off the humiliation of others, a mediocre and explosive pop figure who regurgitates atrocities flaunting his place as white and his heritage as symbols of American prosperity of an imperial nature. Bolsonaro, in turn, is the mirror of basement militarism, of the most rotten band of the Army and the police, involved in a thousand businesses that have emerged from extractive violence, from the taking of possession in the form of “primitive accumulation”, without formalization, with land grabbing and urban coronelism – all of this summed up in the formula, perhaps too weak, of the “militiaman”. Tony Stark in the United States and Captain America in Brazil – the millionaire and the willful – this is how the imagination of the extreme right that cultivates these figures works.

There was also the novelty of networks. Here, like no one else, Letícia Cesarino explored the hypothesis of “digital populism,” a combination that brings together the empty signifier of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – in their theory of populism that had already been denouncing the fragility of the technocratic-liberal arrangement between the center-left and center-right, endorsed by liberal consensus theories such as Habermas, as mechanisms that would drive fascism – with the cybernetics of platforms, designed in their infrastructure to be governed by algorithms that feed on feedback, promoting engagement independent of “content,” thereby producing highly favorable conditions for viral memetics and the dissemination of fake news. I called this at the time the Waldo Hypothesis, the desire – well described by the Black Mirror series, which is becoming more relevant every day, so relevant that not even its author Charlie Brooker can produce fiction anymore, such is the coincidence between his dystopia and our present –, the desire, in short, to “screw everything up”, to break the parameters of political correctness that go hand in hand with economic, political and social stagnation governed by techno-financial oligarchies.

The Bernie Hypothesis

But, in view of this, another supplementary hypothesis was created: what if the Outsider was ours? We were discussing, in another temporality and another regime of urgency, the institutionalization of the social movements of 2010, especially with the case of Podemos – which explicitly adhered to populism – and Syriza, in Greece, which was in conflict with the master technocratic authority of Europe, the Iron Lady Angela Merkel.

The Bernie hypothesis then arises: if Sanders, and not Clinton, had run against Trump, he might have won. A counterfactual that is more or less impossible to test, but in any case it serves as a driving force for a slightly more radical left, even calling itself “socialist” (DSA), to begin gaining momentum, creating channels on social media that range from podcasts, publishers to artistic videos – in an ecosystem that includes Novara Media, Jacobin, Verso, Zero Books, among others. Brazil is trying to repeat the movement here in digital media: socialist channels are entering the scene, with names like Sabrina Fernandes, Jones Manoel, Humberto Mattos and Chavoso from USP, as well as numerous podcasts like Viracasacas, Lado B do Rio, Anticast, and publishers like Autonomia Literária and Jacobin itself, now Jacobina, in the mix.

In short, we need a left-wing populism, as Laclau and Mouffe already advocated, but also Podemos in Spain, and Nancy Fraser is perhaps the theoretical name from the North who most explicitly brought the idea, in her famous and very interesting quaternary contrast between progressive (Obama) and reactionary (Bush) neoliberalism and reactionary (Trump) and progressive (Sanders) populism.

There was, however, a stumbling block, and perhaps the main setback in the period was the case of Jeremy Corbyn, the British Sanders, strongly supported by the self-proclaimed “new new left”, in contrast to the New Left, with a view to restoring the welfare state and ending Thatcher's cursed legacy. The failure was done, because the defeat did not go to just anyone: the most histrionic face, the closest to Trump, possible in the British scenario, the caricature Boris Johnson, was elected in a massacre against the leftist candidate. The same thing happened, in different ways, with the French populist left, Jean-Luc Melenchon, with Podemos in Spain, and with Syriza in Greece – all today shadows of their former selves. Italy, so prolific in intellectuals connected to the struggles (think of Negri, Bifo, Lazaratto, Cacciari, Cesare, Agamben, Gerbaudo, Federici, etc.), seems completely incapable of producing anything; on the contrary, if Berlusconi was, as Bifo once said, the very paradigm of the entry of the clown in politics, opening the doors to Trump, the country only moved further and further towards the literalization of fascism: first, with the Five Stars, then with the Northern League, to today, always climbing one more step, being governed by Meloni's fascist party, admitting concentration camps for African refugees and racist militias to hunt down undocumented immigrants. Germany, which seemed the leading case of memory politics, invoking the superior rationalism of today's Frankfurtians in their defense of the European Union as a Kantian-cosmopolitan avatar shielded against the entry of nationalisms and supremacism, after the Iron Lady, it languishes with a dwindling and irrelevant social-democratic party, forced to govern in alliance with its rivals to prevent the rise of the AfD, the rising neo-Nazi party.

Nor did Bernie manage to establish himself as a major political leader during this period: it was among the poor and black people that he was defeated in the 2019 primaries by the decrepit Biden, who would later become a complete failure in the ability to produce his successor, with the also watered-down Kamala Harris, whose career represents a total adherence to the Clintonist style of social and political interpretation. But Bernie continues with his hypothesis: there is a lack of understanding of the American working class among the politicians of the Democratic Party that distances them from the grassroots, throwing them into the lap of the extreme right. Does this have any similarity to the hypothesis of a certain Workers' Party that can no longer speak to the working class – now precarious, disorganized and individualistic – of today?

The fascist hypothesis

Here we can ask ourselves whether Bernie, and with him almost the entire left, are really right. Because, even here, among us, we have two antagonistic readings of the left that converge on an implicit conclusion: for some, the population is not good enough for the left, it is the phenomenon of the “poor right”. For others, it is the left that is not good enough for the poor, it is the “loss of contact with the bases”. Both, however, assume that there is a coincidence in the interests of the left and workers, mitigated by misguided communication and cowardly political decisions. But – is that really the case?

What if we were to propose here a much more uncomfortable, less politically correct hypothesis, that perhaps, deep down, people's desires are more literal than they seem? The left, in some way, always seems stuck in the problem of ignorance. If the other is not with me, it is because he does not understand my reasons. Class consciousness, emancipation, reflexivity, in short, all this apparatus that goes from Paidia à Education – and, here, “education” (in the USP version) or “awareness-raising” (in the Freire version) – will produce a political convergence that will make the people rise up against their own oppression. Today’s “fascist desire,” if it can be called that, is the lack of enlightenment. In fact, let’s euphemize the word “fascist” a little, please? After all, these people voted for Lula in 2002… Many arguments are found in this basket: “social bonds,” “desire to belong,” “survival,” “precariousness,” “lack of understanding of their demands”… in short, there will be a pile of considerations that range from social manipulation to the isolation of the left to justify that it is not fascism, it is something else.

In this, a strange premise was established in the theory, perhaps as an effect of the liberal mega-triumphalism of the End of History: that fascism is a pathological phenomenon that involves strong intellectual adherence and is restricted to small fringes of the population. Everything is strictly contrary to what the thinkers of fascism have taught us, since Freud (before la lettre), from Adorno and Reich to Foucault and Deleuze: fascism as a mass phenomenon. Suddenly, the academies – Brazilian and American, for example – are ready to say: yes, there was a strong adherence to the ideas of Bolsonaro and Trump, but let's not be alarmed by this – people are just confused. A step further, perhaps, to say: “it's our fault!”, we who do not understand anything about what is happening, and are even wasting a way to surf on social discontent. In the latter case, the curious case of the mass-intellectual-without-masses is created, of the masses that are tiny minorities, the communicator of the popular revolution who is not elected as the condominium's trustee; while, on the other side, the minorities, the pathologically unpopular who are “exceptions”, mobilize the true masses in numbers of “alienated”. 

Now, it is quite possible that we are not understanding anything at all, but even so the question remains: what about the desire of the other, is it really so hidden from us? Because, even the most interesting and necessary ethnographies, in their interviews, tend to show what everyone already knows: meritocracy, moral conservatism, desire for prosperity, identification. A museum of great novelties. We know, for example, that the Brazilian population, in all social classes, is hypnotized – in the sense that Freud gives to the psychology of the masses – through digital platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok, not to mention gambling on betting apps. The world that Jonathan Crary calls “24/7”, 24 hours and 7 days, Nonstop, is visible everywhere in our landscape: at the bus stop, on the beach, in the shopping mall, on the sidewalk, in the bar – I would even say in completely unlikely places, such as a football stadium, a music concert or a movie theater, where theoretically attention should be directed to the spectacle, not to the screen and its banalities. What circulates on these networks is easily mappable: money, body, power, success. Pablo Marçal captured it so easily that he even answered reporters’ questions with concepts originating from the digital world, such as “attention economy”, instead of great ideas or absurd justifications.

What if people in electoral majorities were simply really wanting what is proposed? Let’s take the case of the United States. The big swing vote in the last election was the so-called “Latino men,” which, by the way, is a typically racist framing in the US. After all, who among us, Brazilians, for example, sees himself as “Latino”? Anglo-Saxon whiteness, in its typical supremacism, elevated the so-called “Nordic” (or: Aryan) traits, such as blond hair, very white skin and light eyes, to characterize the true white, thus separating itself from the “Hispanic” mestizaje originating from the true Latins, the Roman Catholic Europeans of Southern Europe, especially the Iberians, in contact with the indigenous peoples originating from the Americas. But it is always a case of heteroidentification: under the condescending gaze of the Democratic Party, or the xenophobic gaze of the Republican Party – victim or offender. Which, by the way, is strongly endorsed in the anti-Mexican imagery of successful series, some of which are even beautifully produced. In the elections, Trump took white supremacy to the max: he even stated that immigrant populations (which we know is a code for non-white) steal and eat pets of the traditional American family, are murderers, rapists and thieves, and live in the United States under the patronage of the liberal press and politicians. What's more: in a typically Nazi gesture, which he himself claims would be labeled as “Nazi” by “left-wing radicals”, he stated that immigrants are polluting American blood, something that leaves no doubt about its relationship with the life sciences of the 19th century.

But the question is: why did the so-called “Latinos” vote for Trump anyway? Well, who are they? Unfortunately, we Brazilians know them very well: just think about who they are. ours who are there, in Florida, supporting Bolsonaro and asking Trump to save Brazil from communism. The same thing happens, we know reasonably well, among the Venezuelans and Cubans who are there, even though, in these cases, the problem is more complex. In any case, these people see themselves as white. That’s the point. Race is not something that only refers to skin color, but a game of positions. Numerous powerful scholars – such as Carlos Hasenbalg, Neusa Santos Souza, Lelia Gonzales, Lia Schucman, Liv Sovik, Clóvis Moura, Sueli Carneiro, among others – show that race is a position of power, not a biological essence (and not even just a “cultural” one, which would make it an “identity”). Therefore, a white person is always white in relation to someone who is not white. This means, as we saw in Bacurau, that a white Brazilian can stop being white when faced with a North American supremacist; just as, even more surprisingly, Min Jin Lee shows us in Pachinko that the Japanese, “technically” a so-called “yellow” people, saw themselves as white compared to the Koreans they colonized due to both their cultural-military status and their lighter skin color. Whiteness is power, and like power, access. Thus, we could ask: did the so-called “Latino” people who voted for Trump identified themselves as white and therefore voted for him? It seems so, even if they eventually receive many Feedback negative aspects of their claims. Identification is not “adequacy to the facts,” as the theory of awareness, based on the theory of truth, postulates. Freud already showed the aspirational character, the “ego ideal” that is involved in identification, far from any identity/interest correspondence that could be estimated through analyses rigidly segmented into categories. Once they have achieved the access (the legal document), it is about making the distinction to the detriment of solidarity, of looking at the “other side” and aspiring to occupy that place.

This point takes us one step further: let's say that, generally speaking, the left is the party of egalitarianism and solidarity, while the right is the party of meritocracy and distinction. Margaret Thatcher advocated, in the face of a solid welfare state, the right to be unequal as a right of British citizens. And if, as Trump showed in his last speech before taking office, the polarization is between meritocracy and quota policies, we know exactly what is at stake: meritocracy is white supremacy, since quota policies were simply “compensatory” for the gaps in relation to a real meritocracy. Those who achieved racial access are, in their minds, guaranteed in the game, so they can adapt to the new rules. They voted as part of an Empire, which is what America is, and they consider themselves as inhabitants of Rome separated from their conquered provinces, to whom the barbarians and savages must be returned so as not to disrupt the prosperity of the Metropolis. In Brazil, of course, things are a little different, because we have a vicarious nationalism: the more “patriotic” one is the more one despises Brazil and praises the United States. Far from Policarpo Quaresma, the Brazilian nationalist looks at Brazil with self-contempt, projecting himself as an American who looks at himself from the outside. He strongly hates everything that is Brazil, and it is no coincidence that there is a mirror image between the perception from the outside: he looks at the foreigners as models and sees himself as part of them, but the foreigners praise Brazil precisely for what he hates the most, while at the same time seeing it as our most repulsive example. It resembles Bolsonaro's masochistic relationship with Trump, whom he idolizes and is summarily despised. confirming his desire for humiliation. Once again: identification is not a process that links X to X, but it can also link X to Y, and with this X creates his own X', who is his equal reduced to the condition of disposable by racism – which he exercises vicariously – in the body of the dominant Y.

Just as happened with Bolsonaro, Trump starts with statements that play on the indecision between the serious and the jocular. It is a laboratory of obscenities, understood as what is off-screen, behind the curtains, coming to light. But, after a while, his program becomes literalizes. If Bolsonaro's bravado in 2018 seemed just that, bravado, it is difficult to sustain the same when we are faced with people who put their own lives and those of their relatives at risk by refusing the COVID vaccine. It was the same with historical fascism, hence the poverty of analyses that think that anything other than a totalitarian state of party bureaucracy surrounded by concentration camps cannot be called fascist – as if the end of the process were its beginning.

On the other hand, the left’s idea is that people are empty vessels searching for meaning in their material tensions, but this underestimates the realm of desire and the myths that swirl around it. People can cling to myth because desire demands nothing more than that, and, worse still, perhaps the left’s certainty of its own myths as if they were something more than that—myths—may be the greatest mistake of all, the one that haunts in the form of the terror of the enlightened despot.

So, to conclude, we have hundreds of thousands of studies on the forms of production of neoliberal subjectivity, but when we come across the more or less simple fact that our studies are true, that is, people really do think and act according to the neoliberal ethos, we strongly retreat and say: no, but they have good hearts. Compare the case, cited by Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, of poor people who, despite a significant accumulation of promises that they will get rich by gambling, continue – even after their symbolic downfall (someone shows the scam) and real (the result does not come) – insisting that they will reach the goal, that it is just not their turn, more or less like the former coach saying that he lost the elections because he did not obtain the alignment of who-knows-what energies that needed to reach a higher peak than the one they reached. It is more than an illusion – it is a positive desire equipped with a mythical basis (an “agency”) capable of sustaining it.

Good politics must start from the assumption of people's ambivalence, not from idealizations. The fascist regimes of the last century demonstrated that anyone, in any position, can become the executioner of their own. This does not place them in an immovable position, nor necessarily unforgivable, it merely indicates a starting point that is not a fantasy in the manner of wishful thinking, nor a self-flagellation of the saints and martyrs who internalize aggression towards the fascist desire of the other as guilt – “we were wrong”, let us now move on to confession and self-criticism. This stance is based on a hegemony that never existed, in a place where the values ​​that the left identifies as more just, such as equality, solidarity and dialogue, have already been consolidated, like a Garden of Eden lost in the face of our fall into the corruption of society (more contemporarily: of the media, social networks, coaches, etc.). If self-criticism is due, it is in the sense of understanding how values ​​that are taken for granted are not necessarily shared by everyone.  

Improvement is necessary, but understanding that improvement does not imply working on an empty vessel, as if the other person simply “didn’t know” what they want, may perhaps lead us towards more realistic and, above all, more effective tactical and strategic perspectives.

*Moyses Pinto Neto He holds a PhD in philosophy from PUC-RS and is a visiting professor in the postgraduate program in literature at UFSC.


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