The future takes a long time to arrive

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By LUIZ WERNECK VIANNA*

At this time, when it is no longer night and not yet day, it is up to the actor to exorcise the shadows of the nightmare we experience.

The future takes a long time to arrive in our country, sometimes it comes close, it even brushes the edge of the horizon as if it were about to land, but it retreats without the strength to go forward without being able to extricate itself from the heavy chains that tie it to the past. Three decades ago, with the appearance of the 1988 Charter, there was the feeling that the way was open for him, but in vain, morbid appetites for power, even originating from the subordinate sectors of society, led us to the disaster of the election of Collor, which we were able to get rid of without having learned from the mistakes that separated us from the politics that led us to defeat the authoritarian regime in 1985.

If before we combined the themes and agenda of political democracy with those of the social question, from then on the social agenda starts to dominate with the implicit conception that democratic values ​​and institutions would instrumentally be at its service.

The disastrous effects of this separation did not take long to be felt, especially in the gap opened, from the conquest of hegemony on the left by the PT, between the memory of the policy of struggles for democratization guided by broad alliances and the policy carried out by the PT that disregarded the links between social issues and the deepening of democracy, especially during the Dilma Roussef government. In an equally serious mistake, PT governments began to give primacy to the conquest of positions within the State, which soon insinuated non-republican practices in public administration, to the detriment of their rooting in civil society.

Detached from its former social bases and vulnerable to accusations of wrongdoing by many of its leaders, as in the case of the Petrobras administration, the PT and its government became easy prey for impeachment, which further deepened the distancing from what survived from the political times of the 1980s. The denouncer rage that came with the installation of the so-called republic of Curitiba turned the field of politics into an immense desert, burying the memory of the struggles for the democratization of the country and implying real threats to its best fruit, the Constitution of 88.

The future gives way to the past, a latent presence lurking to return to the proscenium, nostalgic for the Estado Novo of 1937 and the AI-5 regime of 1968, which considers that it is ahead of its time and its turn in order to eradicate institutions, practices and cultures that put at risk their conceptions of the world as an unequal market in which the strongest should reign, a fascism that does not dare to say its name hidden in a neoliberalism that it claims to practice.

The emergence of the pandemic with its macabre entourage of victims, almost 650 so far, which immobilized society in a movement of self-defense, facilitated, in the sadly famous phrase, that the herd of destructive impetus would find free passage. There was, however, a stumbling block in the way, the Constitution and its defenders, removing it then became the central axis of the reactionary forces' strategy, evident in the frustrated conspiracy that surrounded September 7th.

Deprived of the coup solution, both by internal resistance and by the adverse international scenario, resulting from the new alignment provoked by the president of the hegemonic nation contrary to autocratic solutions, these forces start to resort to the electoral path for what they seek support in the political parties of the Centrão, fossil preserved from our training flaws as a society.

But there are also obstacles there, the Centrão, as our political tradition registers, is reproduced by voting, whatever the form of its extraction, and surveys by respected institutes have indicated that it leans towards parties and personalities in opposition to the current regime. . New winds blow in the opposite direction to the reproduction of the government that is there, which still has the resources of the immense state machine that squanders at its discretion, even if the deluge is its successor. In his defense, the past forbids the paths to the future.

At this time, when it is no longer night and not yet day, it is up to the actor to exorcise the shadows of the nightmare we experience, even atoning for his faults, which were not few in the setback that we purged. Missing are the rituals of confession and the promise that we won't make mistakes in the past. It is also necessary to abandon the Shakespearean passions of struggle for power, forgetting that it was this great author who best exposed the miseries and tragedy of the relentless quest for glory in the command of one or a few over the great majorities.

Ulisses Guimarães was able to weave the broad front that led us to victory against the authoritarian regime of 1964 even with the sacrifice of his legitimate personal ambitions, and his example must be invoked when, blind to the common good, not a few embarrass the paths of a broad democratic front with its provincial appetites and the defense of its small parochial interests, more often than not supported by false petitions of principle with a democratic appearance.

There is still time for the work of reason to be established, and it is up to all democrats to seek the path of unity, because the work that lies ahead is not a small one, it means not only rebuilding what was plundered by the current rulers, but above all to emancipate the country from a history that weighs like lead and hinders its aspirations for a fairer and more equal society.

*Luiz Werneck Vianna is a professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Author, among other books, of The Passive Revolution: Iberism and Americanism in Brazil (Revan).

 

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