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Time to check up on our Lusotropicalism enjoyers.
The Brazilian Presidential election ended yesterday, featuring a run-off between Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro, had won the previous round. Prediction markets placed his odds of winning at roughly 80%.
But Lula ended up winning, and not without controversy.
Apparently, a Supreme Court justice, and a former personal attorney of Lula's, added two extra hours to the voting period in a last second decision. There have been claims that voting in Bolsonaro-friendly areas had already been finalized and could not been restarted. One person on X claimed "it's as if voting restarted, but only in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore". I am not sure how accurate this claim is.
Bolsonaro is not accepting the results of the election. There are calls for the election results to be annulled, especially if it turns out the extra voting period was decisive. The situation is perhaps mitigated by the fact that conservatives now control a large majority of the legislature and may be able to immediately impeach Lula and, more importantly, his judges.
Perhaps someone who understands the situation can weigh in. From my outsider's view it seems that, in Brazil, individual Supreme Court justices wield nearly unchecked power and can make last second Banana Republic type decisions like opening the polls for an extra two hours. Brazilian politics feel like American ones, just more so.
The Brazilian stock market is down by 25% overnight.
Context: Reuters reports that Brazil's Federal Highway Police conducted widespread roadblocks specifically targeting public busses in the (left leaning ) north-east of the country. After being explicitly ordered not to stop busses on voting day. The highway police is apparently obviously pro-Bolsonaro.
Several sources (as of yet only in Portuguese) also report irregularities with public transportation (~50% of busses being ordered to stay in their depots on voting day in - left leaning - Salvador and São Paulo), with the secretary of transportation in Salvador now having an order of arrest on him for his role in this instruction.. Public transport officials claim the busses were stickered with pro-Lula messages, and they just wanted to prevent being accused of illegally running political ads through the city...
But it seems like the the extended voting time was specifically ordered to compensate for perceived voter suppression. The courts also ordered all busses to be released from their depots, stickered or not.
Better scenario for dangers of adopting public transport, and abandoning cars, can hardly be imagined. In fact, were one claim it as possible con, he would be considered to have succumb to conspiratiorial thinking.
This is just corruption. Using cars would have protected you from this specific problem, but they would have tried to find another way to profile and delay voters instead.
So there's no point in doing anything if you can't be perfect?
It seems straightforward and obvious that people who have private transportation are harder to control than people who don't.
My point is that "maybe the government will use this against me" is not a particularly good argument against public transport considering the many upsides. Especially considering that the corrupt measures taken were ultimately ineffectual.
You could just as easily turn it around: If everyone used public transport, there would have been no reason to delay it, as it would no longer be an effective way to profile people. So actually, you should enforce a ban on cars.
Also consider that private transportation only works as long as the roads are maintained and there is access to fuel. Similarly, private companies can be in charge of bus routes and trains. So I don't think your conclusion follows as naturally as you think.
From what it sounds like, the charge was that they selectively interfered with public transport in cities supporting one particular side, so unless the population is also perfectly geographically shuffled, everyone using public transport would not be sufficient protection.
That being said, I agree that if you already have the sort of corruption that allows selective interference with public transport, private vehicles are hardly safe. If anything, under Brazilian conditions, some tactical road closures that just so happen to result in the city being choked up in jams would be more deniable and even easier to get away with.
I do see an overall argument for small government so that it is less capable of terrorizing you if it becomes corrupt. My issue more broadly is that the idea of personal independence in a modern society is an illusion. Every thing you do is part of a gigantic interconnected network of various technologies operated and built by people who know neither you or each other.
The alternative to big government is not individual freedom. That is impossible because there is no way an individual citizen can be in control of everything he needs to survive. Instead the choice is between big government and big corporation. Private railways that exist to profit their owner, or government owned ones. Both have failure modes. Privately owned infrastructure is subject to profit maxing and anti-consumer practices. If the company is big enough, it basically becomes a dictatorship in its own right. Meanwhile, government owned infrastructure is vulnerable to corruption, populism, and the whims of changing administrations.
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Brazil has mandatory voting, though, so manipulating turnout seems like an unoptimal strategy.
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For better or for worse "maybe the government will use this against me" permeates just about all aspects of modern life. That being said, I do think that private cars, as compared to public transport, give a considerable boost to a person's practical freedom.
That they do. But that is only because the government puts a lot of money into maintaining a huge and interconnected system of roads that are open to private citizens 24/7. An expense which is socialized through taxes instead of being applied to the individual car owner. Private cars promote freedom because the system is designed to accommodate them, while other public infrastructure (railways and busses) are deprioritized and left to decay.
You can still drive on shitty dirt roads. It’s unpleasant and hard on the car, but you can, millions of third worlders do it, and vehicles which can handle it on a budget are big business.
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To a large extent, I agree with this. (To some degree there are tolls, gas taxes, etc. which do apply specifically to motorists).
But I think your explanation touches on an important issue. Suppose the government suddenly stopped maintaining the roads. In that case, the roads (especially local roads) would still be largely usable for a few days or weeks, perhaps even months in some cases. Moreover, the job of overseeing the roads is spread out over lots of different government authorities and agencies.
By contrast, public transit is far more concentrated in terms of oversight and far more dependent on daily government inputs.
The result is that in practice it's much easier for a strike, work stoppage, bureaucratic fiat, executive dictate, etc. to block peoples' use of public transit than it is with the use of roads.
Where I live (Northeastern US) lots and lots of resources are put into railways, buses, etc. But it doesn't change the fact that when you have a car, you are far less subject to the whims of public institutions (and private institutions).
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