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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.
I could definitely see that. Brazil seems like the natural evolution of what's happening in America where both parties are more focused on managing who votes rather than trying to convince people to change their minds. Sadly, this is probably a dominant strategy in a diverse, socialist country given what we know about patronage systems.
It's the dominant strategy in any sufficiently non-homogenous country that has voting. It's divergence and democracy that creates and enables the redistributive pressure often expressed as 'socialism'. In fact one could say that the concepts of capitalism and socialism as they exists in the minds of many are only really consistent with the notion of the 'have nots' taking from those who 'have' or vice versa.
With that in mind, there's a lot to be said for the lack of 'socialism' in homogenous Scandinavia. Despite the large welfare state and high taxes, that model looks dramatically more appealing and feels completely different from anything referred to as socialism in America since most people in Scandinavia are in some form a 'haver'. With personal dignity and private life that, when all is said and done, is pretty nice. Contrast that with Brazil or increasingly large parts of America where the number of 'havers' is proportionally decreasing. What on earth would the 'not havers' do with their vote and work other than to vote and work themselves into the pockets of those who 'have'?
It's an interesting refutation of the conservative conception of America and its freedom, democracy and free market capitalism as a whole. The American conservative does not believe that the state should be used as a tool to reach into the pockets of its citizenry to redistribute their wealth. That should be done through market forces. But when the 'have nots' mobilize within the market, exert enormous pressure on companies and bend them, sometimes literally, to their ideological will, suddenly that's not allowed either!
It need not be said that conservatives are getting their asses handed to them. The mainstream of society is dominated by liberal/leftist/progressive voices. To be normal is to not be a conservative.
The conservative then, out of necessity, increasingly argues in favor of an ideological socialism of sorts. Every idea should be treated equally. Everyone should have freedom of speech, thought and the capacity to express themselves in any educational institution they want without fear or reprisals. And if any company wants to censor one viewpoint, they should then necessarily have to censor any other. It's either all politics allowed or no politics allowed! And so forth. It can't be that their ideas are getting outcompeted, no. It's corruption in our media and universities, collusions and ideological monopolies.
This entire predicament is an indictment of the neoliberal class of elites that proposed that these conditions of diversity could be managed, and the conservatives who greedily accepted the neoliberal proposition since they believed it would make them money and, ultimately, that there was no way that they would lose in the free market. Hell, maybe the neoliberals were banking on that as well.
But no, modern society is not ignoring the new underclass of berry pickers and cleaning ladies. Who don't want your smiles and thank you-s or 30 minutes off on the occasional Friday. They want your money, they want your power, they want your life. And within a free market capitalist enterprise they are under no obligation to play by anyone's rules but the markets. And the market is responding to their actions and demands.
Americans are greedy even now, to act as if they are heading for 'Brazilification' and not something worse.
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