Brazil’s political turbulence remains difficult to fully comprehend, in part because of the enormous concussive shock with which the seemingly golden years of pre-salt oil and commodity-driven prosperity suddenly met a grim sequence of protest, impeachment, and scandal. Scholarship has been challenged by the historical contingency of the unprecedented, fluid situation and the tendency to retroactively impose causal structure on unpredictable concatenations of economic, social and political forces. The protest movement that percolated and mutated from June 2013 onward opened a world of unexpected possibilities, but it was unstructured in its origin, inchoate in its goals, and multivocal about its destination.
The challenge has been heightened by the fact that much of the discussion of politics, be it in the press, on social media, or in scholarly works, has had a Manichaean bent that has failed to capture the historic uncertainty of the moment, to separate mechanistic understandings of party politics from the chaotic fluidity of the streets, or to untangle the planned and unplanned consequences of the upheaval, including the election of Jair Bolsonaro and the “genocide” he is accused of unleashing during the pandemic. Attempts to simplify and summarize events in binary ways – PT versus PSDB, left versus right, coxinhas versus petralhas – obscure the reality that the collapse of the progressive consensus that governed Brazil from 1994 through 2016 had a thousand origins and dozens of twists and turns, and considerably remade the meaning and content of politics.
One productive way to understand this tectonic shift is from the perspective of language and rhetoric, which can be used to explore the changing meanings of politics and the ingenious ways in which the contradictions of Brazilian politics have been harnessed by a variety of key actors.
Idelber Avelar’s Eles em nós: retórica e antagonismo no Brasil do século XXI (Rio de Janeiro, Editora Record) offers a wide-ranging and compelling roadmap to these changing meanings and their implications for Brazilian democracy. Avelar structures his argument around literary concepts such as hyperbole and oxymoron, as well as terms of his own making, such as lexicocide, the murder of words that have been bled of their conventional meaning (think “golpe“).
Concepts such as “o povo brasileiro”, “Brasil Grande,” and “planejamento” “estratégico,” he demonstrates, have been harnessed as hyperbole by politicians from Vargas through Dilma Rousseff, in processes that subtly shift these words’ significance, but carry a kind of mystic baggage as they evolve through time. Antagonism is often hidden by rhetoric, as in the flourishes of President Lula, who was a master of masking conflict by embracing oxymorons: attacking the press, but hiring a representative of TV Globo as his communications minister; harnessing Marina Silva’s international fame by appointing her environment minister, while moving forward on environmentally devastating projects such as the Belo Monte dam; attacking the patrimonialist right, but embracing former presidents Sarney and Collor as coalition allies; and so forth and so on.
As an author, Avelar is a one man threshing machine, cutting down most everything that crosses his path. He points out the excesses of Jessé de Souza, the intellectual who has popularized — at least among some sectors of the left — the belief that the June protests were fomented by a US government that was jealous of Brazil’s success in uniting the BRICS, and that “June” was naively fueled by a middle class that had a deep and abiding hatred of the poor. Avelar is exercised by the Lula and Rousseff administrations, and particularly by their crimes against indigenous populations and the Amazon, to which he dedicates a chapter. But Avelar does not restrict his critique to the left. He also turns his pen on more conservative sectors, for example, the tautology present in the laudatory media coverage of Lava Jato: the prosecutorial task force fed the press stories, and those stories then would reappear as evidence used by the prosecutors, in a vicious circle of self-confirming morality.
Political scientists may not recognize coalitional presidentialism as Avelar describes it. But his trenchant observation that longstanding patterns of Brazilian politics have camouflaged and even repressed conflict takes us a long way to understanding the pressure cooker that ultimately exploded in the protests of “June” – the seemingly never-ending month that redefined the politics of the Third Republic and carried Brazil along the path to its current tragedy. Bridging historical references and current events, Eles em nós is a useful reminder that politics is constantly being remade, and that the rhetorical agency of politicians has the potential either to create new worlds, or to reinvent and excuse the mediocrity of the past.
