It’s time to abandon all the stereotypes you may have heard about Brazilians. Sure, they still love soccer, but they dislike the World Cup—for its mismanagement (both perceived and real), for the overpriced tickets, and for the corruption it has engendered and exposed. Far from dancing in the streets in joy at hosting the Cup, in big cities, particularly in the northeast, they are afraid to step out of their doors. A happy, easygoing people? Urban Brazilians today feel stressed, nervous, and are constantly in a dour mood. The denizens of São Paulo, the country’s biggest city, characteristically were always this way, but now one could apply that mold to the citizens of every major town. There are plenty of things to be upset about: frequent traffic jams, poor public transportation, rising prices at the supermarket, bad or expensive schools, and a drought in the populous southeast that’s menacing the supply of water and energy.
And now there’s the violence, too. It’s not just the criminal violence in poor neighborhoods, for which Brazil already has a completely justified reputation. There have been horrendously violent acts committed recently in neighborhoods that are not so poor; for instance, a housewife in Guarujá, a seaside resort, was lynched by a mob because of a (baseless) suspicion that she was kidnapping children. Sociologists, political writers, and anthropologists describe Brazil as being in the midst of a process of fraying communal ties and values. Brazilians increasingly depend on the State and demand from it social benefits, jobs, safety, and education—but at the same time they are increasingly mistrustful of public authorities.
But wait, you say, weren’t the big protests in June of last year a sign that the people had awoken to their rights, were demanding that politicians show respect for public needs, and were expressing their profound discontent with the methods by which the country was being governed? Well, yes and no, because all those people out on the streets were protesting against everything—and therefore nothing. As one could have easily predicted at the time, mass protests without a sense of direction, organization, or focus tend, at best, to leave things as they were. And at worst (as is usually the case), they leave the most organized special interests in charge of minding the store.
So far, Brazil is following a script written by countries like Italy, which followed up the wrenching Mani pulite (“clean hands”) anti-corruption investigations with the political circus of the Berlusconi era; or like Argentina, whose ongoing Kirchnerismo populist mismanagement followed the que se vayan todos (“everyone out,” meaning the politicians) mass protests of the early 2000s. In both of these instances, widespread discontent with the political system failed to lead to meaningful changes connecting the will of the voters with the elected representatives who are supposed to serve them. So this isn’t solely a Brazilian phenomenon, but it isn’t just a Latin phenomenon either. It ties in with another deepening crisis: the crisis of authority.
It’s a commonplace in Brazil that every sort of grouping, whether politically organized or not, thinks it can do whatever it wants on the streets, with complete disregard for the rights or needs of others and, of course, the laws. If a dozen or two individuals living close to an important highway have some demand they want met, they just close the highway. This is precisely what happened last month when São Paulo’s bus drivers, going against the policy of their own trade union, staged a wild strike downtown, completely paralyzing a wide swath of area. Police strikes in two states in the northeast forced Federal authorities to employ the Army after several consecutive days of looting and murders.
One might imagine that political figures from all three levels of government—municipal, state and federal—are taking the challenge of decaying authority seriously, but actually the contrary is the case. The party in power in Brasilia, the PT, has for years cultivated a disrespect of state institutions (the PT ferociously attacks the Supreme Court for its having condemned some of its bosses for corruption) and a disregard for judicial decisions (all in the name of “legitimate social demands”). It has also, in the person of the President of Brazil, officially received at the presidential palace the very same militants of a radical group who had only minutes before attacked security officers at the entrance. It has also done the same with a violent group of squatters occupying a private property close to one of the World Cup stadiums in São Paulo. By and large these “social movements” live off of public money, and they have worked as “unofficial” campaigners for the PT—but now they rest easy in the belief that no one would dare try to control them.
Simply keeping law and order in Brazil is widely regarded as a “rightist” thing that typically only dictatorships would worry about, and the PT is keen to exploit, with the help of its well-greased political marketing machinery, any “rightist,” “conservative,” “neoliberal,” or “unpopular” deviation by its political opponents. Brazil is famously a country where almost all mainstream politicians describe themselves as center-left. The party in power has no scruples when it comes to blaming others for its own bad mistakes, never assumes any responsibility for wrongdoing (even when it comes to things like failing to get Brazil’s airports ready for the Word Cup), and is in permanent attack mode and addicted to its own myths of the recent past, such as the one that asserts that the PT is the party responsible for turning Brazil in a marvelous middle class society.
There are two Brazils today: a fantasy country, the product of political marketing: and the reality, a country where the journey up the social ladder is fraught with peril and uncertainty. Increasingly, Brazilians are realizing that they live in the latter country. To be sure, Brazil has enjoyed boom times in recent memory, in part due to factors like the commodities boom, induced by skyrocketing Chinese demand. This period is now over, and structural deficiencies in the economy have begun to reassert themselves. Brazilians, who have grown used to the standard of living the past period of conspicuous consumption allowed them to enjoy, don’t want to take a step back. But to hang onto the economic growth of the past four or five years (jobs, rising incomes, high consumption) would require a much more vibrant, competitive, and productive economy than presently exists in Brazil.
Brazil has turned very expensive and bureaucratic. It has a nightmarishly complex tax code and high tax burden, bad infrastructure, low productivity, and heavy governmental regulation. None of these factors are inevitable; on the contrary, they could be corrected within a generation. But the PT was neither interested in nor able to pass any major reforms while the international winds were blowing favorably for Brazil. It had attached itself to the “narrative” that stoking consumption would create a domestic market and a sustainable demand for durable goods, which would in turn attract private investors, expertly guided by state planners (who would of course be willing to dispense subsidies of all kinds, from tax breaks to favorable interest rates). It all went badly wrong.
I’m rarely convinced that economic factors translate immediately or quasi-automatically into political behavior. It’s plain enough to see that Brazilians are dissatisfied with permanent high inflation (around 6.3 percent yearly) and consequently disapprove of the federal government; this much is well documented in opinion polls. My point is more ambitious. I think that Brazilians are beginning to understand that money alone is not what provides for good education or health services. Subjectively speaking, the hoary old stereotypes about lazy Brazilians should be put to bed for good; my fellow country-people are very focused and hardworking, once they know what they want or where they’re going.
But the problem is that Brazil today is a country that has no dreams for itself. This is a situation that was fittingly, albeit unwittingly, described in a PT ad portraying the “angst” and fear of the past. Politicians, starting with the PT, no longer have any hopes to offer to the voters, and Brazilians probably realize it. But they are still undecided, my fellow people, whether it is better to invest or to spend, to sacrifice for a future of their own or to place their hopes in securing some sort of public job. To return to the World Cup, I think that Brazilians have realized that this is a once in a lifetime event, but one whose luster will fade fast. What lies beyond the Cup is not easy to face; they feel it in their bones.