The political shocks experienced in Brazil since 2013 are sources for countless analyzes and, paradoxically, almost no possibility of presenting projections that identify the scenario that will emerge in the near future. The era of uncertainty, more than just the title of essays and works, became a solid and painful realization that was accompanied by a certain collective exhaustion and disenchantment with the future.
The political plots and games of the Republic are perhaps a tangle that is difficult to understand. But disputes do not only occur in the highest spheres of power: they are also cultural and social, as can be seen in various organized movements and their demands. Politics, since Machiavelli, has been essentially conflictual. The perspective of common good, if it exists, occurs when a group manages to produce imaginaries, myths and a certain moral order to legitimize itself.
Politics and morals have been linked since the first formulations of Aristotelian thought and, between crises and approximations, they are still fertile ground for analyzing some processes. The victory of political power does not always mean obtaining a moral victory.
Those “beaten” by economic and political power often enter the public arena with a morally superior discourse. It is undeniable that the victims of the Inquisition are recognized as superior to the inquisitors, as well as the native peoples of the Americas in relation to the colonizers. The list could be endless until we reach the excluded of current times and the groups that fight for some sense of reparation and historical justice in the logic of the Western world. There is no person with common sense who can deny that women's demands are not an ethical and moral imposition on current societies and that simple silence on these issues is a form of violence.
Morals, understood etymologically as customs and practices, establish an order of meanings that destabilize political power and status quo. Moral logic, to avoid politics being seen as a sophisticated action of gangsters, imposes itself on and based on political principles dear to republican ideals such as equality, justice and democracy.
However, the tensions between individual or group desire and the collective need arbitrated by the spheres of government cause a great disruption in political relations and, also because of this, changes occur in societies. Moral and political values are given new meanings every time.
The left facing the moral question
In Brazilian history, starting with the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985), the left's agenda found support in important groups and garnered political support. Even at times when power was a distant possibility, some of its historical flags were included in the 1988 Constitution and in different post-1985 governments. The electoral defeats of the main left-wing party, the PT, did not erode a capital that was spreading as demands for the consolidation of citizenship.
Corruption was uncomfortable, but it was a practice associated with ancient legacies and the patrimonial past. The practice that was long known to Brazilians was, so to speak, naturalized and rooted in our political and social culture. The moral agenda was with the electorally defeated. Even though specific cases of corruption in municipal administrations had already emerged, corruption was not associated with the action consolidated by the PT.
Being in the opposition ensured space for the flags that, although electorally defeated, were morally victorious, especially among opinion makers. Defending human rights, the agendas of indigenous peoples, the black population, women, other minorities, agrarian reform, social inclusion programs, full access to education and health supported crucial issues for the left in a country marked by due to inequality and discrimination of all kinds.
When the left achieved electoral victory, there were some advances in its historical agenda. However, the corruption that was already entrenched in power became visible and several respectable names from the past found themselves associated with crimes in public administration.
The moral superiority of the once defeated crumbled. Corruption, tolerated or condoned in other party groups, for example, became the tip of a battle that involved crowds in the streets. Ideological polarization intensified and multifaceted agendas exposed fissures in a society that traditionally coexisted with authoritarianism and inequality. The rest of the story is known: with the government deposed, the flank was opened to the withdrawal of labor rights and the cut of social programs in the name of supposed fiscal austerity. Corruption scandals no longer cause major commotion.
The anti-corruption agenda weakened the political bloc most permeable to social rights. The recovery of the neoliberal agenda and conservative agendas were imposed after the moral erosion of the main left-wing party which, without the virtue propagated in the past, is unable to mobilize forces or speeches in the face of the decimation of broader social rights.
The idea of a collective construction of society does not seem to have enough strength to stop the reformist agenda. The loss of moral power was reflected in the loss of the power of political persuasion. The acquisition of political power by the left did not legitimize a new moral agenda, for example, on the issue of abortion and civil unions for homosexuals. On the contrary, in the party coalition's controversies, many progressive agendas were overlooked in the face of threats from more conservative groups, as well as the issue of indigenous reserves and other social interests.
A new scenario
Without the moral superiority led by a party, social movements organize themselves beyond these and the issues become representative demands of groups with specific demands.
The reconfiguration of political and social agendas – gigantic and urgent – emerges under the principles of new identity configurations and under the sign of achievements for specific groups that, in the past, were not included in the logic of universalist policies. And, precisely in these groups, there is the vocabulary of a new policy, a new way of behaving and acting in which themes such as gender, ethnicity, diversity and sustainability cannot be hidden.
These issues impose themselves politically because, minimally, they impose on us the embarrassment of a morality that refused to recognize predatory, misogynistic and racist practices. Through the cracks of multiculturalism, knowledge and possibilities for the future are reordered.
On the other ideological spectrum, the moral agenda is used to combat progressive agendas. The collusion between parties, churches, media groups and conservative sectors repeat strategies of a discourse with an easy and moralistic appeal, in the worst sense of the term. In this context, social rights, for example, can be confiscated in the name of a discourse of efficiency and budgetary accounting. The apparently technical discussion does not allow us to think about the origin of inequalities and the means to combat them.
Democracy itself, with plural principles and universalizing proposals, is not a fundamental value for some of these conservative sectors. Anti-political sentiment generates a certain outcry that, ultimately, destroys the possibility of living with differences.
The links between morals and politics are interchangeable. There is a long process of recognizing strangeness and learning to observe the displacements of our time. And, as morality is related to the notion of virtue, I close with Nietzsche's warning in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Oh, how bad the word 'virtue' comes out of their mouths! And when they say 'ich bin gerecht' (I am righteous), it always sounds the same as: 'ich bin gerächt!' (I’m vindicated!)”
