Nothing exposes the true soul of today’s Brazilian left as clearly as their increasingly obvious irritation with the real-life working class. In their discourse, for their media propaganda system, and to themselves, they continue to claim they are the people’s advocates in the fight against “the rich”—and that poverty only exists because of wealth. In reality, they useless and less often the terms “worker” and “work.” Their world is reduced to offering the population “democracy,” defending Alexandre de Moraes and the Supreme Federal Court (STF), and policing against “fascism.” Repression of “racism” is the next item. Along come “diversity,” “inclusion,” and the right of “transgenders” to use women’s bathrooms. Workers no longer matter. Worse: they’ve become the enemy.
An arithmetic proof of this reality is in the humiliating beating that president Lula, the PT, and their Psol (Socialism and Liberty Party) allies just took in the municipal elections. Out of Brazil’s 5,500 municipalities, PT won in250—less than 5%. Psol managed to win none. Of the country’s 27 state capitals, they only won in one. The God-leader of the “progressive camp” hid throughout the entire electoral campaign to avoid explicit embarrassment. In his last appearance in São Paulo, one of the rare ones he made, he gave the impression of being a wax museum dummy parading on a sound truck amid some elderly ladies. It couldn’t be any other way. Election is about majority, and majority is exactly what the PT and its auxiliaries no longer have. It’s the people, and the party doesn’t have the people on its side.
All the analyses that the left made about their electoral disaster, and especially the prescriptions issued by the sociologists, political scientists, and social biologists that compose this habitat, reached the wrong conclusions—because none of them even tried to look at the real problem. They’re still saying that the PT needs to “get the discourse right,” “better” understand the country, “articulate alliances,” and other smoke screens—and they can no longer hide their aversion to the Brazilian people as they actually are, not as they should be idealistically. These people are everything the left hates most nowadays. They’re Christians. They want to earn more money, enjoy more comfort, and move up in life. They don’t want to “take from the rich”—they want to be rich themselves. They’re number one defenders of private property. They’re in favor of the police and against criminals. They deem family an essential value.
The Brazilian who doesn’t live in the urban bubbles of the rich, queues for buses to go to work, and doesn’t attend gay pride parades, nor wants “sex education” in schools, is treated by the PT as the devil. Just take a quick read of what they’re writing or saying on TV shows—their increasingly open anger appears behind, and even in front of, a mass of people who “let themselves be led” by the “right-wing discourse,” are naturally attracted to “fascism,” and don’t have the cultural conditions to understand that they should be “progressive.” They’re delivery drivers who don’t want formal employment. They’re workers who suffer in long lines in front of union buildings to avoid paying union fees and are treated there as “fascist” delinquents. They’re the ones who think it’s better to upgrade their motorcycle than to defend social programs.
The left’s analyses, diagnoses, and therapies have failed to understand so far that something is profoundly wrong in Brazil when green and yellow are treated as “fascist colors.” The country’s flag and anthem, according to the PT’s creed, have become “coup” symbols. (Don’t try, for example, to drive in front of an Army barracks with a Brazilian flag on your car—who knows how general Tomás might react.) It’s also against common sense to try to convince citizens who wake up at 4 a.m. to work, leave home in fear of what might happen to their children, and toil all day long, that criminals are victims and that prisons should be emptied.
How is it possible for the left, the PT, and intellectuals to believe—or pretend to believe—that the Brazilian people, the flesh-and-blood masses who do physical work to bring home the bacon, take the “climate crisis” seriously? Crisis, for them, is the price of groceries, the thief who might shoot them in the head to steal their cell phone, and the queue to get a medical exam in the public health system. Crisis is the promised “picanha steak” that never came, the President’s idea that criminals steal because they “just want to have a beer.” It’s seeing that Lula and all his fat cats only get medical treatment at Sírio Libanês, Einstein etc., in the super-luxury suite. The same blindness to reality is in the left’s perpetual obsession with demanding that common citizens believe that the worst problem in their lives is former president Bolsonaro—which they can’t.
They talk about nothing else: Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro. Possibly, all the vices of the left and the cultural classes stem from the fact that they’re convinced that the average Brazilian doesn’t have the capacity to think rationally. They think, deep down, that he’s ignorant, incapable of seeing that Bolsonaro is a mortal danger to him and is always ready to be deceived by idiotic promises made by his pastor—or by, say, some coach like Pablo Marçal. He’s guilty, obviously, of the crime of believing in fake news and using the internet. He doesn’t understand the political commentators on Globo, who are increasingly impatient with his difficulty in giving credit to what they say. They don’t say it, but they’re sure that the worker who doesn’t vote for the PT-Psol-Lula alliance is, after all, a dimwit who doesn’t know how to be a citizen. Ultimately, he shouldn’t have the right to vote.
The problem for the national left is that the real-life Brazilian is, indeed, a rational being—and that the ignorant ones are them, not the people. The standard individual didn’t go to university, he doesn’t drink wine, and has no interest in carbon footprints. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think. He obviously does. He doesn’t believe, precisely because he thinks, that “Bolsonaro” will invade his house, steal his car, and rape his wife—nor will he disturb his work on his phone, persecute the police, and strike in the subway. How could he, if it’s they themselves, all the time, who defend farm invasions, cell phone theft, and everything that makes the citizen’s life hell? Do the math—without passion—and you’ll find out that the people hate everything the left want.
There’s a new class struggle in Brazil—and Lula, the PT, and the rest of the “progressive camp” are at war with the working class. They’ve definitely changed their base. Today they represent classes that don’t work, or that no longer connect with the world of production industries. Their audience is limited, precisely, to those who don’t produce and, even worse, to those who steal the product from others’ work. They’re the universities, newsrooms, and unions. They’re sociologists, bankers, and artists. They’re prosecutors, judges, and public servants who earn more than R$20,000 per month, or even less. It’s the school that’s on the boards of state-owned or nationalized companies. They’re the law firms that defend corrupt billionaires. It’s JBS. It’s Odebrecht. It’s those who want to be like them.
Lula, the PT, and the left have traded the Brazilian people for Hamas terrorists, for murderous governments like Iran’s, and for dictators like Nicolás Maduro. Then they get upset because they only elected mayors in 5% of municipalities. And how could they have elected more talking about Hamas? Citizens couldn’t care less about Hamas. They also don’t have time to waste on other fetishes of the PT, starting with the threat of “the right”—they’re not interested in the subject, and they’re sure that what threatens them is not the right, nor the girl who painted a statue with lipstick, but the armed robber. Brazilians are not afraid of Israel, nor of Donald Trump, and much less of the United States—on the contrary, many people actually want to live there. The only idea they have about capitalism is that they would very much like to be capitalists.
Even worse than swapping the working class for the non-working class is the left’s increasingly open hostility towards the people just the way they are. Leftists get aggressive, for example, with the voter who voted for Marçal, or for right-wing candidates, or for names supported by Bolsonaro—they think the people don’t have the right to vote as they want, because they vote “wrong,” or are too stupid to choose “correctly,” or “don’t understand” what they’re doing. As a result, the left has become today the most exclusionary political force in Brazil. They talk about “inclusion” day and night, but they exclude the majority of the population. In São Paulo, the capital of work in Brazil, the Workers’ Party excluded more than three-quarters of the 9.5 million voters. They didn’t even have a candidate—and the candidate they supported came in third place in a race between two competitors, accomplishing the feat of losing to both the winner and abstentions.
The left doesn’t understand that the Brazilian people isn’t interested in what they are. The people don’t want the handout of Bolsa Família—because they simply want much more than that. What’s the mystery? They don’t want to hear about social projects. They want to have more and live more comfortably. They don’t want to distribute income. They want to earn income. They don’t want to hear about transgenders, quilombolas, and “original peoples,” because none of that has anything to do with the daily life of the majority. They don’t want anything with atomic submarines, MST’s “agrarian reform,” or BRICS talk. They don’t want to smoke marijuana, nor burn money in Petrobras refineries, nor forgive the debts of the Batista brothers—especially since no one forgives theirs. They don’t want “public policies” they don’t understand. They don’t want to pay for a new plane for Janja, nor for whoever will take her place.
The Brazilian left has given up on doing politics. Instead, they decided to hand over to justice Alexandre Moraes in particular, and to the Supreme Court in general, the solution to all their problems and the fulfillment of all their desires. They’re no longer interested in this country’s population. They’re only interested in “making a majority” in the STF—especially when it comes to absolving any and all corruption cases involving the “progressive camp,” friends, and friends of friends. They know very well that Lula is only President of the Republic because he was taken out of jail and put there by the STF-TSE consortium. It’s now the only card in their deck—the one that allows them to govern without the people. They’ve condemned themselves to live like this. There’s no other way out in sight.
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