THE THEORETICAL JUSTIFICATION OF THE AUTHORITARIAN MINDSET: THE THREE MAIN PILLARS
Brazil has a long history of a conflicting relationship with authoritarianism despite the years of democracy since the end of the last dictatorship in 1985. The whole of the twentieth century is a sequence of transitions between more democratic and more authoritarian governments.
â€?We can say that Brazil, in over one hundred years of republic, has a political, legal, and constitutional history permeated by regime changes, transitions, ruptures, and continuities’, wrote Cristiano Paixao, adding to that the conclusion of the very â€?complexity of such transformations, the capacity of keeping, in the new regime, components of the former order, and, above all, the impossibility of monocausal explana- tions’.[384] What is more, the authoritarian regimes had the support of distinct sectors of society.[385] There is, accordingly, a deep connection between, first, authoritarianism and continuity despite regime changes, and, secondly, between authoritarianism and popular support. Both perspectives go hand in hand.A diachronic analysis of how such authoritarian forces have organised themselves in distinct periods of Brazilian history is telling of its continuity through reinvention. Two periods of Brazilian history are particularly noteÂworthy for this purpose: Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo (1937-45) and the civilian-military dictatorship (1964-85). In both periods, the demand for justiÂfication of authoritarian acts through the language of democracy gave rise to a genealogy of arguments that have reappeared in distinct contexts (the Bolsonaro presidency is just the most recent, albeit the most explicit, example).
Prominent scholars have pointed out three pillars sustaining such an authoriÂtarian mindset. Silene de Moraes Freire stresses the depoliticisation of society through the â€?construction of a modernity “from above” with no ruptures with the archaic foundations of Brazilian society and destructive to democratic possibilities’.[386] Boris Fausto connects the constitution of such an authoritarian mindset to Brazil’s institutional framework: â€?the authoritarian mindset gained considerable prestige, and the main ideologues of this current had a significant role in creating institutions and in the political life more broadly’.[387] Raymundo Faoro provides a more sociological viewpoint by stressing what he calls â€?esta- mentos’, as a â€?social stratum with effective political authority within an order of aristocratic content’,[388] which has long adopted diverse strategies to â€?privatise’ the state according to their interests and to disrupt the exercise of citizenship.
Briefly, from these three viewpoints, the main three pillars of the authoritarÂian mindset could be summed up as follows: (1) the depoliticisation of society, which is seen as still unprepared for dealing with the challenges of the country or as a player that should be tamed rather than regarded as an active particiÂpant of political life; (2) the institutionalisation of a technocracy that steadily deals with political, economic and legal elites in order to keep their privileges and benefits virtually untouched (which helps explain the high inequality); and (3) the strategic use of the legal framework for a symbiotic and clientelistic relationship between the private and public spheres.
These three main pillars have seriously impacted the rule of law in Brazil, though their prevalence and influence over Brazil’s institutions have obviously fluctuated over history.III.