For sociologist, “if Trump wins in the USA, Bolsonaro will be a strong candidate in Brazil”
The articles written by the PÚBLICO Brasil team are written in the variant of the Portuguese language used in Brazil.
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A fierce critic of the Brazilian elite, which he calls “prey”, sociologist Jesse Souza, 64, says he hopes for the victory of candidate Kamala Harris, from the Democratic Party, in the next elections in the United States. In his assessment, if Republican Donald Trump wins the polls, the chances of the Brazilian Congress overturning the ineligibility of Jair Bolsonaro, who will be a strong candidate, will be high.
Souza states that the large flow of Brazilians migrating to Portugal is a reflection of the lack of opportunities in Brazil, where the richest groups appropriate a discourse that leads the poorest to take a stand against what would be best for them. This, in his opinion, is aggravated because the left, especially the PT, party of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, mistakenly believes that only an improvement in the economy will be able to bring back popular support to this political field.
Graduated in Law from the University of Brasília (UnB), with a doctorate in Sociology from the German University of Heidelberg and a post-doctorate in philosophy and psychoanalysis from the New School for Social Research, in New York, Souza sought a new way to explain the division of society between those who increasingly accumulate wealth and the vast majority of the population who face enormous difficulty in having the minimum to survive.
Born in Natal, the sociologist is currently a professor at the Federal University of ABC, in São Paulo. Previously, he taught at the University of Bremen, in Germany, at the University of São Paulo (USP), at Federal Fluminense and Federal de Juiz de Fora, among others. He was president of the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea) from 2015 to 2016, being dismissed after Michel Temer took power. So far, he has published 39 books.
Souza is in Portugal, where he participated in the seminar Brazil in the New World Orderheld at the headquarters of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP). Furthermore, he launched, in Lisbon, his most recent book, The Poor Right Wing — Revenge of the Bastardss. See excerpts from the interview given to PÚBLICO Brasil.
Brazil is experiencing a migratory phenomenon like never before. Millions of Brazilians have left the country. What causes this phenomenon?
In this case, it is one of those issues that we have no doubt about: obviously, it is the lack of opportunity due to an extremely restrictive, neoliberal market, that is, without any developmental proposal to stimulate industry, to encourage small businesses. People don’t have jobs and leave in search of a better opportunity. In the second Lula Government, it was the opposite. It was the Portuguese who were going to Brazil, especially those with technical capacity, because the country was expanding. Ultimately, this has to do with the type of domination we have and the elite we have.
Do you believe this can be reversed?
I believe. Now, we have the worst cards in our hands. The right and the extreme right swept the most recent elections for councilors and mayors. We have a framework for 2026, which is very complicated for a thousand reasons. Firstly, due to a very well done articulation by the extreme right, both global and national, financed with a lot of money by the same elite, that of Faria Lima (Brazil’s financial center), and the horrible agribusiness we have, which is murderous, a waste of money. land, destructive to the extreme, with people who don’t care about the country’s project. And also, an incompetence on the part of what we call the left, which doesn’t even realize the need to fight for the hegemony of ideas, which is what defines politics. The left, especially the PT, thinks it will change the economy a little and that people will, spontaneously, know that this is the best thing for them. This is naivety, vulgar Marxism.
Brazil today is very divided. How do you get people who need the State for their basic needs to position themselves in favor of the reduction of that State and even the destruction of that State?
There was a coup d’état to, among other things, dominate the Central Bank. You dominate Congress, limit the Executive, that is, the only democratic body in the country. This has been in the works for some time. These niches are being built, and evangelical religiosity does the rest, because it is neoliberal. So, there is a cultural hegemony. And that makes it stupid. Every person is born intelligent, but you can be turned into an idiot if that’s the only information you receive. So, there is a public sphere colonized by money, as the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas would say. And, if that happens, you will be convinced against your best interest.
Brazil is a country that has a very strong racist tradition, but the black population itself uses terms among themselves that are considered prejudiced. Is this a trivialization of racism?
When it is the oppressed who uses words, it is an attempt to give new meaning. In the United States, this is very clear when you call each other “niggers”, which is the most important pejorative. It’s like what happened with gays. Gay was a pejorative word, but when a person comes out and calls themselves gay, they impose another version.
You state that, in Brazil, there is a rapacious elite. How is this elite built?
The first thing is poisoned ideas. USP was a great factory for this. Not that everyone there is bad, but it was built for that by the São Paulo elite. If you have ideas poisoned by brilliant people, who pretend to be criticizing society, when, deep down, they are imposing the worst prejudices of the elite, like Sérgio Buarque and 90% of the Brazilian intelligentsia, who are influenced by him. If there is dominance over all symbolic production, publishers, newspapers, television, that vision is imposed on everyone else. Basically, it is an elite that needs the State, because it is the way it robs the population. He steals in a way that, nowadays, is invisible, through exorbitant interest rates. The venal press will say that high interest rates are good for workers, because they do not increase inflation. As no one understands economics, the explanation is accepted, because it is the only one that exists. It is a huge transfer of resources from the population as a whole to half a dozen scoundrels behind the banks. Basically, it is a rapacious elite that steals, because that is a robbery. Big crime, whoever does it, is this elite who steals a lot and takes away all the purchasing capacity of the population. And it lies, distorts, creates a parallel reality and has all the mechanisms to assault everyone, with a press to deny this and blame it on other things.
Nowadays, ideas that would have been considered absurd and outrageous five years ago are spoken more naturally. Why is that?
This is the effect of the American extreme right, which is unique in relation to European fascism, although they have similar things. It is a technological extreme right, shaped by the redefinition and destruction of civilizational agreements, which provide that women have rights, as well as minorities, black people and the poor. In addition to denying this, they criminalize it. There, an ideal stage is created so that there can be exploitation without any limits in which one poor person is pitted against another poor person, not against the rich person.
We are days away from the American elections. How do you see this process?
I support the Democratic Party because, with Trump in power, I think Jair Bolsonaro will be eligible again, and he would be the strongest candidate for 2026. I don’t want that to happen. Now, I think the two parties, Democrat and Republican, are the same thing, because, deep down, it’s imperial politics.
