New Year’s Eves are intervals dedicated to utopian aspirational messages. Nobody takes them seriously, including their authors. Predictably, this 2025 began with the call, addressed to politicians, for the end of . The plea will not be answered — but, in any case, it misses the target.
The polarizing discourse became a political strategy: a cold calculation about electoral gains. It’s not new. “Us versus them” has formed a grammar of populist politics since the 19th century. It has been exercising it for decades – and has come to power on its wings. and their people led it to a climax, in an attempt to prepare the rupture of the democratic order. None of the rival camps will give up on the tool, at least as long as it produces the desired results.
The relevant point is another: the contamination of social relations by the polarization that percolates from the party surface. Didactic illustration: readers’ comments on the news about . There is, of course, a majority that, noting the obvious, calls for the aggressor to be punished. However, reflecting a social illness, there are still those who carry out symbolic shootings.
In defense of the delinquent police officer, expressions such as “red rats” and “corrupt rats” emerge, a Bolsonarista version of Castro’s “gusanos”. A brave man even writes that, in front of a Globo journalist, he would do “the same as this police officer”. In a similar vein, but pretending to condemn the aggression, some believe that, as a public figure, the journalist is “subject to this type of harassment”.
The “other side”, so to speak, does better – but not by much. From him emanates the most classic cliché, “Nazi-fascism”, applied generically to political rivals of . Hitler, no less. At the height of the delirium, nostalgic for “social control of the media”, a profound thinker declares that “the Sheet de S.Paulo is guilty of this” because it “feeds the right” and “has always been a neo-Nazi”.
According to a cliché, Brazilian society has never been so “politicized”. In fact, it’s the opposite. The fever of obtuse political proclamations that spread across social media and contaminate everyday conversations, at the bar or at the dinner table, highlights the phenomenon of social depoliticization.
realized that a unique feature of the world is found in the colonization of social institutions and private life by politics. “Everything is political!” –the motto shared by right-wing and left-wing extremists, religious preachers and identity activists was invented by regimes devoted to the radical extermination of political divergence.
The democratic system is characterized, in normal times, by the segregation of politics from electoral processes and demonstrations of demands. People expect the government to manage things, avoiding the temptation to manage minds. They vote, sometimes they protest in the streets. Other than that, they want politicians to leave them alone, with their friends and affections, their hobbies and their entertainment.
Our problem is not the polarization of politicians’ speech, but the overwhelming . Or, to put it another way, the radical depoliticization of ordinary people’s political discourse. Abnormal times. Happy 2025.
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