Another window of democratic warming is opening in the country. It stirs political affections. It takes emotional and mental energy from those who choose to participate in the debate and deal with the discomfort of conflict. It calls for non-arrogant conversations, the exercise of explaining the reasons for your vote, of listening to the reasons for a different vote, of being open to convincing and being convinced.
It is also a time to treat language with care. Understanding what is said and what words are used. The historian, a student of tyrannies and their tricks of domination, warns against the lazy, thoughtless and misleading uses of language. Defends the urgency of preserving certain distinctions. And he recalls the effective linguistic technology of contemporary manifestations of fascism: “A fascist does not care about the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve language; language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal ‘fascist,’ the term begins to function in a different way, as a servant of a specific person, rather than a bearer of meaning.”
The objective is not to communicate ideas or facts, just to instigate tribal emotion, the drive to belong to a group. He is not concerned with thinking and arguing, just feeling and attacking.
It is worth trying a vocabulary protocol, reactivating alerts against rhetorical slogans that take on a life of their own, flood public debate and empty words of meaning.
insists on the motto “Stop calling fascists populists”. Jurist Charles Fried once said “Stop calling reactionaries conservatives.” Here we should demarcate a third: “Stop calling authoritarians conservatives.”
There are different lineages of conservatives. None of these lineages supports disobedience to the law, instigates the invasion of indigenous land, proposes a security policy through the release of individual weapons and police lethality. None of them appeal to a past of freedom with , equality with large estates, fraternity with coronelismo and captain of the bush. None of them confuse virtue, intelligence and the military institution. None of them appeal to Christ to exempt their church from helicopter taxes. None of them confuse religion with politics.
If you call yourself conservative, ask first what values you want to preserve.
There is the conservative social hierarchies that our colonial past handed to us and successive generations strived to maintain. White men, large landowners, accompanied by servile women, guardians of the patriarchal family. Magistocrats, guardians of the state of Justice. Party chiefs, guardians of political clientelism, hydrated by Preserve poverty, the oligarchic order, domination by force.
On the other side there is the constitutional conservative. It tries to preserve values of progress and the promise of emancipation. Family, tradition and property with freedom, equality and social function. The constitutional family is diverse and egalitarian, giving priority to the child and the care of . Constitutional property finds limits in the common good.
That conservative seeks rupture. The constitutional conservative tries to contribute to a promise of Brazil of the future.
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