Faced with a series of effervescent debates around rights such as the separation between state and religion, weaponry, and reproductive rights, including the, growing stands such as the Bible, the ox and the bullet, which use these themes to promote a more fragmented and less accessible reality, favoring their own agenda before Brazilian society.
It is this hypothesis that the book “The Law of Bullet, Ox and Bible: Democratic Crisis Culture in the dispute of rights” seeks to investigate, trying to understand the history and political and legal strategies of more conservative groups in the center of power in the country.
The work, elaborated by researchers from Laut (Center for Analysis of Freedom and Authoritarianism), also seeks to make parallels about how group discourses and conservative leaders in the country, such as (), are linked to the process of.
LAUT is independent and apartiwort, founded in 2020 by academics and jurists, and seeks to study the rule of law, democracy and its spheres of public debate. It also tries to monitor the new forms of manifestation of authoritarianism, as in discourses around an illiberal order, where there is, but civil society is removed from political participation.
Authors Adriane Sanctis de Brito, Luciana Silva Reis, Ana Silva Rosa and Mariana Celano de Souza Amaral state that religious, rural or public safety groups have used a populist language to gain space among voters, also citing the need to approach politics with religion to protect individual rights and the belief of the population.
This discourse is combined with the idea that the progressive agenda has made the representatives of these groups – underpinners as the defenders of individual freedoms – victims of a process of disorder or erratic driving in the country. These figures are still transformed into development advocates amid economic and political crises.
Some phrases are an example of this rhetoric, which would guide the discussion on national politics topics, according to the authors: “O is a”, “the church is the promoter of the common good”, “weaponry is safeguard against crime.”
These groups follow the book, do not need to change the constitutional devices to impose an antipluralist agenda.
Researchers argue that disputes for interpretation of law and already consolidated laws can both configure more freedom and generate restrictive conceptions of citizenship, increase the concentration of power and even unbalance a regime without the need for a coup d’état.
For the authors, it is necessary to look at these same discourses and strategies used by conservative groups to curb democracies’ wear.
It is necessary, according to the work, to demonstrate that there is no opposition, for example, between individual and property rights and the promotion of social rights and that protecting the economic activity of Agro, for example, does not imply reducing the rights of indigenous people and vice versa.
Luciana Silva Reis, one of the authors of the book and professor at the Faculty of Law of UFU (Federal University of Uberlândia), argues in an interview with Sheet That the need to contain authoritarian climbing is a permanent task forward around the world.
She sees the responsibility of those who participated in the coup plot participants, who were recently reported to the (Supreme Court), as adequate and necessary to weaken the authoritarian threat.
According to Luciana, the determination of conduct is one of the ways to fix concrete meanings to what the usually abstract rules, they say, and what political values are in a democracy – account display and individualization of criminal acts, as with any citizen.
“The important thing is that democratic political culture has the means to protect against interpretations of constitutional rights and guarantees that, in each of these fields, are contrary to pluralism or are unduly restrictive in their visions on who ‘deserves’ the protections of the rule of law.”
Adriane Sanctis de Brito, associated with the History Department of Harvard University, Codirer of Laut and also author of the work, states that the publication is the result of a series of multidisciplinary discussions, which have undergone political science, history, sociology and law.
The researcher expects the book to contribute to the legal language to be seen as a form of political language, which builds important meanings for the state and society. Adriane points out that the use of legal language in the political clash can point to other exits to democratic weakening.
“The change in the senses of legal language allows you to change all references not only of policies under a particular leader, but of all political culture. These changes are contextual at each historical moment.”
