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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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There was an interesting article about that in Foreign Affairs. The relevant excerpt here:

The undoing of modernization through its principal process—the coming apart of formal employment and of the rise of precaritization—is the root of the whole phenomenon of “Brazilianization”: growing inequality, oligarchy, the privatization of wealth and social space, and a declining middle class. Its spatial, urban dimension is its most visible manifestation, with the development of gentrified city centers and the excluded pushed to the periphery.

In political terms, Brazilianization means patrimonialism, clientelism, and corruption. Rather than see these as aberrations, we should understand them as the normal state of politics when widely shared economic progress is not available, and the socialist Left can­not act as a countervailing force. It was the industrial proletariat and socialist politics that kept liberalism honest, and prevented elites from instrumentalizing the state for their own interests.

The “revolt of the elites”—their escape from society, physically into heavily guarded private spaces, economically into the realm of global finance, politically into anti-democratic arrangements that out­source responsibility and inhibit accountability—has created hol­lowed-out neoliberal states. These are polities closed to popular pres­sures but open to those with the resources and networks to directly influence politics. The practical consequence is not just corruption, but also states lacking the capacity to undertake any long-range developmental policies—even basic ones that might advance economic growth, such as the easing of regional inequalities. State failure in the pandemic is only the most flagrant recent example.

To add my two cents, this idea is about turning Western world into cycle of elitist/populist cycles which entrench corruption and oligarchy in place. Imagine a world where every single person in your country is corrupt - from lowly nurse or police officers to supreme judges and presidents. Everybody accepts this as a new normal, the way to move forward is to accept this and move in cutthroat environment toward wealth and power. If you don't have it, you cheat and corrupt and do whatever is necessary to attain it. If you have it, you defend with all your might - ranging from creating gated communities, crushing lowlifes under your boot to propagandizing and using social status to make yourself look good. Imagine that the whole country is full of Vito Corleones from Godfather: ruthless power hungry thug who is "respected" in local community for his strenght and directed "charity" which helps his power.

And the point is that it is even hard to see Vito Corleone as a "bad guy". He is just product of his Brazilian surroundings, he may see himself as a hero of Kolmogorov complicity type of a problem.

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