The 2016 coup was not complete, and we are underestimating its conclusion.

From the Count's Blog - A large portion of Brazilians have learned to detest politics. They are the anti-PT (Workers' Party) supporters, the anti-democracy supporters, the anti-Brazil supporters.

This phenomenon is a direct legacy of colonial subservience – which here is cultural – combined with the influence of our underdeveloped journalism.

Authoritarian tendencies still bind the mortar of this social structure soaked in blood. Want a painful example? There are many people who say they like the PT (Workers' Party), but who don't accept the PT's internal democratic process.

The moment is right to identify them: they are devastated by Jilmar Tatto's victory as the party's candidate for mayor of São Paulo.

This is the understanding of democracy held by many self-proclaimed 'leftists'. They like to 'pull rank'. That's why the PT (Workers' Party) confuses them.

But that's the least of our problems right now.

The openly anti-PT (Workers' Party) masses are worse, obviously.

They are at a bitter crossroads. Because they have always demonized the state, politics, and public debate, they don't know what to do during the pandemic.

Business owners, severely depoliticized throughout their lives, find themselves destabilized by the unforgiving reality. They don't understand why João Doria decreed a quarantine. They don't understand, they don't accept, they don't respect.

For these people, only Bolsonaro remains.

In their characteristic mental poverty, all they can think about is going out in a motorcade.

Today, I had the misfortune of reading this monument to stupidity and suicide in a publication by a merchant from my poor hometown (Caçapava-SP).

She says, shocked: 1) the governor decreed a quarantine without consulting business owners; 2) the mayor followed the order without questioning it; and 3) people are sicker than before.

This is the result of the denial of politics.

The political decision-making process and hierarchy are ignored (not to mention the gem "people are sicker than before").

The 2016 coup led us to this pit: individualism, analytical incapacity, and institutional disrespect.

I won't even mention the technical misunderstanding surrounding the health crisis and the need to activate ethical principles regarding human life, because that would be asking too much.

That's why this energy of the coup, of anti-PT sentiment, of anti-democracy is still so alive.

These 'merchants' - who consider themselves entrepreneurs - are not even capable of reinventing themselves, opening online sales or seeking technical retraining.

For these 'businessmen' (not all of them), only Bolsonaro and the motorcades remain. For these 'businessmen', authoritarianism becomes a solution.

Since they don't deal well with democracy—since they despise it from the bottom of their hearts—the solution is to definitively install an authoritarian process.

We are in an endless process of 'underestimating the problem'. We are absolutely underestimating everything that is being dumped on us by this tragic political sequence imposed by the 2016 coup.

These merchants, detached from the sanitary reality, for example, should have received some kind of psychological and technical assistance from the Brazilian State, but a conscious choice was made for disaster and abandonment.

They become vectors of the virus, of chaos, of death, and of a new coup to finish what the first coup failed to finish.

It's important to understand: the coup in Brazil wasn't complete. This 'feeling of incompleteness' is growing stronger. Let's not close our eyes to what just happened in Bolivia.

Militarism is on the rise, and the Brazilian press is ready to support an authoritarian regime in the country once again.

It is wrong to imagine that our journalism, imbued with conservative public opinion, will react to the 'complement' of the 2016 coup, since it did not react to its beginning (not to mention its support for the dictatorship).

I repeat: we are underestimating the health crisis, the virus, Bolsonaro, the irresponsibility of sectors of the left, the processes of violence that are beginning to emerge on the horizon, and the accelerated slaughter of the Brazilian population.

It would be good if we tried to start breaking free from this vice of underestimating reality, but I know how difficult that is.

Underestimation is a defense mechanism (like fear, like cowardice, like escape). It fits into this petit-bourgeois global worldview, this classist view of maintaining the establishment, so dear to the discourse produced in both conservative journalism and the fragile and limited progressive journalism.

Everyone constantly underestimates it – not least because codifying reality as it is produces effects of 'panic' and 'conspiracy theory'. The meanings produced by the linguistic activity of the species are thus: dizzying and wild. They change constantly. They create barriers to the experience of reality. They establish ruptures in the interpretation of scenarios.

We are watching all of this from the sidelines: the entire West – with all its arrogance – underestimating a virus and the consequences for a world that will never be the same, if it ever continues to 'be' anything at all.

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