Ultimately, who is afraid of democracy in Brazil?

* Originally published in Major Card

A huge ideological and political dispute is taking place around democracy. Who is democratic and who is not? A dispute over who will appropriate the term, with the pretense that whoever appears democratic will automatically be hegemonic.

The fact is, everything depends on the prevailing concept of democracy. Who could say that the family oligarchies, monopolistic owners of traditional media in Brazil, would appear as the strongest defenders of democracy, supposedly threatened by the State that is promoting the greatest democratization process in Brazilian society, with the massive support of the vast majority of the population, in broad and open electoral consultations, with the majority participation of the population?

This is because we are talking about different things when we talk about democracy. The dominant conception, used by those opposition bodies and parties, refers to the liberal conception of democracy. This conception was founded on the rights of individuals against the State, considered the greatest threat to freedom and democracy.

It is a concept founded on individuals, considered the only effective reality in societies. Margaret Thatcher even stated that: "There is no longer society, only individuals"—the greatest utopia of liberalism. Society would be structured around individual rights.

In a society like the United States, among the inalienable rights expressed in the Constitution is the right to bear arms, so that individuals can defend themselves against the State. (It doesn't matter if the weapons end up in the hands of children, who kill their classmates at school or their little brother.) Individual rights so override collective rights that Obama, even brandishing the massacre of children at that US school, failed to limit this inalienable right that Americans reserve for themselves.

According to liberal principles, if there is a separation of powers, if there are periodic elections, if there is a plurality of parties, if there is a free press (note: for them, a free press means a private press), then there would be democracy. Liberalism uses institutional, political, and formal criteria to define democracy. Brazil itself was, for a long time, the most unequal country in the world, but it came to be considered democratic when it began to respect those canons, regardless of whether it was an economic, social, and cultural dictatorship.

Today, as Brazil undergoes an unprecedented process of social democratization, the oligarchies feel threatened. They no longer control the national government, they systematically lose elections at the national level, they feel that social strata that were always neglected by them are seeing their rights recognized, and they react violently.

For Brazil to truly become a democracy, it needs to undergo a process of economic, political, and cultural democratization. It needs to democratize the economy, breaking the hegemony of speculative capital and promoting the predominance of productive investments that generate goods and jobs. It needs to broadly promote small and medium-sized agricultural production, the kind that generates jobs and produces food for the domestic market.

We need to democratize the structures of political representation, promoting public funding of election campaigns, so that parliaments effectively represent the population, without the distorting influence of money.

We need to democratize the judiciary so that it is an institution elected and controlled by the citizens, and not by the oligarchies of power and wealth.

We need to democratize the process of forming public opinion, breaking the private monopoly of the few families that monopolistically dominate the media. It's not about preventing anyone from speaking, but rather about allowing everyone to speak, through the multiplication and diversification of different media outlets.

Democracy is the greatest threat to the power of traditional oligarchies. That is why they react so angrily to the democratization processes underway in Brazilian society.