A Turning Point?

Maybe liberalism is starting to win.  In Poland last year a coalition of liberals and allies threw out the conservatives imitating the Hungarian fascists.  Next door to Brazil, Javier Milei, absurdly described sometimes as “conservative,” has started on a liberal path of dismantling the top-down regulations that have made Argentinians into impoverished children of the state.  At the other door to Brazil, the Venezuelan engineer and mother of three, María Corina Machado, a liberal of Milei’s sort and chief theorist of the opposition to Maduro’s left-wing fascism, remains in hiding, but defiant.  The party she nourished of course won the election in July by a massive margin, which even Maduro’s dear friend Lula admits. 

Up north in the U.S., in less than two months the people will vote in presidential and congressional elections.  It looks increasingly likely that Kamala Harris will crush Donald Trump and his authoritarian allies.  Even conservative U.S. Republicans, such as Dick Cheney, the architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, are lining up against Trump.  Two months is a long time in politics.  Maybe something will go badly wrong, and the U.S. will slide into the authoritarian camp of Russia, China, and too many Latin countries.  But at present, I’d advise placing your bets against it.

In one sense the authoritarians worldwide have already lost.  If the only way that Maduro and Putin and Erdogan can stay in power is to fake elections, jail and murder opponents, and recruit enough fascist-inclined policemen to squash protests, their regimes are fragile.  True, the authoritarian regimes look hopelessly permanent.  But then suddenly they fall, as has happened repeatedly since 1989.  It seems that nowadays the liberal genie is out of the bottle.  He can’t be put back in, not permanently.  In Burma and Russia and Saudi Arabia the genie is in hiding. But like Corina Machado he will emerge triumphant.  Bet on it.

That is, in the long struggle since 7 September 1822 between the two words on the Brazilian flag—by the way, Happy birthday!—liberal progress has won over authoritarian order.  As the British economist Keynes said in 1936, “the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.” The idea of equality of permission has gradually won.

Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.