Eric Voegelin on the preservation of democracy

Eric Voegelin, the greatest historian of political philosophy in the 20th century, establishes three conditions for the democratic quality of a government:

“For the purpose of this study we may say roughly that the democratic quality of a government hinges on three points: (1) the type of the elite who shapes the issues, (2) the issues themselves, and (3) the state of mind in which a voter goes to the polls. The three problems are closely interwoven. / The first condition of democracy is that the governing elite permit only issues to be shaped that do not stir up emotions too deeply and are not apt to produce an irreconcilable cleavage in the people. This requires, of course, an express or tacit gentlemen’s agreement between the party leaders to refrain from vote-getting by stirring up emotions beyond a definite limit. It requires a relation of mutual confidence between the leaders that none of them will take undue advantage of the others by using unfair means of rabble-rousing in his favor.”

So now there comes the question, how deeply has Brazilian political elite been violating Voegelin's first condition? I think it has been violating it deeply enough for democracy to be already dead.

Voegelin goes on to saying:

“Hitler lies, he lies habitually, pathologically. / (...) A lie, we may say for the purpose of this paper, is a statement known to be untrue by the man who utters it, who nevertheless makes it with the intention to have it appear true. Now, first, it is not quite certain that the statements and promises made by Hitler and broken later were always lies subjectively when made. He may have been at the time of making them in a state of auto-suggestion which made him sincere. / However, this is a minor point for our present problem. The more interesting one is that the National Socialist movement has developed a theory of truth, most amply elaborated by Alfred Rosenberg, to the effect that truth is what is useful to the German people.”

This is what strikes me most, because of its resemblance with our current political debate, greatly fed by lies against the conservative movement and the opposition, and the institutional disorder subrepticiously instilled by the Supreme Court since Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, when the then Minister Lewandowski, in a clear violation of the Constitution, partially freed Dilma from political punishments: the psychological issue of “compulsively liying with sincerity” and, most importantly, the construction of a politically convenient “theory of truth”.

This is such a serious threat to our democracy, that it even gives us a sharp criterion for political analysis: whatever the government says to be useful to the Brazilian people on the basis of controlling fake news but is in any way useful to the Workers Party, that, then, is a lie.

In his essay “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism”, Voegelin points out to the political disease of modern times: the prohibition of questioning. In accord with their confluence to the gnostic character of Lula’s totalitarian cosmovision, the members of the Supreme Court have made their homework to justify the prohibition of questioning in Brazil, which of course is directed only to the political opposition. Since the presidential election campaign of 2022, journalists and politicians have been unconstitutionally persecuted by the Supreme Court for the “crime of free speech” and “questioning”. Though Voegelin meant metaphysical questioning, we may say that the Brazilian Supreme Court added some mundanity to it: it is prohibited to question the Supreme Court about any extrapolation of its constitutional duties. Indeed, in Brazil the Supreme Court is the supreme being itself, and Alexandre de Moraes is its Pontifex Maximus.

The real threat to our democracy is Lula himself, and his allies in the Supreme Court. It is our moral and civic duty to press the Parliament to start the process of impeachment of Alexandre de Moraes, the most dangerous element of constitutional disruption in the Supreme Court, and to react strongly against Lula’s dictatorial ambition.