Equal pay or: ‘I was once Brazilian like you’ – 09/03/2023 – Reinaldo Azevedo

Don’t stir it, it spoils. The amendment is always worse than the sonnet. When governments get involved in correcting inequalities, they hinder more than they help. Trying to protect the vulnerable will further marginalize them.

When I became aware of the set of measures announced by Lula to protect women, I was reminded of these considerations that are heard around, especially in environments where one breathes the air of “Brazilian liberalism”. Not infrequently, this coexists well with alarming inequalities and transforms them into facts fallen from the tree of life. The missionaries also want less State in social assistance, not only in the economy. It’s not evil, it’s belief.

I await the reaction of those faithful to the pro-women package. I don’t know how many abstract beings, who inhabit the “world as an idea”, will be summoned to show that everything is going to go wrong because eternal truths of the economy are being confronted. The same ones evoked, and I have them alive in my memory, against the SUS in the last century.

I remember a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. “I too was once Brazilian like you” —in this case, the enthusiasts of “not dark liberalism”. I am making a mirrored allusion here to the “brown socialism”, of which Leonel Brizola became the electoral expression, in the effort to adapt certain general ideas about the good and the fair to the circumstances of each country. I note on the sidelines: I do not make a value judgment on those political choices.

If “socialism” —and I take the word as an emblem of the various egalitarian currents— softened in Brazil, substituting, as a triumphant trend, disruption for reform, merging with what we made of what they did to us, it seems certain to me that what they call “liberalism” walked in the opposite direction, not refusing, and sometimes seeking it, proximity to the most abject reactionaryism. In the symbology used here, it became whiter and less bland.

Jair Bolsonaro did not devastate the democratic right by chance. This was not only due to his truculence, but also to the proximity of certain ideas. And, for that very reason, all things being equal, it will take a long time for the so-called non-Bolsonarist and non-PT “conservatives” to have a recognizable voice. You should read Paul: the zither and the flute will sound different. If the sound is uncertain, who will organize for battle?

I return to Drummond, adapting it. “I was once a poet too./ All I had to do was look at the market,/ I immediately thought of the stars/ and other celestial nouns/ But there were so many, the sky was so big,/ my poetry was disturbed. (…) And my friends loved me ,/ my enemies hated me./ I ironically glided/ satisfied to have my rhythm.”

I know how to make all the panegyrics in favor of the market. But, in democracy, either it is regulated by politics —instead of controlling them—, or we will live from regretting, every little, that many are caught by tragedies. Or, without these, let them die in sighs. Equal pay will encounter enormous resistance. All sentences that open this text will be toned. And if it will alert, additionally, to the unemployment of women, which the bill seeks to protect.

Detractors, with those who waste their time with it, can use that Drummond against me, which ends like this: “But I ended up confusing everything./ Today I don’t slide anymore,/ I’m not ironic anymore,/ I don’t have rhythm anymore.” I don’t feel any nostalgia for a time of many certainties and little perplexity. Paulo again: it’s time to stop being a boy. We know how tedious a neophyte traveler’s enthusiasm is for landscapes we’ve had enough of.

We have been living badly with the idea that people may not be that virtuous, but that we have to fight for institutions that are, as Minister Marina Silva (Environment) told me in a recent interview. I am not unaware that they are born out of possible consensuses, but I argue that they also contribute to creating them. If a conservative does not seek to improve institutions to conserve them (Chesterton), what will he fight for the conservation of? Of iniquities? Lula, for that very reason, is our most notable conservative. And that those “liberals” I’m referring to still don’t understand. Perhaps they will never understand.

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