Why the Brazilian left does not see risks in Moraes’ decisions

In recent days, three of the most traditional American newspapers – The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal – and the most widely read generalist newspaper in Spain, El País, have published articles that address the risks of the recent monocratic decisions of the Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), for Brazilian democracy.

The international repercussion in traditional media contrasts with the low visibility given to the same type of questioning in large-scale vehicles in Brazil. Exceptions are also cases of opinion makers from outside the right in national territory who make public concerns about attacks on freedom of expression. Those who do have been attacked for it.

Last week, the American journalist Glenn Greenwald became a target of the left when he expressed his disquiet with Moraes’ decisions. Known for having published hacked conversations between former members of Lava Jato on the website The Intercept, Greenwald was considered a hero among leftists for having given the starting point for the dismantling of the operation that had resulted in the arrest of President Lula (PT). Faced with the flood of criticism of his position on Moraes, the journalist evoked the importance of not relativizing “principles” in the name of ideologies.

“Whoever defends a principle is not on the side of any political faction. A principle does not serve left or right. A principle, by definition, has universal application. Those who cannot reason with principles always assume that everyone suffers from the same disability,” he said via Twitter.

For freedom of expression expert Pedro Franco, master in social history of culture at PUC-Rio and in interdisciplinary studies at New York University, the left’s silent behavior in relation to recent STF decisions and criticism of Greenwald “has much to do with motivated reasoning.” “If the main targets of the censorship processes were from the left, perhaps the left would defend freedom of expression. Anyone who is the target of the attack always becomes a defender of freedom of expression. That’s a human tendency, and it’s rare — though it shouldn’t be that rare — to see members of the opposing political camp defending their opponents’ right to free speech, as was the case with Glenn Greenwald.”

Left condemns ‘American view’ of free speech

Many of those who criticized Greenwald after his positions on Moraes accused him of wanting to introduce in Brazil a typically American idea of ​​freedom of expression, in which unrestricted manifestation of thought is seen as an ideal. For Franco, this argument is being used “to dismiss Glenn’s criticisms and not think too much about the substance of what he is talking about”.

“The United States, in fact, has a jurisprudence sui generis regarding freedom of expression. I think it is the country that most values ​​this right. It makes sense that Glenn or the average American would have the impetus and have the arguments to defend this right at the tip of his tongue, and put up a fight to defend it more often than the Brazilian. But the right to freedom of expression is not entirely foreign to the Brazilian legal system, it is not foreign to any modern liberal democracy, and it is not an alien principle to our jurisprudence,” he says.

Bruna Frascolla, PhD in Philosophy from UFBa and columnist for People’s Gazettebelieves that the North American model of freedom of expression not only does not contradict Moraes’ logic, but is precisely the intellectual origin of what he has done.

For her, Brazil, in recent years, has moved “from a model of censorship that was objective, because it characterized certain theses as morally reprehensible” to the “utilitarian parameter of the United States, according to which freedom of expression must be unrestricted, except in case of damage”.

In the USA, according to her, decisions on freedom of expression always end up falling under the subjectivist criterion, in which it is the judge who ends up deciding what causes harm to society or not.

“That comes from Judge (Oliver) Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935) on the First Amendment (which deals with free speech). This interpretation was even made to defend censorship during the war. His argument was utilitarian: he used as an example the idea that you can’t shout ‘fire’ in a full theater, because that’s dangerous. From there, anyone can consider anything dangerous and call for censorship in the opposite direction,” he says.

For Bruna, the solution to this subjectivism would be to establish “a consensus through objective laws of what should be censored and what should not”. “When you say ‘it’s a crime to do things that are dangerous,’ it goes to the judge’s head to say what’s dangerous and what’s not,” she observes. “’Hate speech cannot’. Why? ‘Because it is dangerous’. And how am I going to determine if it’s dangerous or not? That’s the judge’s head. It’s all very subjective. You end up making, even informally, a list of prohibited things because they are dangerous. It just wasn’t coded. It’s in the head of the judge, who does what he wants, ”she adds.

Moraes ignores the risk of the “Streisand effect”, says expert

For Franco, Moraes could end up causing in Brazil what is usually called the “Streisand effect”, that is, the idea that censorship awakens people’s interest in censored content.

He cites Nazi Germany as an example, where, according to some historians, laws to curb hate speech did not prevent Hitler from coming to power. “There were laws prohibiting anti-Semitic speech in Germany before the Nazis came to power. There were high doses of censorship, including against the Nazis. Did that stop the Nazis? Do not. On the contrary, it was used precisely as a weapon by the Nazis to make themselves victims. This generates people’s sympathy for people who often don’t deserve sympathy – like the Nazis, for example.”

Franco compares the attitude of Moraes and part of the left to “wanting to fight global warming by breaking all the thermometers”. “It is an absolutely superficial and inefficient palliative, which will lead to obscuring the nature of the problem rather than fighting it”, he says. “I think that Alexandre de Moraes is monstrously naive to think that this combat method will work. It is a monstrous naivety of all those who think that this will strengthen our institutions, because our institutions function on the basis of trust. And that doesn’t build trust,” he adds.

For Bruna Frascolla, establishing clear laws about what can or cannot be said publicly is the best solution to avoid both the arbitrariness of judges and the usurpation of freedom of expression by powerful agents. In societies that dispense with objective laws about the limits of expression, democracy is always subject to these two risks, she says.

In this sense, she proposes a reflection on an important limit of free expression according to the North American model: “Imagine that some crazy and extravagant billionaire decides to defend cannibalism. As he has a lot of money, he sponsors television programs and makes a whole cultural revolution with just his money, defending cannibalism. And he will do it, because he has money. Society will be revolted, it will try to censor it, but it will not have the means to do so, because that is the freedom of expression of that billionaire.”