Brazil’s Cultural Battleground: Public Universities and the New Right

• Author: Juliano Fiori,Pedro Fiori Arantes
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221147594
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221147594

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 248, Vol. 50 No. 1, January 2023, 197–217

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221147594

© 2023 Latin American Perspectives

197

Brazil’s Cultural Battleground

Public Universities and the New Right

by

Juliano Fiori and Pedro Fiori Arantes

After assuming the presidency in January 2019, Bolsonaro used the machinery of gov-

ernment to wage culture warfare. Public universities, sites of cultivation of a new moral

radicalism of the left over recent decades, became primary cultural battlegrounds. With its

attacks on public universities (demonization, unconstitutional government interference,

budget cuts, and political persecution), Bolsonaro’s government nurtured the reactionary

imagination of Brazil’s new right and challenged the cultural hegemony of the left and

thus undermined a biopolitical pact that once tied public universities to the defense of a

right to life.

Depois de assumir a presidência em Janeiro 2019, Bolsonaro utilizou a máquina do

governo para fazer uma guerra cultural. As universidades públicas, viveiros pela formação

de um novo radicalismo moral da esquerda durante as últimas décadas, se convertiram em

importantes campos de batalha culturais nessa guerra. Com sua ofensiva contra as uni-

versidades públicas (demonização, interferência do governo inconstitucional, cortes orça-

mentais e persecuções políticas), o governo Bolsonaro fomentou um imaginário reacionário

na direita brasileira que desafiou a hegemonia cultural da esquerda e, por conseguinte,

minou um pacto biopolítico que anteriormente vinculava as universidades públicas à

defesa do direito à vida.

Keywords: Public universities, Culture war, Cultural Marxism, Left hegemony,

New right

The explosion of discontent across Brazilian cities in June 2013 and the

right’s subsequent conquest of the streets demonstrated that the country’s

progressive neoliberal settlement was not as consolidated as its champions

had supposed. But no one expected Bolsonaro. And yet, once the unexpected

transpires, hindsight transforms it into the inevitable through vindication of a

historical rationality. What else was to be expected? For many of Bolsonaro’s

detractors, his presidency was the result of elite betrayal of Brazilian democ-

racy. For his devotees—those who call him Mito (Myth)—it represented the

hope of salvation from ethical and cultural degeneracy. As political intrigue

plowed fertile ground for counterrevolution, Bolsonaro’s presidential election

Juliano Fiori is the director of Alameda, a new institute for research and social strategy. Pedro

Fiori Arantes is an associate professor of art history, is one of the principal investigators at

Sociedade, Universidade e Ciência Research Center (SoU_Ciência), and was vice provost of plan-

ning (2013–2021) at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo.

1147594LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221147594Latin American PerspectivesFiori and Arantes/PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES AND THE NEW RIGHT

research-article2023

198 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

campaign of 2018 polarized these moral postures, presenting conflict between

them as not just inevitable but essential.

With Bolsonaro in power, Brazil provided a dramatic example of the popular

authoritarianism that has reshaped the ideological landscape of liberal democ-

racies.1 Bolsonaro nurtured the reactionary imagination of a new authoritarian

right, according to which “cultural Marxism” appears as an imported threat to

an essential, conservative Brazilian character. Identifying those at the forefront

of progressive politics today—black, indigenous, and landless activists, femi-

nists, members of the LGBTQI+ community, those engaged in historical strug-

gles for rights—as internal enemies, he provided license for violence against

them.

Over the past two decades, public universities have provided spaces for the

cultivation of a new moral radicalism of the left, contributing to a progressive

cultural politics that has stretched the moral contours of Brazil’s conservative

society (Arantes, 2021; 2022a; 2022b). Broadly celebrated by the Partido dos

Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) during its time in government, between

2003 and 2016, this cultural politics was integrated into a social pact that prom-

ised freedom to consume for the poor and freedom to accumulate for the rich—

a biopolitical pact to the extent that consumption enabled by targeted state

assistance (that is, without fundamental challenges to neoliberal hegemony)

was imagined as guaranteeing a humanitarian minimum of survival.

But behind the picture of class conciliation presented by the PT government,

old authoritarian tendencies of the Brazilian state persisted. Initially accelerat-

ing the deindustrialization begun in the 1980s, the PT entrenched a neoextrac-

tivist model of development. It expanded Brazil’s “agricultural frontier,”

offering lucrative contracts to private energy and construction firms and col-

luding in the violent displacement of vulnerable populations in the Amazon

and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the long genocide of poor black Brazilians in met-

ropolitan peripheries continued unabated, as the militarized “pacification” of

favelas caused thousands of civilian deaths. As Giorgio Agamben (1998: 71–72)

has argued, the biopolitical rationality that affirms a right to life also makes life

more vulnerable. The preservation of certain lives comes to depend on the dis-

posability of others. In Brazil, race plays a particularly important role, along-

side class, in determining this distinction. As a biopolitical pact was consolidated

under PT rule, Brazil’s black proletariat remained subject to a necropolitics that

has now been generalized under Bolsonaro.

During the years of PT government, affirmative action and freedom of cul-

tural expression, complements to assistentialism, became bound up in the

defense of a right to life. The PT viewed public universities as important sites

for their promotion. But as the new right grew between the presidential elec-

tions of 2014 and 2018, providing a political base for Bolsonarismo—the move-

ment ideologically committed to supporting Bolsonaro—it singled out the

public university as a symbol of the left’s corruption of Brazilian society. For

Bolsonaro, attacks on the public university would become functional to a rup-

ture with Brazil’s biopolitical pact.2

The new right has positioned itself in opposition to established knowledge

and science, which it associates with the cultural hegemony of the left. All sci-

entific research carried out by public universities thus becomes subject to