Why Brazilians Vote for the Left (Olavo de Carvalho)

Why Brazilians Vote for the Left
If in Brazil this aberrant phenomenon occurs of a conservative electorate massively voting for leftist candidates, the reason for the apparent contradiction is very clear and consists of the confluence of three factors.
First, conservatism has no partisan or cultural channels of expression and has become politically null. There are no conservative politicians: no one can vote for nonexistent candidates.
On the other hand, leftism uses one language in its internal discussions, another to speak to the people, and only in the first does it assume its true ideological identity. In the other, it dilutes its image in moralistic, nationalist, and populist generalities. It is a maliciously slippery discourse that avoids Marxist jargon and prevents the people from identifying the Brazilian left with the continental neocommunist revolution. Even qualified foreign observers who are unaware of the internal documents of the PT and the São Paulo Forum — such as Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Otto Reich, and the very deputy secretary Tom Shannon — were deceived by this false appearance, imagining Brazilian leftism as populist rather than communist. The local population, of course, falls for the ruse even more easily. Even among educated people, the reaction is common: “Lula, communist? Are you crazy?” Lula himself was able to say, without anyone contesting him, that he was not only never a communist but not even leftist. This statement would be considered cynical, unacceptable, and even criminal if the audience ignored that the declarant was founder and president of the largest pro-communist organization on the continent.
Third, the success of forty years of Gramscian “cultural revolution” was so overwhelming — given the complete lack of resistance — that the values, criteria, and even mental habits of the international communist movement were incorporated into Brazilian “common sense” and are no longer recognized as such: they are passively accepted by society without awareness of their ideological implications.
Add these three factors together, and you will understand why a conservative people vote for communist candidates: they do not know they are communists, do not know that there is a very active communist movement on the continent, and have no idea of the consequences of their vote. Brazilian elections are a farce in the most exact and complete sense of the term.
With no right-wing parties or politicians in Brazil, the entire left-right confrontation seen today is a work of social engineering created by the left itself with three objectives: (1) to hide its hegemony and monopolistic power under the appearance of a normal democratic dispute; (2) to neutralize any right-wing tendencies by channeling them into a prefabricated right, the “right of the left,” which was very clearly observed in the two electoral campaigns of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a Gramscian Marxist who was cheerfully accepted as the (unfaithful, obviously) trustee of the right-wing electorate’s trust; (3) to dominate the entire political space through the game of two party currents loyal to the same ideological scheme, separated only by the dispute for offices, as explicitly acknowledged by Fernando Henrique himself and Prof. Cristovam Buarque, then one of PT’s mentors. These three lines of action precisely define what Lenin called the “scissors strategy,” a term inspired by the idea of cutting with two blades.
The PFL could be a right-wing party, but since it only wants offices and has no power perspective, it consented to become a branch of the PSDB. The PMDB has been leftist since its origin and is full of communists. The PSDB, the “right of the left,” is the funnel where whatever hypothetical right-wing remains in these other parties converge. Like the PT, this party was born at USP, and its only function within the overall USP communist strategy is to prevent those discontented with the PT from clustering into a genuine right-wing.