A polarização no Brasil contemporâneo: tendências, contratendências e tradições críticas modernas

Abstract

This article proposes a sociological interpretation of Brazilian polarization based on a paradigmatic empirical configuration: the coexistence and simultaneous intensification of the March for Jesus and the LGBTQIA+ Pride Parade in the city of São Paulo. Far from constituting an anomaly, this simultaneity expresses a more general dynamic: in contemporary Brazil, the expansion of rights and the intensification of resistance to them do not occur sequentially in time but are produced simultaneously, each feeding off the other. To account for this phenomenon, the article mobilizes a morphological perspective inspired by Durkheim, Bouglé, Mannheim, and Elias, articulated with investigations developed within the Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Reflexivities. The central hypothesis is that the structural transformations of Brazilian society since the 1960s—urbanization, educational expansion, occupational diversification, and communicational densification—have created fertile conditions for the emergence and diffusion of modern critical traditions oriented toward making subordinated subjects visible, denaturalizing social asymmetries, transforming moral sensibilities, and promoting the egalitarian expansion of rights. The trajectory of Brazil’s New Republic is reinterpreted as a cumulative process of institutionalizing these progressive transformations across successive governments led by the Brazilian Democratic Movement, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, and the Workers’ Party.  The article argues, however, that this process generates, as an immanent effect, its own countertendencies. Beginning in the 2010s, reactive dynamics intensified, seeking to restore destabilized asymmetries and marking the transition from a conservatism of containment to a neoconservatism of reaction. Bolsonaroism is thus understood as an endogenous product of this dynamic: the organized backlash generated by the structural frontlash itself. Its countertendential grammar operates through the systematic reconversion of modern critical traditions by denying subordinated subjects, renaturalizing asymmetries, delegitimizing or ridiculing emergent moral sensibilities, and recasting new rights claims as undue privileges. In this sense, it constitutes a logic that is structurally homologous to that of critical traditions, yet oriented in the opposite direction.