The Ideas Letter

Brazil is playing an outsized role on the global stage, and for good reason. With the largest rainforest area in the world, the future of the planet hinges in no small part on decisions made in the Amazon. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, “Lula,” has inspired a second coming of non-aligned states—middle powers, in today’s IR parlance—which strive to present a collective alternative to American empire. Elections will be held on October 4 to determine whether a member of the reactionary Bolsonaro clan will return to office and unseat Lula, the progressive champion, who is running for a fourth term. A lot is at stake. No small reason why The Ideas Letter 65 is focused on the largest country in South America, which the pre-colonization Tupi Indigenous people referred as “Pindorama,” the land of the palms.

First out of the gate is the remarkable political philosopher and public intellectual Marcos Nobre. You’ll recall that we featured an essay by Nobre in The Ideas Letter 14 that introduced his concept of neo-extractivism to make sense of a new form of the dependency model in Brazil and more broadly in the international system. In this piece, Nobre takes the measure of Brazilian history since the resumption of civilian rule in 1985 and traces the patterns and ruptures that produced this conjunctural moment. Nobre argues that Brazil faces a political crisis today and that the stakes of this year’s elections are high because the system based on elite accommodation established after the dictatorship is breaking down, giving way to a sharper conflict between a resurgent far-right and a weakened but still-central left. Nobre is hopeful but hardly optimistic.

Returning to history, the Brazilian social scientist and policy analyst Miguel Lago reconsiders what could usefully be mined from the radical and authoritarian presidency of Getúlio Vargas (1930–45 and 1951–54).