this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Democracy isn't a magic anti-fascist spell, sorry to break it to you. If someone can convince enough of the population to elect them, then they get into power, fascist or not.

By your definition, there really hasn't been a "real" democracy ever, frankly, since it depends on there being a state with no imbalance of wealth whatsoever. If that's how you want to define it, sure, go ahead, but I'm going to keep using a definition of democracy that's based on how the institutions of elections and the state are built, because that's a useful way to discuss political systems, and "democracy is when only leaders I like are elected" is not.

Brazil's leaders are elected through universal suffrage, its speech and media are (relatively) free, that's a democracy by any reasonably useful definition. There's plenty to criticise in how that democracy functions, especially how money and power can influence those outcomes, but there is no perfect democracy, just the best attempts at what people can build within their existing social systems.

Democracy is a political system, while capitalism is an economic system - understanding how they interact with each other is useful and important, but pretending they're mutually exclusive is unnecessarily reductive, and closes the space to actually discuss those things.

Edit: the mere fact that Bolsonaro attempted to retain power by force, but was unable to do so in the face of losing the election is direct evidence that there are functional democratic institutions in Brazil