Against Trumpeachment: The Case for a Strategic Alternative

By Bryant William Sculos

Given the recent plea deal accepted by retired General and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to FBI investigators regarding his contact with agents of the Russian government during the 2016-2017 transition prior to Trump's inauguration, the question of how the left should situate itself with respect to the potential impeachment of President Trump has gained increased significance.

Should the American left actively work towards the pervasively justified impeachment of Donald J. Trump? Not only is this question one that plagues the Democratic Party as well as those on the left, it is likely being debated seriously at the highest levels of the GOP. Sadly, and exclusively for strategic reasons, the left and those in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, in whatever state it exists, should not waste time struggling for the impeachment of Donald Trump.

The Case for Trumpeachment

Before answering the big question being posed here, we must ask the obvious question (with an equally obviously answer), are there legal justifications for impeaching Donald Trump? While impeachment is always a political mechanism for the removal of a President, it is also always rooted in at least a discourse of legality. That said, there are literally countless legal reasons for the successful impeachment and guilty verdict in the impending trial of the forty-fifth President of the United States. Trump is an admitted sex criminal , with any number of open complaints against him that he hasn't yet admitted to (or bragged about) on tape. He has repeatedly worked to violate the civil rights of transgender soldiers , foreign-born permanent residents, and legal immigrants (to say nothing for the human rights of undocumented persons ). Donald Trump continues to profit from dealings with foreign governments, an apparently too overt of a violation of the emoluments clause of the US Constitution to matter to, I don't know, anyone. Then, on what we might find out to be in two or three dozen cases, Donald Trump and his immediate staff have committed various forms of obstruction of justice and/or perjury, including, though certainly not exclusively, the firing of controversial former FBI Director James Comey for his pursuit of the then fledgling Russia election interference/Trump campaign investigation.

All, or nearly all, Presidents break US law. All, at least contemporary, US Presidents are categorizable as unconvicted war criminals, including the darling drone king, Barack Obama . This reality is not new to Trump. What is new or novel about Trump is the openness with which he has and continues to violate US law, nearly with impunity-except for the US federal courts preventing Trump's Muslim ban and transgender purge of the US military. Given the degree of publicly available documentation regarding Trump's crimes, why would I suggest not impeaching him?

Who Benefits from Trumpeachment

First, I'm not actually suggesting that Trump should not be impeached - and I don't really think anyone on the left is either. At most, those on the left who have criticized the possibility of impeaching Trump seem to fear Mike Pence becoming President and then all of a sudden all Handmaid's Tale becomes a documentary. That fear aside-a fear that is a only a bit exaggerated because Trump's campaign and White House have already emboldened white and Christian supremacists and given presidential approval for sexual harassment and statutory rape (if not outright pedophilia) , and Pence has already gotten his Supreme Court pick and the reinstatement of the global gap rule -it is hard to see the value of the left spending significant time working towards that as some kind of major political victory. While there is certainly evidence that the Democratic Party would enjoy running against Trump as evinced by their recent collaboration with the GOP in voting against articles of impeachment , their steadfast support for the Russia election meddling probes evince a narrow-minded belief that eventually damning evidence against Trump himself will be revealed. Their plan seems to be one of certain patience. All the while they continue to meet with Trump to work out compromises within the wider revanchist agenda of Trump and the Republican Party.

Special Prosecutor Mueller is still conducting what seems, by undemocratic American political standards, a pretty decent investigation with few leaks nor any of the hallmarks of a witch hunt. While there is no evidence yet that Trump had any direct contact with top officials in the Russian government regarding Moscow's election tampering, given the tenacity and professionalism of the investigation so far, it seems unlikely Mueller's team wouldn't be able to find evidence for any collusion that did occur, if it did occur. While there is certainly the possibility that Trump, as mentioned above, is guilty of more obstruction of justice than is already known, if there exists the kind of smoking gun regarding collusion that would be of the degree needed to dethrone Trump, especially in the polarized climate of "fake news" and "alternative facts," it certainly won't be hindered because the Democratic Party wasn't prepared enough to take advantage of it. In fact, given the low opinion that most of the country has of the Democratic Party, it is possible that the less prepared they seem when any such smoking gun emerges, the more legitimate the smoking gun might be by treated by the general public.

Again, without suggesting for even a moment that the country and the world would not be better off without Trump in office nor that he isn't guilty of any number of crimes that would justify impeachment and conviction on criminal charges, we should think about who the impeachment of Donald Trump would benefit, given the likely political context that such a process would occur within. Mike Pence? The Democratic Party? The Republican Party? The answer very well may be yes to all of those answers.

The impeachment (or even a pre-impeachment resignation) of Trump would vindicate the hard center of the Democratic Party that has set their entire political existence on the tenuously provable accusation of genuine "collusion" between Donald Trump (and his 2016 presidential campaign staff) and the Russian interference in the election, including hacking and the legal purchasing of polarizing advertisements online. Mike Pence, however delegitimized and short-lived his presidency would be, would become President. And although he has gotten much of what he would have attempted to accomplish as President as Vice President, including the arch-conservative jurist Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and the reinstatement of the global gag rule, he would still probably prefer to end his career as President rather than Vice President.

The Democratic Party would win a superficial victory of course because they have been saying since they co-founded "the Resistance" that Donald Trump purloined the Presidency from its rightful inhabitant Hillary Clinton. They would be vindicated, but without a serious alternative progressive agenda to offer the American people, their victory would undoubtedly be short-lived. Given the current GOP control over both houses of Congress, and the likelihood that they will continue to hold at least one of the houses after the 2018 midterm elections, any successful impeachment would likely need to involve cooperation between the Democrats and Republicans - undermining the Democrats ability to run an effective campaign in 2020 tying the GOP to Trump.

If the benefits of a Trump impeachment are either too complex to really figure out in advance, with little to no guarantee of anything other than the veneer of civility covering up the typical presidential crimes and cruelties, why bother struggling for it? Aren't there better things that the left could focus on in the lead up to 2018 and 2020?

Presenting a Positive Progressive Agenda

There is an alternative, and it is one that would certainly allow for the possibility of the impeachment of the forty-fifth President should a smoking gun emerge or the political climate otherwise shifts even further against Trump. Thinking about what an alternative strategic approach might entail, it is worth thinking back to the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary. A self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders fell just shy of being able to overcome the nearly universally predicted and expected victory of establishment darling Hillary Clinton. As a critical Sanders supporter myself, and through my many conversations with other Sanders supporters, though there was a lot of mixed dislike of Clinton and her agenda, it was much more the latter that drove support for Sanders, in addition to the alternative program for the United States that he represented. The Sanders phenomena was a response to Clinton's agenda first and foremost, not her as a person. This is the lesson that both the left and the Democratic Party needs to heed.

It was the belief in the importance of a social democrat, in the Scandinavian welfare-state tradition, running for President of the United States on practicable platform of social, political, and economic justice for all and with a campaign that refused to take corporate money. This is what the left, both within and well-beyond the Democratic Party should be focusing on. What do the people who need American politics to change the most want from our politicians? What do the young people who will inherit this increasingly warm, wet, and economically unstable world want and need from American politics?

First and foremost, they want an actually functioning democracy, including within their limited choices of the legally-instantiated two-party system. This means the Democratic Party needs to be transparent about their internal corruption, purge themselves of those involved, openly reform the policies that led the scale-tipping to happen in the first place, and then they need to trust that if they present a platform and candidates to the American people who are worth supporting and voting for, that the American people will be there with both their votes and their wallets (of course, supporting public financing of elections would be a better option for everyone-but let's not get too too crazy with our demands or expectations of a corrupt political party).

And if we're all genuinely concerned about election tampering, which is the ostensible purpose of all the investigations into the Trump campaign and administration, wouldn't it be more worthy of our time to focus on the election tampering that the GOP is already promoting here at home, without any foreign assistance? Republicans have foisted voter ID laws on the poor and people of color in a number of states, and they have gerrymandered the districts , to such a degree they would literally have had to help elect a President as seemingly unhinged and unqualified as Trump before they'd be in danger of losing their stranglehold on the House of Representatives. The GOP has supported the continued disenfranchisement of convicted felons , which disproportionately affects people of color. They have cut funding to voter outreach programs and reduced (including failing to increase) the number of voting stations in populated areas . Yes, of course we should have an election system that prevents foreign hacking and manipulation, but to think that the greatest threats to any semblance of democracy in America are foreign is the height of naiveté.

Donald Trump isn't a Teflon president; he is a garbage magnet president. There is so much trash in and surrounding the forty-fifth President of the United States that impeaching him would be like finding the smelliest, most rotted piece of trash in a landfill and thinking that if you just remove that, the landfill will stop smelling so badly. Much of the #dumpsterfire that is Trump's presidency is self-caused, but let us not immunize his collaborators, which include much of the Republican Party (and since the election, many Democrats, including the leadership).

The left should let Trump stink up everyone that allows themselves to be touched by him and his hateful, regressive agenda (though we really can't assume that everyone who is touched by Trump does so consensually). It is worth remembering, as political theorist Corey Robin ( The Reactionary Mind, Oxford, 2017) and award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein (No is Not Enough, Haymarket Books, 2017) have each shown, Trump's agenda (tax cuts for the wealthy, the privatization of education, gutting the EPA, massive increases in military spending, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQA+, etc.), with few exceptions, is the GOP policy wish list from the past 30 years.

Let that agenda get completely covered by Trump's defecated reputation. Let the Republicans and any Democrats that want to pick-and-choose their favorite injustices to support from that agenda get ensconced in an unredeemable stench. At that point the whole country will have a better chance of knowing which politicians are trash in need of taking out and which are genuinely interested in a more just future.

If the GOP wants Trump gone, let them do it (and right now, they are the only ones who can). They won't though, not unless Trump becomes such a problem that their agenda is completely sidelined-sidelined more than it already has been. For the most part, Trump's agenda, insofar as he has any coherent agenda, is the GOP agenda. And furthermore, it is nearly completely impossible for an impeachment of Trump to take down all of the people who have supported him and/or the agenda he currently represents.

With that said, letting Trump and his toilet bowl of allies and occasional collaborators stink up DC is not the same as letting them have unchecked, unprotested reign over the country. There are too many lives at stake for that. The left must resist more in both quantity and quality, never forgetting that Trump is a mere wart on the ass of a too slowly decaying political charade. Strategizing in such a way that makes the broader systemic problems related to Trump increasingly apparent will be central to any effective resistance. Impeachment targeted specifically at Trump the man is unlikely to aid that cause. This alternative strategy to impeachment has the clear benefit of not letting anyone off the hook, neither the GOP nor the corporate, collaborationist Democratic Party for their respective roles in the emergence of Trump and whatever political success his agenda attains.

The left must continue to resist, protest, and organize for the near and long-term future of the US and the world, but dedicating serious time to impeaching Trump is not an effective way to show the world just how many more American politicians are Trump-like than they appear. The left must oppose Trump, the GOP, and the collaborating Democrats.

If Trump resigns or gets impeached in the process, great, but the crucial point is to impeach the agenda and indeed the system that created him and his program of policy cruelty-one that is too similar to what has been the modus operandi of mainstream American politics for far too long.

Dr. Bryant William Sculos holds a PhD in political theory and international relations. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, adjunct professor at Florida International University, contributing writer for the Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power. His published work has also appeared in Constellations, New Politics, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, Political Studies Review, Public Seminar, and New Political Science.

Brazil's Gramscian Moment: On Cultural Hegemony and Crisis

By Jacques Simon

With the Brazilian senate confirming Dilma Rousseff's impeachment procedure, it seems increasingly likely that Brazil could soon see the long-loved Workers Party (PT) out of office. Given the seemingly unshakable support that the party had up until a few years ago, the deep political crisis that Brazil faces today may seem a bit surprising. How is it that, after winning four consecutive elections, three by a landslide, the PT's Dilma Rousseff is now facing impeachment charges, and people are in the streets by millions? Why have Brazilians completely turned their backs on the PT, despite it having enjoyed fourteen years of political hegemony?

The mainstream media has identified two main causes to the current political turmoil in Brazil.

The first is corruption. Operacao Lava Jato (operation carwash), until recently led by the now famous Justice Moro, has shaken the political class to its core. Millions of reais flowing from top Petrobras executives into the pockets of the political elites have gotten widespread news coverage. Of course, this is not factually incorrect, but it disregards the fact that corruption has been the name of the game in Brazilian politics since the end of the military regime in 1985.

In fact, Lula's 2006 re-election happened in the midst of the Mensalão scandal, where the PT was accused of buying votes in congress. Transparency International has kept Brazil at a steady 76th on 167 in terms of global corruption between 2012 and 2015, even though the Petrobras scandal started in 2014.

Corruption is such a common occurrence in the country that a term has been created to describe Brazilian institutions' feeble reactions to shady business. In Brazil, when a scandal is said to "end in pizza," it means that charges where not laid out to the extent that they could or should have.

It seems that the corruptibility of the political elite is taken for granted by Brazilians. While it may have been an accelerating factor in the current crisis, it certainly does not seem to be the determinant variable in Rousseff's demise, who, in fact, is not even facing corruption charges unlike her opponents.

The second cause to the political crisis identified by the mainstream media has been the media itself.

Some have pointed the finger at the largely right wing and anti-PT bias of Brazil's largest news corporations. Once again, while not factually false, that position of the media is not a recent occurrence.

The same families have held the five main media companies for decades. Grupo Globo for instance, the country's largest media corporation, has been privately owned by the Marinho family since its creation in 1965. There has not been a recent change in the media's ideological affiliation: the right-wing mainstream media has been a constant throughout the PT rule.

Once again, it seems that this variable may be an accelerating factor in the PTs downfall, but it certainly does not seem to be the determinant variable.

In reality, two things have actively participated in Dilma's crash: an economic recession, and her turn away from the PT's traditional politics. All else is anecdotal.

Let's turn to an influential political theorist of the early twentieth century to further elaborate on that.

This conclusion can be reached by using Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony. It might be a bit of an overstatement to say that the Italian philosopher is making a come back. Undoubtedly, most people still do not know who he was, and few are aware of the importance of his theories. It is however, somewhat satisfying to see that Google searches for his name have been growing exponentially since the early 2000s and show no sign of slowing down.

It seems that the global capitalist crisis of 2008, which shook the entire world, has made a few people question the strength and general positive nature of the economic system we are living in. This kind of uncertainty creates a fertile ground for previously outlier positions. In Gramscian terms: such important events destabilize otherwise anchored cultural hegemony.

This concept-that of cultural hegemony-is perhaps Gramsci's most important contribution to the field of political science. The idea is the following: power, in all its forms, is rooted in popular consent. In order to successfully establish a specific way of organizing society, you must first get the local population on board. In fact, people need to be so convinced that that specific organization is the way things must be that they should not question its basis.

Rival ideologies should not compete on equal terms. To take the place of the cultural hegemon, they need first to contest its de facto legitimacy, and then successfully claim its place in the hearts and minds of the people.

In Gramscian literature, this struggle will take place as communism inevitably takes the place of global capitalism. This remains to be seen, but while we're waiting this theory can be applied to smaller instances of ideological shifts. Brazil is living just that.

In order to demonstrate this, let us first take a quick detour by Brazilian political history.

Until 1985, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship, which relied on brutal repression to get its way.

Things changed during the '80s, an active period when it comes to democratization worldwide. Some political scientists-Samuel Huntington in particular-have gone so far as to call that phase the "third-wave of democracy." Along with other South American countries, Brazil saw its military regime come to an end, and hosted its first democratic elections in over two decades.

Since the 1985 election, at least three tendencies have become abundantly clear.

First, the country has had a history of inflationary problems. If we consider the rate of inflation over the last three decades, we see two peaks. The first, in 1990, reached an astonishing 6,800%. The second, in 1994, culminated at 5,000% in June of that year. But even if we disregard these extreme cases, Brazil has had far from a stable economy throughout the end of the twentieth century. For instance, the average inflation in 1987 was 363% and in 1992 it was 1,119%.

The second clear tendency is that when Brazilians are unhappy with a governing party, they let it know with their ballots. The third is that they rarely offer a second chance: the results of the three presidential elections following the fall of the military regime led three different parties in office.

First, in 1985, Tancredo Neves of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (BDMP) was elected. Though, in a Hollywood-worthy turn of events he collapsed just before gaining office and died shortly after, his running mate and vice president, José Sarney, assumed the role of president.

Four years later, with inflation bordering 2,000%, Fernando Collar de Mello's Christian Labour Party (NRP) was elected with 53% in the second round. The BDMP only managed to secure 11.5%.

The following elections took place in 1994, just after the second inflationary peak. Once again, this economic fiasco led to the ruling party's political demise. The NRP secured an astounding 0.6% of the popular will, while the BDMP came fourth with 4.6%. The Brazilian people where still looking for their party: a whopping 95% of the population was not satisfied with what they had seen since the fall of the military regime a decade prior.

This time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso's Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) was elected in the first round with over 54% of the ballots: a landslide victory considering that the runner-up was Lula's PT with 27%. It is important to note here that this was the most left-leaning government elected since the end of the military regime. While all other parties had been right-of-center, Cardoso ran and governed in a clearly social-democratic manner.

FHC fought inflation tooth-and-nail (successfully-bringing it from an average of 3,000% in 1994 to 7% in 1997 by pegging the reais to the American dollar), opened the Brazilian economy to foreign investments (FDIs augmented threefold between 1995 and 2000), and privatized some industries in order to fund social projects. FHC is credited with creating social security and generalizing taxation in Brazil.

The Brazilian population responded positively to this newfound stability. A constitutional amendment was passed to allow Cardoso to run for a second term. In 1998, he was re-elected with a majority of 53.1% in the first round. During his four years in office, he had lost only one percentage point of support. He went from winning 25 out of 26 states, to 23. The surprising stability of the results of his two presidential campaigns shows how faithful his electoral base was. This popularity was not unconditional however. During his second term, the hens came back to roost: his desire to please both workers and capital created an influx in public debt.

During his 8 years as president, federal as well as state and municipal debt increased more than twofold. In an effort to save the national economy from an exponential debt crisis, and a freefalling export sector due to economic collapses around the world (Asia and Russia were seeing their economies crumble), he took a number of neoliberal measures. He liberated the reais from its US dollar parity, accepted a structural adjustment program from the IMF, and undertook a structural reforms of the economy in which privatization and austerity held a key role. The results where what one would expect: GDP per capita plunged, the value of the reais was cut in half, and capital flew out of the country at high rates.

Following the footsteps of recent history, the government swapped hands in 2002, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was running his fourth campaign for the Workers Party (PT), won two thirds of the votes against the PSDB candidate. This was the beginning of an era for Brazil, one that we haven't seen the end of-yet.

The PT was the most left-wing government since the fall of the military regime. Under Lula's presidency, real social programs were put in place, yielding real results. To name only a few, the 2003 Fome Zero program aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in the country, the Bolsa Família and Bolsa Escola programs provided impoverished working class Brazilians with an allowance if their children were vaccinated and attended school, and the Progama de Aceleraçāo do Crescimento (PAC) had a multibillion reais budget to invest in infrastructure.

Make no mistake: Lula's presidency was not that of a socialist. In fact, the left wing of the PT was so disappointed with his lack of defiance towards capital that they split to form a separate party called the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). But Lula did provide working class families with a net increase in their material condition. During his two terms in office, the gini coefficient of country (measuring wealth inequality) fell continuously, the GDP per capita increased substantially, as did the GNI. 98% of people born after 1990 now have at least a secondary education, compared to 70% for those born in 1970.

It was with this kind of mindset that Lula was re-elected in 2006, winning close to 50% in the first round, and then by a more than 20 percentage point margin in the runoff. Constitutionally barred from a third presidency, his protégé Dilma Rousseff ran in 2010, and won by an over 10 percentage point margin. Running again in 2014, she got re-elected-albeit not with as impressive result as previously.

This brief recap of Brazilian political history demonstrates two things:

First, the kind of legitimacy that has been enjoyed by the PT is a one-of-a-kind instance since the fall of the military regime. However, the second lesson is that this support is quite logical. Lula and Dilma have provided the working class with what it has been asking for since 1985: a stable democracy, and material returns for the working class.

From a Gramscian perspective, this legitimacy is rooted in cultural hegemony. Indeed, PT rule and the political scene since Lula's arrival in power have been causally linked in popular conscience. This means that any opposing ideology has an uphill battle before it: that of discrediting PT's social democracy.

As of now, the PT has won four consecutive presidential elections in Brazil; half of all those that have taken place since the end of the military regime. For a time, Lula's party looked like it was the country's natural party, as if the PT and the Brazilian people had some sort of indivisible bond. So how did we arrive to the place where we are now?

According to Gramsci, cultural hegemony is essential for the ruling class. The PT has undoubtedly acquired something of that nature. It has offered Brazil social democracy. It promised a capitalistic system with real returns for the people, and, to some extent, has delivered. The material condition of a large amount of people increased impressively during the Lula era and, to a lesser extent, during Dilma's early days. But if there is one thing capitalism has shown, it is that these kinds of honeymoon periods are always finite, and at some point the economy contracts over its own weight.

The party's cultural hegemony rested on two things: a booming economy, and social democratic policies. Both fell apart in the last two years. First, the country's rise to economic prosperity came to a halt. The economy that the PT had created was highly dependant on exports to countries like China or the US. With these countries' economies contracting, the model ceased to work. Brazil's GDP growth was divided by two between 2011 and 2012. The reais has plummeted in face of the US dollar since 2011.

Between mid-August 2014 and today the Petrobras stock, Brazil's largest company worth about 10% of the country's GDP has fell from $23.35 to $8.44. Brazil, in other terms, is facing the harsh realities of capitalism.

This left Dilma with two options: either take a left-wing approach and handle the crisis by stimulating demand, nationalizing big industries, and reforming the tax code to take money where it is, or, take the right-wing path.

She chose the latter.

2015 was the year of austerity in Brazil. Budget cuts, backpedalling on investment programs, cuts to social security… the Rousseff government fell to right-wing pressure and implemented capital-friendly policies. This came after she had won the elections one-year prior with a left wing discourse. This shift in position was one of many blows to the PT's cultural hegemony. By disavowing her party's traditional positions, Dilma legitimized dissident opinions. It is thus unsurprising that the lion's share of her critics, Temer included, come from her political right.

Indeed, now that Dilma is, at least temporarily, out of office, the interim government has already called for widespread neoliberal policies, which include cuts in public spending, decreases in welfare, and cutting jobs from the federal government.

The Rousseff government has dug its own grave by coming back on settled questions. The president and her administration have broken the ideological continuity of the PT rule, which in turn destabilized the foundation of their authority. She opened a door to her right, which allowed contestation. With the hegemonic left-wing personalities turning to neoliberalism, nothing was keeping public opinion from going in that direction.

The demographic participating in the ongoing protests further proves this. One image speaks volumes about the kind of people fuelling these events. A visible rich, white couple is seen marching alongside a baby carriage pushed by a black nanny. This photo sparked mass criticism in Brazil-a country where the racial and wealth divide is still very much a reality. Some have even reported protesters drinking champagne at anti-PT events. This segment of the Brazilian population is the one represented in Temer's provisional government. Clearly, what is being witnessed is not an uproar from impoverished favela youths, but rather a movement that is largely dominated by white, upper-middle-class individuals, whose right-wing bias has been gaining traction through legitimization.

Worst of all, a specter is haunting Brazil-the specter of inflation. Granted, we are far from the four digit numbers that plagued the country in the late '80s and mid '90s. But nonetheless, since 2014, inflation has almost double from about 5.5% to 10.5%-well above the average of 4% that the country had become accustomed to during Lula's time. In fact, 2015 was the year with the highest rate of inflation since the country has been under PT rule. This has sparked some concern amongst the general population, who fear the return of hyperinflationary pressure.

The point is the following: The PT had acquired a cultural hegemony, which mechanically provided it with popular legitimacy. The schematic being used, however, was based on a capitalistic logic of economics, which is fragile and ultimately unsustainable. When the inevitable turmoil arrived, the PT could have taken measures to ensure that material benefits from the working class were not withdrawn, but decided to dive into neoliberal reforms instead. By backpedalling away from their own logic, which was the backbone of their cultural hegemony, the PT delegitimized their position, providing a fertile ground for ideological debate. This is why the right-wing media and corruption scandals are gaining traction today, even though they have always been around.

This leaves Brazil in quite an awkward situation. The population is disillusioned by the Left and is turning to the Right in order to solve their problems. Presumably, this is a bad idea. But not all hope is lost. The possibility of having a new Left rise from the old one's ashes is still possible. For that, however, there would need to be a conscious effort to establish a new cultural hegemony.

Jacques Simon is a French national, currently studying politics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. His interests include political economy, comparative politics, and the study of radical politics.