Liberalism promises the best of all possible worlds: freedom, democracy, progress, all together. The State, but not too much. The Market, that makes way for the freedom of everyone and the happiness of all. Everyone seeks their own good, but the result is that everything is better for all.

After the end of Soviet Socialism, many have sought refuge in liberalism, the social democrat version for some, simple neoliberalism for others. To no longer have to defend the State, nor rights. It is sufficient to promote "civil society", against the State, against parties, against politics, beyond the now surmounted division between right and left.

But there comes a moment when liberalism reaches government, either through coups, or through elections. This is the moment of truth, of demonstrating in practice how to make the fantastic combination of all these good things. There begins the liberal striptease.

This is because it has been in the name of liberalism that the worst barbarities have been committed and continue to be committed, in the economy, with corresponding political actions. Because the market has not been so magic, because the freedom proclaimed is not for persons, but for capital, because what it brings is not the power of individuals, but of money.

The military coups d'état in Latin America have been carried out in the name of the values of liberalism: to defend democracy against the risks of totalitarianism, to defend the individual against the State, to protect the market, businesses and businessmen, freedom of the press against the authoritarianism of governments. More recently, liberalism appears as the plank of salvation against Bolivarianism, Chavism, Lulism, Kirchnerism, Evism, Correism and other variants that supposedly threaten our countries.

But when they begin to govern, the liberal discourse changes tone, the tranquilizing promises give place to calls for sacrifice, to arguments that only the best trained can retain their jobs, that we have to go through a period of suffering to purge the populist inheritance received until we reach the promised paradise of liberalism. Enter: unemployment, wage cuts, power transferred from the State to big private corporations; and as an inevitable corollary, repression, to contain those who are mobilized to defend their common interests at the expense of State spending.

In Latin America in particular, liberalism has resulted in successive failures. In the most recent period, when it oriented neoliberal governments, none of them worked, either in economic or political affairs. Mexico and Peru are countries that have clung to neoliberal models and these are the countries of Latin America where the social situation of the people has improved less or has even gotten worse.

Liberal candidates promise to combine hard fiscal adjustment with social policies, because this is easily said during a political campaign. But when they win, they must face the concrete dilemmas and realities and then demonstrate whether this is compatible.

The government of Mauricio Macri in Argentina has the responsibility to try to prove that they can do what they proposed in their electoral campaign. It would appear that in effect Macri and his ministers believe in what they proposed in their electoral campaign, and are putting into practice a harsh fiscal adjustment, in conformity with the precepts that they have always defended.

Clearly, in Argentina today, it is not the freedom of the people, without the obstacles of Kirchnerism, that is being imposed, but the freedom of capital, of big business, of the big corporations, even the vulture funds. Without the counterweight of the State, it is not individuals who gain power and freedom, but the big economic conglomerates and their representatives, in the media, and the economists who speak for capital.

The promises of liberalism were left behind in the campaign. Those who survive are offered a long road of thorns to reach the rose-garden of liberalism. All the suffering is imputed to the twelve long years of deceit, in which the Argentinians had the illusion they were eating better, living better, in a less unjust society, with a sovereign external position, of being brothers of Latin Americans, that the pictures in the Casa Rosada were of their leaders, that Argentina had overcome the worst crisis of its history.

It is not possible to write the history of liberalism, because this would denude what has resulted of its promises. Europe had the most generous moment of its history with the welfare States. Europe was less unequal, when it was less liberal. Today it becomes brutally unjust again under liberal illusions.

This is what liberalism promises for Venezuela, what it would like to do with Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Uruguay. The history of liberalism is the history of the worst failures in which the promises of freedom and democracy end up with injustice, social exclusion, and repression.

04/02/2016

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Emir Sader, Brazilian sociologist and political scientist, coordinator of the Laboratory of Public Policies of the State University of Rio Janeiro (UERJ).