O discurso da guerra cultural à brasileira no bolsonarismo

Abstract

The cultural war is a field of social and moral disputes, intrinsically related to the symbolic, language and discourse. In the recent Brazilian context, this phenomenon manifests itself with particular intensity in the actions and pronouncements of the former president Jair Messias Bolsonaro. With theoretical and methodological inspiration from French-Brazilian Discourse Analysis (DA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the aim of this study is to investigate how the discourse of the so-called “cultural war” emerges and comes to function as indispensable to the Bolsonaro government. The corpus analyzed consists of eight official pronouncements by Bolsonaro during the first year of his mandate (2019), a period in which the discursive bases of Bolsonarism in the exercise of power are outlined. The specific objectives are (a) to organize and delimit a theoretical framework on interpretations of the notion of cultural war, (b) to determine regularities and specificities of the Brazilian cultural war in a pendulum movement between general studies of cultural war and those specific to Bolsonaro's discourse, (c) to establish an analytical device that allows a critical reading of Bolsonaro's discursive arenas and (d) to point out possible paths for future research on Bolsonarism with a focus on the perpetuation of the cultural war after the electoral defeat of 2022. The analysis revealed five discursive fronts that structure the Bolsonaro's cultural war: (1) the defence of the traditional family, associated with conservative values and Christian morals; (2) neoliberal education, conceived as technical, depoliticized and free of ideological “indoctrination”; (3) Christian nationalism, which articulates religious identity and patriotism; (4) digital media and fake news, highlighting the centrality of digital platforms and the construction of the victim narrative in the face of the spread of fake news and persecution by traditional media; and (5) aversion to politics, with a rejection of state intervention, especially in social policies, promoting privatization and the defense of economic freedom. These fronts configure the cultural war as a discursive device capable of articulating symbols, affects and social divisions, promoting a moral radicalization that opposes an “us” and a “them”. This device is a technology of power that is fundamental to the consolidation of Bolsonaro's symbolic hegemonies and the organization of political alliances in contemporary Brazil. Although Bolsonaro was crucial to the emergence and dissemination of this discourse, the cultural war transcends it, configuring itself as a broad discursive phenomenon that is still influential in the Brazilian political and social field.