Sérgio Abranches

Portuguese to English translation by Melissa Harkin, CT and Todd Harkin – Harkin Translations.

Sérgio Abranches is a political scientist, a university professor, and a writer. He is the author of “Presidencialismo de Coalizão: Raízes e evolução do modelo político brasileiro” (Companhia das Letras, 2018), among other books.

Summary

The instability and contradictions of our time have an explanation. They arise from a true social metamorphosis, from the passage from one structural, historical and existential situation to another that surpasses it and differs fundamentally from it. Its course is unpredictable, as it is about the future under construction. In the current transition, democracy suffers from the disenchantment and discredit of various social sectors. The major challenges during and after the metamorphosis will continue to be overcoming old and new inequalities, deepening democracy, reshaping safeguards against autocracy, and mitigating climate change, which makes the future even more uncertain. To face them, society will have a new toolkit, one that will arise from technical and behavioral changes. This article proposes a synthetic analysis of the characteristics of such metamorphosis, its consequences, and its challenge to democracy.

       The emotions of metamorphosis

The instability and contradictions of our time have an explanation. The tectonic plates in the deep foundations of societies are in motion and friction, which causes turbulence and emergencies. We are living through profound changes, dizzying transformations in everything we do, in every aspect of our lives. What we are experiencing is not simply a cycle of changes; it is a true social and global metamorphosis.

The mortality of technologies, artifacts, ideas, and solutions makes the transient prevail over what was standard for several decades in the 20th century. Old patterns crumble without the new ones being ripe for a trauma-free transition. The emergence of new structures is slower than the collapse of old ones. Decay precedes emergency. The interval between the cycle that ends and the maturation of the new one is long enough to produce a void of responses that generates frustration and dissatisfaction in all sectors of society. That process is a pool of unforeseen events—or events that can even be foreseen by science, but it is not possible to predict where, when, and how they will occur.

Social metamorphosis was the expression used by sociologist Ulrich Beck (2016) to designate the transition from a structural, historical, or existential situation to another that exceeds and fundamentally differs from it. Its course is unpredictable, as it is about the future under construction. It is born from the clash of interests, choices, desires, and dreams. This ongoing revolution will mark the 21st century and radically change our lives and future generations. Beck convincingly defends the term metamorphosis instead of the usual concepts of change or transformation, which allow certain parts of the social system to change while others remain the same. Metamorphosis means a more radical transformation in which the old is no longer recognized in the new. In the meantime, our explanatory and intervention capacity in reality is continuously reduced. As Beck puts it, exploring the new beginnings foreshadowed in the emerging forms, embryos of new patterns of production, employment, and services is necessary.

Such complete social mutations arise from the confluence of five great contemporary forces. Globalization, which reduced distances and amplified the movement of people, capital, and goods. The scientific and technological revolution, which expands with the possibilities opened by the digital revolution, advanced genomics, synthetic biology, biomimetics and pharmacogenetics, nanoscience, and neuroscience, changing the established scientific paradigms and the fossil-based technological standard. The digitalization of society and the emergence of the information society, the networked society, affecting sociability, politics, and economic patterns of accumulation, production, and circulation, as pointed out by sociologist Manuel Castells in the late 1990s (Castells, 1996). Machine learning and artificial intelligence, for example, expand the scope of automation and the space of the “phygital” world, a hybrid of physical and digital, covering the socio and the cyber domains. The fourth force is climate change, which requires the adoption of new patterns of production, consumption, mobility, and energy generation and use.

These forces converge and strengthen each other. They activate the socio-structural force that causes continued disruptions in the social, economic, and political structure of societies.

Social metamorphosis is structural, systemic, and planetary in nature. No dimension of human life will be untouched by it. Because our ability to understand, explain and intervene to solve the problems caused by the transition is declining, social metamorphoses first manifest themselves as a succession of crises. Crises that provoke fear, insecurity, indignation, and revolt. And a society dominated by these feelings is a seedbed of demagogues, fascists, and populists ready to manipulate collective emotions and announce a new world, made of an idealized past, closed and safe for “their people.”

The politics of emotions goes from the field of interests and the proposals of public programs to the emotional field, the field of “love or hate,” of “love or destroy.” It brings with it bad behavior and can rekindle the flame of radical evil, the invisible enemy that inhabits humans (Nussbaum, 2013). In this environment, the tendency to evil has a great chance of manifesting itself among social groups dominated by resentment, which is born from the feeling of deprivation of the possibilities of satisfaction of what is materially and culturally necessary for life in society. The fear of destitution summons primitive instincts. Fear, says philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2013, pp. 320-3), may be a reasonable feeling, a state of alertness, and may also be misdirected, in many ways.

Refounding moments

During social metamorphosis, historical blocks move like tectonic plates demarcating the boundary between different historical-structural eras, between civilizing patterns. This movement causes tensions, conflicts, confrontations, and interactions that have an indeterminate outcome. Deterioration cycles and formation cycles occur during this complex process. The latter found or re-found economic, social, and political institutions. Because of this spirit of a time dominated by strong and adverse feelings, democracy lives a worldwide moment of contestation. As we move to other structural realities, there is nothing to fix. There’s something to build.

We are not living through a situation of increased changes that allows the correction of failures or the filling of gaps in the existing social structure with material already tested. We are experiencing the emergence of new and unanticipated structural and behavioral elements that will be decisive for the future of contemporary societies. Once the turning point is crossed, when changes mature and clarify the physiognomy of the new social formation, the previous order disappears, and the new societal paradigm can generate more pertinent answers to the problems of its time. The increase in completely new ingredients, thus far unknown in the composition of our social and economic life, is at the origin of the fear of the future invading our reality and causing strong currents of conservative reaction.

The historical-structural process described above results from the combination of structural determinations and the intervention of social actors, who, despite not being able to have a decisive influence on the movement of the tectonic plates of history, have the power to intervene in the direction of changes through collective choices and actions. Historically, structure and “agency” operate to give direction and pace to global metamorphosis in each society. It is through this combination that democracy is challenged, and only through it can it be re-founded.

The re-foundation will occur in constituent moments where the new historical subjects capable of giving life to the expanded and deepened democracy are established. The constituent process opens space for redefining the institutional people, giving voice and representation to all social forces present and expanding the coincidence between civilian and institutional people. In Brazil’s case, the people have always been defined in the different constituent moments, from the Empire to the Republic, in a restrictive or excluding way, promoting a significant mismatch between the civilian people, present in society, and the institutional people, allowed to fully exercise citizenship. Such a discrepancy has historically prevented the constitution of a true republic of equals in rights and opportunities, and diminishes, to this day, the representativeness and legitimacy of democracy.

The change process leading to constituent moments never occurs without a significant increase in tension and conflict. On the one hand, the west vanishing forces are losing economic, social, and political ground. On the other hand, emerging forces gain space as new structures mature. Part of these emerging forces, once mature, will become an agent of the construction of new modes of social organization. They find themselves, in several cases, unrepresented and unprotected, left on their own devices in the whirlwind of change. They join those social sectors displaced by change and which are no longer reached by social protection networks. They are very different forces, which meet coming from opposite situations, and which promote different political impulses.

The first one is emerging, arising from the new, looking to the future. The others are displaced by the collapse and turn to the lost past. The oligarchic control and isolation of political parties and trade union organizations leave the latter unrepresented. Fiscal constraints limit the role of the State, due to imposition of fiscal discipline and the shortening of the tax collection base, depriving them of adequate social protection. These emerging forces do not recognize themselves in the structures for representation and participation in democracies that are in the process of becoming oligarchies, nor are they recognized by them. They also do not fall within the regulations arising from the old mode of state protection to obtain coverage by social protection networks.

The results of this exclusion process can be quite different. On the side of people displaced from their former occupations and unable to re-enter the new labor markets, outrage and revolt make them vulnerable to the preaching of demagogues. Emerging forces, on the other hand, also have difficulty fitting in, as the old social forms cannot fit them into their routine boxes. The reaction tends to be adherence to ultra-individualist, ultra-elitist, and ultra-liberal ideologies.

In certain social segments, this state of mind may also be vulnerable to the values proclaimed by far-right demagogues. These forces will not be the only social actors to influence the development of new political arrangements in the near future. Other social forces will rise amid the structural revolution, whose emergence will occur in the most advanced moments of the transition and, therefore, will be less impressed by the decay of previous formations. The problem-factor for democracy lies in the typically transitional segments, those driven out by transformation and those not achieved by traditional institutions. On the social level, these two powers, one loaded with the past and the other carrying the future, have contradictory interests, and there is great potential tension between them.

The only way that opens up for societies to successfully emerge from the dilemma between collapse and transformation is to define oneself by change and act on it. From the collective choice for change, social forces gain prominence and the political moment opens up to individual action, to the emergence of new leaders, determining the direction and pace of transformation of each country. There is no predefined or predetermined end. Metamorphosis may lead to an array of different possible solutions.

In the words of Norbert Elias (1975), this complete reorganization of human relations will radically transform our habits, behavior, and feelings. The power distribution between the forces linked to declining structures and activities and the forces associated with emerging formations is uneven and dynamic. It changes in time. In the initial moments, the political-institutional power of the forces of decay is much greater than its declining structural strength. The structural power of the emerging forces, on the contrary, is much greater and grow faster than their political-institutional power. The structural movement, however, is inexorable, and while some decay and others grow, this power imbalance tends to reverse in favor of emerging forces. There is an unpredictable moment, but deductible by the logic of the movement of these tectonic structures, in which this power disparity will reach the point of ambivalence or neutrality of forces.

For Elias, the direction of change — that is, the way to which conjunctures will shift — will most likely depend on the “determination and stature of a few people,” influencing the outcome of the transition process. This is about both the great global leaders, as well as the local leaders and even the micro-leaders, in each space of collective and family life. It is impossible to predict which actions will lead to the tipping point, to the turn that unbalances the game of forces to the emerging side.

Social metamorphosis does not lead to the inevitable defeat of authoritarian and neo-fascist forces. They can come out victorious. It is one of the dangers arising from the fear caused by the morbid symptoms of the transition, without the new positivities being fully visible and convincing. Everything will depend on the circumstances and choices of each society. In the historical fissures produced by the shaking of social foundations, the space for human action and individual leadership is expanded. In the unrestricted movement of history towards the future, people’s free will, creativity, and leadership skills are extended. Radical and ubiquitous change calls for innovation, and this is the product of creativity in times of need and diversity.

The demand for innovations creates opportunities for personal initiatives to collectivize and initiate a “creative phase,” resulting in new socio-political configurations. In this process, transformative leaders are born, often from those sectors of the civilian people that so far have been outside the traditional definition of the institutional people. Democracy needs new leaders capable of understanding the transition and people capable of formulating transition policies for the economy, society, and the political system. Such leaders, with the capacity to innovate and join forces, are the ones who can prepare the ground for the re-foundation of democracy in the 21st century, a democracy that will necessarily be digital, admit enlarged popular participation and develop more robust safeguards against authoritarian attacks.

The turbulent journey toward the digital polis

It is in the clash between the forces of the past and those of the future that demagogues and neo-fascists such as Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro emerge. They are authoritarian and narcissistic characters who see others as servants of their will. They are also devoid of compassion and rigorously self-focused. They are not charismatic leaders, as many have considered them. They are demagogic and tyrannical politicians who excite the people, stirring their dissatisfactions, manipulating primitive emotions, and deceive them with empty promises. They present themselves as expressions of a new politics, closer to the people and incorruptible, but once in power, they reveal the opposite of what they promised.

Narcissism, the cult of oneself, prevents them from feeling empathy and compassion (Butler, 1997). Demagogues manipulate the fear of destitution, which they attribute to “others” (migrants, part of the people, ethnically differentiated groups, “communists,”“globalists”), mainly through the language of hatred, defining a clear enemy that threatens the very existence of the people they are addressing. They turn to “their” people to call them to action under “their” command. Only the mythified authoritarian “leader” can tell who his “people” are. With rhetoric that is always targeting the enemy, using war metaphors against corruption, bad politics, incompetence, and the abandonment of “their people,” demagogues launch an emotional trap whose bait is the promise of a “new world,” the past restored in its greatness and without the flaws that “they” provoked and “we” are able to correct.

The speech mode of autocratic leaders is seen by their followers as a delegation of powers to be used as a weapon in the war on “others,” to hurt and silence their opponents and critics. It is this language that dominates the digital networks run by demagogues. When looking at how digital networks have been dominated by the language of hate, manipulated by extremists, and used to commit crimes, the more general tendency is to condemn them. There are many manifestations of what I call “technological reactionaryism,” which invests against technological artifacts as if they were inexorable carriers of evil.

Evidence abounds that extreme groups use in their favor the power of algorithms to amplify and dominate their discourse on social networks. But the network society also offers tools for creative interactions, new forms of interpersonal, group, transnational, and transcontinental cooperation. Digital networks are in the phase of ambivalence. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, the most used platforms today, resist keeping the digital conversation within the limits of civic respect through democratic self-regulation of the content that flows through them, differentiating information from misinformation and news from digital rumor. Therefore, they are responsible for the degeneration of much of the public conversation on the networks.

They also force governments and parliaments with little digital expertise to impose regulation that mirrors analog regulatory models. It doesn’t work. None of this is trivial. The technological environment created by the transformations in the metamorphosis process is multi-causal. Technology generation and use are distributed, decentralized, making it impossible to apply conventional legal processes (Kaufman, 2022). The moderation of content in networks, on the necessary scale, also implies the use of algorithms, replicating the problem on another scale. The automation or robotization of content analysis of posts and videos involves at least three complicated dilemmas for democracy: inevitable lack of decision-making transparency and difficulty in independent verification of moderation decisions; unequal treatment of points of views, groups, and types of discourse, creating serious problems of procedural justice; depoliticization of moderation practices of platforms.

It is a new and fundamental challenge for democracy. The algorithms allow not only to act on its recipient but also to intervene in the social constitution of the recipient, overlapping the original real identity with the version from the network interactions. Lawyer Mari Matsuda (1989) analyzed this ability to act on the recipient and, at the same time, contribute to their social constitution, when examining racist discourse, well before the domain of social networks. It is not technology that produces evil. It’s humans.

Algorithms are not good, bad, or neutral, as historian Melvin Kranzberg (1986) said long ago about technologies. They are technosocial artifacts that interact dynamically with users-subjects, self-improving from the data generated by the interactions. They are, therefore, political artifacts that carry in their code the values and objectives of their developers but can take unforeseen directions from the interactive contexts in which they automatically operate. The agents-developers, who embed values and original objectives in the algorithms and programs so that they act with “autonomy,” and the agents-users, who learn to use the properties of the algorithms to achieve their own objectives, are the ones to whom evil inclinations or destructive purposes can be attributed.

Toni Morrison said that “oppressive language does more than represent violence; oppressive language is violence; it does more than represent the limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge.” (Morrison, 1993) The language of hate is one of the forms of expression of oppressive language that Morrison explained so well in her speech when receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Any hate speech, wherever it comes from, is always oppressive, always authoritarian, and does more than represent hatred; it is hatred and certainly it limits knowledge. Hate language is used as a weapon to wound, disqualify, silence, intimidate, and oppress those to whom it is addressed. It is a weapon to exercise sovereignty, as proposed by Judith Butler (1993). It’s a power resource.

As Hannah Arendt (2021) said, the moment you speak to the audience, everything changes. Our public space in the digital age is hybrid; it is physical and digital: “phygital.” What used to be printed, or to reach the radio or television news, now presents itself to a larger audience than that of any of these media, in real time and in a much more intimate and personal way. Therefore, the power of the discursive weapon increased by several megatons, and the ability to intervene in the definition of people’s social identity has been considerably expanded; to such an extent that a defamatory statement about a target of hate speech can be taken for real even by sympathizers of the attack victim.

This new authoritarian agent, who is able to move in the phygital public space, arises from the proficient use of digital means in a social ecosystem prone to listen to it. It is a phygital agent, a product of the climate of uncertainty, insecurity, and fear caused by the morbid symptoms of social metamorphosis. The new phygital means give it the weapons to make its rhetoric more captivating, on the one hand, and more offensive, on the other, enabling access to power faster than in the past and giving it new resources to undermine democracy from within (Abranches, 2021).

We are again faced with the danger pointed out by Hannah Arendt (2021) that “the enormous pathos of the new era” can only come to light after reaching a point of no return. This is what climatologists fear, for example, concerning climate change. Is it also the fear of many democrats about the neo-fascist threat who wonder when it will be too late to sound the alarm about demagogues. (Buruma, 2018; Abranches, 2021).

We live in a time when it is necessary to take care of the morbid symptoms, as Gramsci called the elements of interregnum crisis, while we still learn about the disease. This is true for the emergence of new authoritarianism and climate change, as it was true for the COVID-19 pandemic. If we leave it to treat the disease after we fully know it, it may be too late for a large part of humanity and, at the same time, we may end up missing the opportunity to use the emerging virtuous components in the transition to build a better, more just, and freer society.

Social networks have created a public space that matters more, mobilizes more, and convinces people more than the analog political space. The intensity of information in this space is much greater than in the analog world. The networks and search engines serve as instruments to seek explanations for what is happening and in the frantic capture of links to articles on politics, economics, science, and behavior that allow us to understand what is happening. The logic of the links and the increasingly precise search engines make it possible to find in real time all the information available on the topics of interest. The conversation widens.

The cybersphere becomes the field of decisive battles for the occupation of the digital polis and for advanced democratization. However, networks raise a critical dilemma regarding the quality and reliability of the information. Information today flows with biases introduced by its developers into algorithms that select what each person will see. This is already a problem for the new network society. The authoritarian tendency to monitor, control, and punish has learned how to manipulate algorithms using the language of hate and intolerance to dominate conversation that should be democratic. The war for digital democracy will increasingly take place in the public space of the cybersphere.

The argument of sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon (2015) that the deepening of democracy requires the increase of citizens’ vigilance and their ability to promote the impediment of bad rulers finds in digital tools the means that best enables its realization. The democratic potential implied in the digital revolution is extraordinary and can impose itself. Citizens already have powerful instruments to confront the disinformation bombing by extremists and watch over rulers and make their misdeeds public. Consumers have never had a more effective tool to report companies’ bad behavior. But its political use is still incipient in the digital space. Networks mirror the transition, reflecting its virtualities, dangers, and contradictions. They will change society and be transformed by it.

Individual action and our choices acquire greater power in the digital society. Individual acts can have consequences far beyond the individual and their surroundings. The cluster of clicks, likes, and individual disapprovals produces celebrities, makes influencers wealthy, fuels network messaging traffic, and removes people from ostracism. To click on something or not, like it or not, share it or not are individual choices, much like the decision to vote or not.

Our micro-choices in the digital public space can, however, join other people’s choices, on the scale of millions, with greater ease and speed, generating unpredictable results. Networks have allowed people to become important poles of influence and persuasion beyond their professional activities. Actress Selena Gomez, in the United States, and singer Anitta, in Brazil, are good examples of the impact of their positions, posted online, on important topics that transcend artistic activity. In politics, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from the left wing of the Democratic Party, is new to the US Congress but she is a celebrity on social networks. She has pressed her own party to do better in digital campaigns, as it happened in the close race for the Senate in the State of Georgia, which ended in a historic Democratic victory. Her influence already goes beyond the field of politics, reaching the plane of behavior.

Even more anonymous people, who do not carry out activities that give them a broad audience, such as celebrities, have become influential by the dexterity of how they manage communication in networks and take advantage of the attributes of algorithms to make their messages go viral. As we are human nodules of an immense digitized social network, network interaction can provoke chain reactions at scale and speed that are impossible to achieve in analog society. Not acting means disconnecting from this network and giving up contributing to its movement. We cannot determine the direction of these reactions or their outcome. Today, more so than ever, our micro-actions can cause macro-reactions. This has become a relevant vector in determining the degree of democracy of local and global governance.

It goes without saying that democracy is much more capable of seizing opportunities for institutional innovation than reactionary regimes. Democracy thrives mostly when choices are made freely, decisions are made in a free and open context, and passions are expressed with some ease of mind. But with the deep moving structures producing severe instability on the surface, it’s actually harder to get the calculation right and temper passions. We live in a society of risk in every aspect. It is the empire of passions of all kinds in societies in which structural change makes interests confused and diffuse and makes it difficult to differentiate between transitional interests and durable ones.

Passions are left to highlight interests and guide individual actions and reactions. Known solutions of balance between interests and passions have been lost in the mists of the past. Inequalities inevitably increase. The concrete result tends to be radicalized polarization, the extreme reactions that lead to exit rather than voice, and the alienated race to consumerist individualism, to ultranationalism. Everyone seeks situations that protect them from afflictions and gives them the impression of belonging, of being among equals.

The critical question is whether polarization and the extreme passions of disenchantment and demagogic preaching are inevitable. I don’t think they are. But it takes more than rhetoric to appease passions and discredit demagogues. Transition policies are needed to mitigate deprivations and respond to people’s evident desire to be heard and to have their needs fulfilled.

Social networks more faithfully express this unease, this zeitgeist of a troubled time. They are agile channels for expressing our doubts and perplexities. Digital mobility helps a person to escape from the painful reality of the physical world to the endless paths of the virtual world. Loneliness in the socio-sphere in crisis is replaced by tense coexistence in the expanding cybersphere. In it, one can express passions and convictions, share perplexities, interact, find his equals, what comforts him, what he admires, one can listen to what is said and done, and find what justifies fear, hatred, and unilateralism. The pandemic, on the one hand, reinforced this virtual exile; on the other, it showed the virtues of meeting in person and the need to be with family, friends, and colleagues. It revealed the possibility of virtual loneliness and helped rediscover the benefits of sociability in the physical world.

The democratic challenge

Demagogues who manage to get elected, whom I’ve nicknamed ‘incidental rulers,’ seek to degrade the mechanisms that guarantee the rotation in power and secure the checks and balances that safeguard democracy. When they succeed, they manage to perpetuate themselves in office. Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chávez, and Viktor Orbán, among others, managed to change the electoral rules to guarantee permanence in power, producing the necessary electoral or parliamentary majority necessary for that. The second mandate is always the most dangerous because it is when they can reinstitutionalize the political system, dismantling democratic safeguards and turning institutions inside out to perform functions opposite to their original constitutional delegations.

During Donald Trump's four years in the White House, he took Supreme Court decisions much further to the right by appointing ultra-conservative justices to the court. Today, the justices appointed by the presidents of the Republican Party are the pivotal majority. But Trump could not change the electoral rules in his favor or manipulate the vote count. Defeated in an attempt to re-elect himself, he harassed his far-right followers, among them neo-Nazi and supremacist groups, to storm the Capitol, the iconic seat of the US Congress, and force Senators to invalidate the vote count. To general perplexity, the Republican Party later decided that the unprecedented and violent invasion of the Capitol, a real threat to the physical integrity of its members, was a common act of “legitimate political fighting.”

Bolsonaro has threatened to carry out a coup that would allow him to intervene in the Judiciary and Congress, so far without success. Despite his inability to completely disrupt the institutional arrangement of democracy, he has managed to dismantle the apparatus of public policies whose primary function is to realize the democratic promises of the 1988 Constitution of inclusion, diversity, cultural pluralism, universal secular education, academic freedom, and protection of the environment, native peoples and their lands. He has also invested against the system of checks and balances for democratic safeguards. He neutralized the investigative autonomy of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (Ministério Público Federal, MPF), appointing a person from the outskirts of the legal career to be docile towards his intentions.

He has promoted institutional dismantling, often with the help of politicians of the opportunist center in the Legislative Branch, who moved to the ultra-right for convenience. The Senate has been an important barrier to legislative and institutional setbacks, where Bolsonaro’s opportunistic center is not a majority. Much of the adherence of congressmen to Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic agenda is due to the increasingly arbitrary management of budget funds concentrated in budget amendments under the control of leaders in Congress. Those are funds diverted from public policy priorities that do not meet the constitutional criteria of transparency that constitute the so-called secret budget. Through it, the Bolsonaro administration has produced tremendous disparities in allocating public resources aggravating durable inequalities of income and opportunities. The most direct victims have been public schools, the public health system (known as SUS in Brazil), and the lower-income population, especially black people, and native peoples.

Autocratic rulers are incidental, but they don’t come out of nowhere. They have social bases and strong support in the financial market and fossil economy sectors. In Donald Trump’s social base, there were sectors of the rural US, small landowners displaced from the market by the industrialization of agriculture and dominance of large agro-industrial corporations; and Rust Belt workers, unemployed by the decommision of obsolete steel mills also high emitters of greenhouse gases; by the reduction of the use of coal; and by the displacement of industrial production to other countries of higher productivity and lower costs. Regardless of what they think and who they support, they are people who need protection in the transition to new livelihoods that, while preserving their cultures, are viable in the new socioeconomic environment. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, had support from the financial market, a large part of the industrial patriciate, the agribusiness, and middle and lower class sectors threatened by downward social mobility, the latter also need protection in this transition.

In several authoritarian regimes, and even in some democracies with authoritarian governments, digital militias, which mix volunteers, mercenaries, and bots, are mobilized to disseminate hate messages and violent attacks against government opponents. But, in the same environment in which autocratic demagogy grows, grow the seeds of an informed and mobilizable society, capable of promoting the democratization of the State and the digitization of politics. In the cybersphere, people have more resources and possibilities to confront the state, authoritarian rulers, and large corporations than in the socio-sphere. The public space for collective control and deliberation is in expansion.

The cunning manipulation of information and public opinion by authoritarian groups is part of the transition. This contributes to increased mistrust of representative democracy, institutions, politics, and politicians. At the same time, distrust can be an active element of citizens’ civic life, leading them to use digital means to monitor, and broaden representativeness, and to intervene in public decisions (Butzlaff and Messinger-Zimmer, 2020). Networks significantly reduce the opportunity costs of participation in active citizenship and decision-making.

Civic distrust is a form of activism that has little worth without political participation. The citizen-spectator, who does not vote, does not protest, and does not demand, is an involuntary opponent of democracy and contributes to the degrading of the democratic regime into oligarchies or autocracies. The democratic control of the state and corporations implies the participation of active and vigilant citizens. The active distrust of citizens gives them a controlling power over political transactions that are far more conducive to the enlargement of democratic reach than the destabilizing forms of protest by outraged people. Such citizen skepticism can be a tool to strengthen democratic legitimacy. The adverse social effects of the transition, however, lead to discredit in democracy and politics. I distinguish discredit from active mistrust that is beneficial to democracy. Discredit, or disfavor, would be disruptive and undemocratic. These two strong currents of political motivation collide in contemporary polarizations.

The experiences of the United States and Brazil show that the success of autocratic attacks in an environment of disenchantment with democracy depends on the robustness of democratic institutions and the degree of cohesion of society around democracy. At the institutional level, in both cases, it was observed that some worked effectively to contain, at the very least, the scope of the attacks on democracy.

In the United States, broader federative autonomy has allowed most states to block attempts to change electoral rules to the detriment of minorities. Even in the Supreme Court, center-right Republican justices have allied with Democratic justices to bar some of the most serious initiatives to restrict the right to vote by governors and state representatives linked to Trump. In Brazil, the Supreme Court, on the one hand, and the Senate, on the other, served as a shield against attempts to dismantle democracy.

Social cohesion around democracy is weakened by the growing frustration with the promises contained in each country’s constitutional convenant. Support for democracy depends, above all, on policies that sufficiently meet the structural needs of the people, by providing welfare.

In the phase of social metamorphosis that we are experiencing, the poor government performance and the inadequacy of public policies to the new needs that arise give strength to the appeal of demagogues and threaten democracy. In this transitional period, whose duration is difficult to estimate, all answers are insufficient because, in the realm of scarcity, political and economic power always prevails. Moreover,  oligarchical politics both on the left and right does not even see or does not recognize most of the new needs created by the transition. Hence the bottleneck in the provision of policy solutions to the majority. It is a substantive dimension of material and political effectiveness, which concerns the social obligations of the State and the correspondence between the demands of society and public policies, between the democratic promise and the result of the actions of democratic governments.

Rosanvallon (2015) recalls that democracy has historically manifested itself simultaneously as a promise and a problem. The promise cannot be fully fulfilled because it needs to adapt to social dynamics. It must provide sufficient structural answers to problems at every stage of society’s development. Updating the democratic app became urgent. What is sought is a theory of transition that allows us to think of temporary structural solutions until the new modes arising from metamorphosis begin to generate more permanent responses using the logic and tools of the new societal paradigms to emerge. But, for that to happen, it is necessary, first of all, to recognize that we are experiencing a social metamorphosis, a radical, deep, and global structural transformation, and not a set of conventional changes.

No democratic government has yet managed to link these emerging elements, the embryos of the new, to the resources available to mitigate the harmful effects of the transition. Liberal-conservative sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (1960) spoke of the importance of meeting citizens’ material needs for democratic stability and legitimacy. Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (1977) considered the ability to give structural responses to the needs of the people a necessary condition for moral hegemony in a new political order. Legitimacy and moral hegemony are equivalent terms originating from polar paradigms. One seeks the stability of the regime, the other the change of power. Both recognize the need for concrete policy responses in line with the material and cultural needs of society. The democratic response needs to be directly connected to the promise of democracy. Even if that promise can never be fulfilled entirely, democracy begins by seeking to realize and protect its essential part, civil and social rights, and, moreover, always moves towards realizing other dimensions of the democratic promise that have not yet been fulfilled. Especially those that give greater representation and wider voice channels for the civilian people to manifest institutionally.

The narrowing of representative democracy is a result of the asynchrony between the social process and the political process. Throughout the 20th century, politics in conventional representative democracies systematically sought stability, which is considered a democratic virtue. The correlation of forces present in economics and politics merges the general desire for democratic stability with the private interest in the stability of policies that benefit the power holders. The democratic order is thus confused with the status quo, and the general will to preserve democracy becomes an instrument to the oligarchic interest in conserving this state of affairs. Democracies have become very conservative, jeopardizing the very legitimacy of democracy. Citizens’ representativeness and participation have been sacrificed to ensure the stability of policies.

This conservatism was aggravated by the hegemony of fiscal stability policies over any other consideration, broken only by the pandemic, which imposed a global increase in public spending to cope with the health emergency. Orthodox austerity differs from the broader and more flexible notion of fiscal responsibility. The first aims only at the fiscal surplus, usually resorting to the most direct and automatically applicable spending cuts, regardless of their distributive consequences. In general, it is made through linear across the board cuts or absolute ceilings for spending with regressive effects.

Fiscal responsibility, on the other hand, provides for the balance of public accounts and the guarantee that permanent expenditure will have permanent sources of financing. It is concerned, in principle, with the quality of public spending and the containment of public debt growth, seeking to minimize regressive distributive impacts. Progressive governments can adopt fiscal responsibility and seek this balance through two procedures. First, cutting capital subsidies, releasing revenues that the government has renounced to benefit capitalists, and increasing revenues derived from progressive taxes, which charge more from the wealthy. The second measure would be to inflexibly adhere to the rule of only creating or increasing permanent expenditure having permanent funding sources.

One of the problems of democracy analyses is that they follow a mental model that sees it as the final stage that, once reached, only needs maintenance care to ensure its stability and legitimacy. But democracy exists in a dynamic, conflicting, and problematic social context. Current changes linked to the demographic, economic, social, and political dynamics associated with material progress alter and expand the constitution of the civilian and institutional people and change their needs.

Therefore, democracy must be considered as part of a complex system in constant evolution, a moving target, a civilizing ideal of freedom, equality of rights, and opportunities. This vision seeks the permanent updating of liberal democracy, made ever more inclusive, participatory, and in tune with new demands and rights. There is an unwavering element of insatiability in the democratic being. Democracy is a permanent process of constitution of popular sovereignty, of the people itself as a collective subject, and of the means of exercising this sovereignty.

The major challenges during and after the metamorphosis will continue to be overcoming old and new inequalities, reshaping safeguards against autocracy, and deepening digital democracy strengthened by the new mechanisms of participation and representation offered by the digital society. Challenges for which societies will add a new toolkit arising from technical and behavioral changes.