The New York Review of Books - 24.04.2020

(Axel Boer) #1

April 23, 2020 37


bank accounts, and convicted of corrup-
tion and tax evasion; he is now serving a
fifteen- year sentence.
What Brazil experienced that year,
in other words, was a falling-out be-
tween two gangs of thieves who had
been working together but, as the cops
closed in, turned on each other. The
public was furious and demanded that
all of the guilty parties be brought to
justice: the slogan heard on the streets
and seen as graffiti at that time was
“Dilma out, Temer out, Cunha out,
Renan out,” the last being the pres-
ident of the Senate and an ally of the
other two men. Instead, Temer simply
outmaneuvered Dilma, orchestrating
her impeachment behind the scenes
and eventually succeeding her. Thus
the plundering continued for the more
than two years remaining in her term,
to the public’s mounting rage.


When Anderson turns from the
seaminess of politics to actual policy,
a different problem with his analysis
emerges. In one typical passage, he
examines education programs and
spending in Brazil, using cherry-picked
numbers to make questionable claims
for progress and equality under three
consecutive Workers’ Party adminis-
trations, while minimizing advances
that occurred prior to its taking power.
“Since 2005 government spending on
education has trebled, and the num-
ber of university students doubled,”
he states. In contrast, he alleges, under
Cardoso “during the nineties, higher
education in Brazil largely ceased to
be a public function.” Anderson’s book
lacks footnotes, so I’m not sure of the


source of those statements. But sta-
tistics compiled by the World Bank,
UNESCO, the OECD, and Brazilian
government agencies would seem to
indicate that, at best, government
spending on education rose about 100
percent in real terms over the period
the PT was in power, significantly less
than Anderson claims.
The principal problem with his as-
sessment, however, is what it leaves
out. During Cardoso’s eight years in
office—1995 through 2002—his ad-
ministration focused on secondary ed-
ucation, having logically concluded that
it made no sense to prioritize invest-
ment in higher education if a sufficient
number of high school students were
not graduating. In that, the Cardoso
administration excelled: high school
enrollments expanded by more than a
third during his tenure, the number of
high school graduates increased by 35
percent, and the number of children not
attending school at all dropped to 3 per-
cent, compared with about 20 percent
at the beginning of the decade. That is
why, as Cardoso was leaving office, the
United Nations Development Program
praised him for having “overseen im-
portant human development progress,”
especially in the areas of education,
health, and agrarian reform.
Had Cardoso’s party won the 2002
election, it planned to supplement in-
vestment in secondary education with
a similar push in higher education, em-
phasizing public universities, to accom-
modate the growing number of high
school graduates. When Lula won, he
took a similar path, but rather than
focus on the public sector, he allowed
dozens of fly-by-night private universi-

ties to proliferate, with the government
providing scholarships and loans to un-
derprivileged and nonwhite students.
“However poor the quality of instruc-
tion—it is often terrible,” Anderson
argues, the program was “a great pop-
ular success, sometimes optimistically
compared for democratizing effect to
the GI Bill of Rights in postwar Amer-
ica.” Who besides Anderson makes
that comparison is never stated, but
their numbers probably do not include
Brazilian graduates saddled with debt
who find, when they apply for jobs, that
their degrees are deemed less worthy
than those from public universities.

Anderson’s unwillingness to give
credit where credit is due emerges as
a major problem throughout Brazil
Apart. He is skilled at turning the
snarky phrase; in a single paragraph
he refers to Bolsonaro’s “austeritar-
ian overload” and the “salmagundi
of conservative parties” behind him.
But when the subject is Cardoso, all
he can summon is bile and more bile.
It is hard to say whether the origins of
his animosity are personal—Anderson
and Cardoso moved in the same circles
at the University of São Paulo in the
mid-1960s and were friendly until they
weren’t—or ideological, or some mix-
ture of the two. A sociologist and po-
litical scientist, Cardoso is the co author
of Dependency and Development in
Latin America, a canonical text in
economic underdevelopment theory,
but like many other Latin American
intellectuals, he long ago left orthodox
Marxism behind. Anderson, a founder
of the New Left Review, has not, and

accuses Cardoso of “sacrificing his
intellectual standards” to become “a
lesser mouthpiece for the guff of the
Third Way,” personified by Bill Clin-
ton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and
Ricardo Lagos of Chile.
Anderson goes so far as to maintain
that Cardoso’s criticisms of Lula and
the PT are motivated by jealousy and
vanity rather than legitimate policy
differences. “For eight years, he suf-
fered from comparison with Lula, a far
more popular president who repudiated
his legacy and changed the country de-
cisively in ways he did not,” Anderson
writes, adding that Cardoso was “stung
by the greater political appeal of a
worker with no education.” This seems
exactly wrong, and on multiple levels.
For one thing, though Lula did complain
of the “cursed inheritance” Cardoso
supposedly bequeathed him, he never
really “repudiated” that legacy. Instead,
after losing three campaigns for presi-
dent (including two to Cardoso by wide
margins), Lula embraced significant el-
ements of his predecessor’s policies and
moved away from a hard-left position—
so much so that the Brazilian sociolo-
gist Francisco de Oliveira, a cofounder
of the Workers’ Party whom Anderson
cites approvingly on other matters, used
to mordantly observe that Lula’s first
year in office was actually “the ninth
year of the Cardoso Administration.”
Even Lula’s signature social pro-
gram, the Bolsa Família (Family Al-
lowance), owes a significant debt to
Cardoso. Anderson concisely defines
Bolsa Família as “a monthly cash trans-
fer to mothers in the lowest income
strata, against proof that they are send-
ing their children to school, and getting

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