The New York Review of Books - 24.04.2020

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

An up-close look at

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