The Brazilian elite, however—famously living in gated condominiums with private security guards—is merely a more grotesque version of elites in “advanced Western democracies.” The disavowal of responsibility for society finds its most outré example in
Peter Thiel’s seasteading. But this process is much more widely distributed, and depersonalized, across the West.
When Brazil’s ruling class opts for diminished sovereignty in order to maintain their dominant position amid deep inequality, we should see its mirror image in the European Union. The regional bloc is best understood as an “
economic constitution” which is devised to prevent politics from interfering with market regulation, thus locking in policy choices. When national elites opt for membership in the bloc—in spite of the EU’s neoliberal death spiral—they trade away national autonomy and with it political responsibility for social outcomes.
Just look at Italian elites’ desperation to remain part of euro, despite the penury to which it subjects the country and the destruction of any future for it. Just as Brazilian elites wish they could permanently decamp to Miami, for long the capital of Latin American reaction, so globalized elites in Europe and North America wish they too could escape the masses that “hold them back.” Italian elites wish they were German, British “Remainers” do likewise, and American liberal elites wish they were “European”—or at least that America’s flyover country might disappear.
Nowhere (except perhaps in China) do we find ruling elites pursuing any sort of “national project”—something that thereby implicates, and aims to integrate, the masses. Insofar as neoliberal elites have any project, beyond short-term crisis management and government-by-media, it is always anti-national. Brazilian president Fernando Hen*rique Cardoso, who sold off state-owned family jewels to investors at cut prices in the 1990s, had been right all along: the national bourgeoisie cannot be relied upon.