Neoconservadorismo de periferia: articulação familista, punitiva e neoliberal na Câmara dos Deputados

Abstract

The present work analyzes the articulation around different issues of the contemporary right wing agenda in Brazil: traditional family, popular punitivism, neoliberalism and the fight against Bolivarianism. The focus of this investigation is on the possibility of a concerted promotion of those issues within the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, on who would be its protagonists and on which arguments link those matters. The research employs a transversal understanding of the political action in each one of the aforementioned topics. The hypothesis states that there is a neoconservative political articulation within the Chamber, as a reconfiguration of that North American ideology in Brazil. The analytical axis for research is the literature on this political movement that came into prominence in the United States in the 1980s. This literature provides the conceptual framework to test the hypothesis. The methodologies used are both quantitative and qualitative: the analyses of plenary votes, of bills and of parliamentary speeches on the topics indicated, as well as the profile (religious denomination and ideological commitment) of the representatives who performed such actions. The results confirm the hypothesis, demonstrating similarities between the performance of a group of Brazilian federal deputies and the North American movement. The action produced in Brazil, however, contains the idiosyncrasies of a peripheral country: there isn´t an imperialist drive, as in the United States on the contrary, it enables a hemispheric and non-autonomous international insertion; and the defense of neoliberal principles is not so clear, probably because Brazilian neoconservative parliamentarians have a lower class constituency lacking state protection. The linking of the different issues happens through a neoconservative ideology, which has in its core the defense of Christianity and family values as a response to social dysfunctions. The leading figures of this movement in the Brazilian parliament are evangelical deputies.