Denial of Politics and Denialism as a Policy: pandemic and democracy

Abstract

The text is developed in three complementary stages: Firstly, we discuss the strategy of denying politics, which allowed President Bolsonaro to reject democratic values without definitively breaking with democracy, employed both during the presidential campaign but also during the pandemic. Secondly, we analyze the strategy of denialism as a policy, important to the understanding of the way thru which Bolsonaro undertook his management of the pandemic. Thirdly, we argue that during the pandemic both strategies were combined, thus producing socio-political phenomena that erode democracy, such as the trivialization of deaths and the naturalization of the cleavage between valuable lives, less valuable lives, and disposable lives.