From an excellent piece in The New Yorker on the rising economy in Brazil:
[Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff] has to keep revving the engine of prosperity for ordinary Brazilians, and make sure people know who’s responsible for it…
…In the United States, during the second half of the twentieth century, this kind of political apparatus fell victim to its own success. Policies that succeed in creating a middle-class nation can generate their own opposition, because the people they’ve helped tend to become hostile to the kind of governance they used to want. If this happened in Brazil, it would feel, at least to the country’s current cadre of leaders, as if, by effectively promoting economic progress, they had used their time in power to turn the country over from the Houyhnhnms to the Yahoos [Editor’s note: This is a reference to characters in Jonathan Swift’s satirical Gulliver’s Travels]. While I was in Brasilia, I spoke with an economist named Ricardo Paes de Barros, a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is the undersecretary of a new government agency that is charged with long-term planning, called the Secretariat for Strategic Affairs. He was organizing a workshop, at which the President was scheduled to give the opening remarks, on the politics of the new Brazilian middle class. “This new middle class, they talk a lot about meritocracy,” he said, disapprovingly. “They forget that a lot of their success was based on solidarity. Suddenly, now I’m not so concerned about inequality. They start talking about merit. Wow, it’s a big problem. People are very concerned. Very, very concerned. It will have very important political implications.”
Simon Owens is a journalist in Washington, DC. You can read his blog, follow him on Twitter, or email him at [email protected]