Has anyone ever been more praised than Brazil's man of the people, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva?
Under his socialist rule, Brazil was suddenly the world capital of cool. People on the left viewed him as a saner, more democratic alternative to the crackpot lunacy of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. His was vegetarian socialism, as writer Alvaro Vargas Llosa once quipped, compared with Chavez's carnivorous socialism.
Lula's tax and spend policies shoveled pork to the poor much the same way Chavez in Venezuela did, winning him oodles of praise.
President Obama gushed about Lula's "progressive, forward-looking leadership," and even reportedly backed him for next president of the World Bank. Obama's first trip to South America was to Brazil, where he praised its energy production (read: oil boom) and its economic model.
Today, Brazil is Venezuela South. The carnival is over, the other people's money has run out, GDP has tanked, inflation is back, Lula's handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, is threatened with impeachment, and many Brazilian officials and state company executives are either in the dock or in jail. To its north and south, conservatives and classical liberals have been elected in Venezuela's legislature and to the presidency in Argentina, getting an early start on a new model and dismantling the failed socialism of their previous governments.
Most significantly in Brazil, the winds of change are being felt in accountability for public officials for corruption. For a long time, Lula seemed immune, even as plenty of his aides were packed off to the hoosegow. Corruption charges never seemed to touch the man of the people who was so venerated on the global left.
But the same weakness that infects all socialists, that of creating special interests, with special privileges and special claims on the public fisk, all in the name of "fairness" and redistribution, doesn't take long to morph into plain old corruption. A ruling party, even if, or maybe precisely because, it claims to be socialist, always ends up making itself the biggest and most important special interest of them all, even as it denounces a long-gone establishment, claims to embody the people, then digs in to help itself with the people's money.
That's the story in Brazil, and it's significant that the markets leapt for joy at the news of Lula's detention. It also it offers a cautionary tale here in the States as well. Voters should be very wary of any political party that claims to have a monopoly on the interests of "the people." If a society is to hold any claim to being a democracy, as Brazil clearly does, it positively requires one set of laws for everyone, an idea anathema to the socialism of redistribution.
Don't know about you, but I suspect this news is being greeted very nervously in the Hillary Clinton camp as the unthinkable in Brazil continues to unfold.
