These principles are not rules to be followed in practical politics. Instead, they are a set of recognition criteria for you to distinguish when you hear a politician, whether you are before a conservative, a revolutionary, or a "liberal," in the Brazilian sense of the term today (an undecided blend of the previous two).
1) Nobody owns the future. "The future belongs to us" is a verse from the Hitler Youth anthem. It is the essence of the revolutionary mentality. A conservative speaks on behalf of past experiences accumulated in the present. The revolutionary speaks on behalf of a hypothetical future whose court of final appeal he believes he represents in the present, even when he knows nothing of that future and cannot describe it, if not through generic praise for something he does not know.
When former President Lula said, "We don't know what kind of socialism we want," he assumed he knew: (a) that socialism is the bright and inevitable future of history when experience shows us that it is indeed a bloody past with a legacy of more than one hundred million dead; (b) that he and his accomplices have the right to lead us to a repetition of this experience, with no other guarantee that it will be less deadly than the previous one except for the verbal promise coming out of the mouth of someone who, at the same time, confesses not knowing where it takes us.
The revolutionary mentality is a mixture of psychotic presumption and criminal irresponsibility.
2) Each generation has the right to choose what suits them. This implies that no generation has the right to commit subsequent ones to drastic choices whose almost certainly harmful effects can never be reversed or can only be reversed through the sacrifice of many generations. The people, by definition, have the right to experiment and learn from experience. Still, for this very reason, they do not have the right to use their children and grandchildren as guinea pigs for reckless experiences.
3) No government has the right to do something that the next government cannot undo. It is an unavoidable corollary of the previous principle. Periodic elections would make no sense if each elected government did not have the right and the possibility to correct the mistakes of previous governments. Democracy is, therefore, essentially hostile to any project of profound and irreversible change in the social order, however bad it may be at any given time.
No social order generated over the centuries is as bad as a new order imposed by an enlightened elite that believes, with no reason, that it has the only desirable future. In the past three centuries, there has not been a single revolutionary experiment that has not resulted in destruction, slaughter, wars, and widespread misery. It is hard to see how future experiments can be different.
4) No revolutionary proposal is worth discussing as a respectable alternative in a democratic political framework. The revocability of government measures is an inescapable principle of democracy, and every revolutionary proposal, by definition, denies this principle from the ground up. Therefore, putting any revolutionary proposal into action without the concentration of power and the ostensive or camouflaged exclusion of any alternative proposal is impossible. You cannot discuss alternatives based on the prohibition of alternatives.
5) Democracy is the opposite of revolutionary politics. Democracy is the government of experimental, always revocable, and short-term attempts. The revolutionary proposal is necessarily irreversible and long-term. Strictly speaking, every revolutionary proposal aims to transform a particular society, the entire Earth, and human nature itself.
It is impossible to argue democratically with someone who does not even respect the nature of the interlocutor, seeing in it only the provisional matter of future humanity. It is stupid to believe that communists, socialists, fascists, Eurasians, and tutti quanti can peacefully integrate into democratic coexistence with infinitely less ambitious political factions. It will always be the democratic coexistence of the wolf with the lamb.
6) The total eradication of the revolutionary mentality is essential for the survival of freedom in the world. The revolutionary mentality is not a permanent trait of human nature. It had a historical origin - around the 18th century - and it will almost certainly come to an end. The period of its heyday, the 20th century, was the most violent, the most homicidal of all human history, surpassing, in the number of innocent victims, all the wars, epidemics, earthquakes, and natural disasters observed since the beginning of time.
There is no exaggeration in saying that the revolutionary mentality is the greatest scourge that has befallen humanity. It is a matter of numbers and not of opinion. Refusing to see this is being a monster of insensitivity. Any policy that does not aim at completely eradicating the revolutionary mentality, in the most candid and explicit way possible is a criminal and unacceptable attempt to change the subject, however much it adorns its omission with beautiful democratic, libertarian, religious, moralistic, egalitarian pretexts, etc.
“Principles of a Conservative Policy,” by Olavo de Carvalho, originally published on Diário do Comércio Newspaper on June 27th 2011. Translated by Daniel Bertorelli in March 2020, revised by The Academy on April 20th 2023.
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