Every few years, like clockwork, the international press corps packs its bags, buys fresh safari shirts, and heads down to the Amazon to explain to the rest of the world why ordinary people shouldn’t be allowed to make a living. The latest dispatch from The Guardian follows a well-worn script. A correspondent ventures up to Roraima, Brazil’s northern frontier, to marvel with undisguised dread at the fact that local voters, small-town preachers, and working-class families have the nerve to support conservative candidates. To the global media, this isn't an election about roads, jobs, and security; it is a morality play where the earth itself is on the ballot, and the people who actually live on that earth are casting the wrong votes.
Sitting here in the American Midwest, the whole routine feels painfully familiar. You do not have to speak fluent Portuguese to understand what is happening in Brazil’s hinterlands. It is the exact same dynamic that plays out every election cycle between coastal newsrooms and the folks who work the soil between the Alleghenies and the Rockies. To a certain class of roving professional, a region is never a home, a culture, or a community of flesh-and-blood human beings trying to feed their children. It is an abstraction, a designated sanctuary, or a carbon offset to soothe the guilty consciences of people who spend their days in air-conditioned London or Manhattan offices.
The people of Roraima have thrown their support behind the conservative banner, just as frontier communities across the Americas have done for generations. They back candidates who promise them the right to work the land, build infrastructure, and protect their property from arbitrary bureaucratic diktats. In the eyes of foreign observers, these voters are treated as backward or reckless, seduced by populist rhetoric. But if you talk to people from the diner counter up, whether in a dusty Brazilian border town or a grain elevator town in Indiana, you realize they are motivated by the oldest and most honorable impulse known to man: the desire to leave something stable and prosperous behind for the next generation.
Edmund Burke once wrote that to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of public affections. Burke understood that human beings do not love abstractions like the global climate ledger; they love their families, their churches, their neighbors, and their hometowns. When a Brazilian frontier worker votes for economic growth, he is not voting to destroy the planet. He is voting to ensure his family has electricity, that his church has a roof, and that his sons do not have to leave their ancestral home just to find a paycheck. When cosmopolitan elites demand that entire regions be locked away in amber for the sake of international treaties, they are asking living people to sacrifice their own flourishing on the altar of a foreign elite's vanity.
There is a deep, hypocritical arrogance in the way Western commentators lecture the developing world about stewardship. The very nations that chopped down their own ancient forests centuries ago to fuel the Industrial Revolution now turn around and demand that poor Brazilians live in perpetual poverty to clean up the world’s air. It is a new breed of eco-imperialism, wrapped up in the pious language of international sustainability. The sovereign citizens of Brazil have an absolute right to govern their own territory and develop their natural resources as they see fit, through the democratic process, without having to seek a permission slip from European podcast hosts.
The alliance between faith, enterprise, and family that drives the conservative movement in Brazil’s northern reaches is not an aberration. It is the foundation of every durable society that has ever tamed a wilderness. The preachers in Roraima are not villains in an international melodrama; they are ministers tending to flocks that face brutal hardships and scarce economic opportunities. They preach hard work, personal responsibility, and hope, which happens to resonate far more with a struggling family than a lecture on biodiversity from someone who has never had to clear a ditch or harvest a crop.
When the ballots are counted, the outcome will not be determined by the anxieties of the international climate summit circuit. It will be decided by the people who call that red dirt home. They will vote for leaders who see them not as ecological trespassers, but as citizens with God-given dignity. The experts and correspondents will surely lament the result, just as they always do when working people refuse to follow the script written for them by their betters. But that is the beauty of a ballot box: in the end, the vote of a frontiersman in Roraima counts just as much as the opinion of a columnist in London.