A retórica da guerra cultural e o parlamento brasileiro: a argumentação no impeachment de Dilma Rousseff

Abstract

The origin of the term "culture war" is controversial. It was in the United States, however, that the expression became popular through the publication of James Davison Hunter's Culture Wars in 1991. It was a description of the clash between two antagonistic worldviews, one conservative, associated with the right politics, and a progressive one, predominantly related to the left, but not only. The concept of culture wars bring with it social and moral problems that concern, for example, sexuality, behavior, race, religiosity, etc., as well as political and economic issues. From the point of view of language, one questions: given these cultural clashes in society, would there be a rhetoric peculiar to it? Would it be possible to think of some regularities, even if this war has its own contours in different countries and historical periods? One also questions, regarding the impeachment voting in the House of Deputies, if public debate conducted in Parliament can be seen as imbued with a Rhetoric of the Culture Wars. How did the deputies take into consideration the auditorium, what Charaudeau calls the “citizen instance”, to achieve their argumentative strategies? Could it be said that the rhetoric witnessed during the rite is a reflection of an entrenched political culture among Brazilians? In what sense can it be said that the argumentation observed in impeachment contributed or not to the maintenance of democratic institutions? What argumentative resources did the political actors use to defend their views? To try to answer these questions, this research uses, as a supporting corpus, the pronouncements adopted in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, when voting on the admissibility of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, on April 17, 2016. One takes into consideration some categories of Rhetoric, understood in the context of discourse; categories of the notion of gender of discourse in Dominique Maingueneau; categories presumed from the idea of communication contract of political discourse proposed by Patrick Charaudeau, as well as notions of rules of debate and argumentation in the democratic space, proposed, for example, by Angenot and Danblon. In view of the approximate 500 pronouncements of the House of Deputies, it was firstly sought to categorize speeches according to, for example, the decision (whether “yes” or “no” to impeachment); according to mentioning or not the merits of the case (the crime of responsibility); according to the use of not of the word "God" or to religion itself; according to mentioning or not one’s family, the electoral corral, and the word “democracy”; according to mentioning or not the value of egalitarianism; according to mentioning or not the word “coup”, among other constants. Then, representative speeches of each of these constants are selected, so that, in the light of the theoretical-methodological references exposed above, the corpus can be treated. One came to a typification of constants that would make up the so-called “Rhetoric of the Culture Wars”. From the point of view of the importance of the audience, it was observed that it, in the figure of the electorate, was a cornerstone in the discursive construction of parliamentarians, mainly due to the increasingly direct manifestation of a conservatism that would be proper to Brazilian culture. Regarding democratic institutions, one found that the way argumentation was undertaken in the public space contributed to their corrosion.