Mithridates VI was king of the Kingdom of Pontus, a country located in northern Anatolia. His father, Mithridates V, ruled Pontus until he was killed by poison. Fearing that he would suffer a similar fate, Mithridates VI began taking small doses of various types of poison daily as a means of developing endurance. Ironically, this strategy had unexpected consequences: when he attempted suicide after the Roman Empire’s conquest of Pontus, he was unsuccessful due to the high degree of immunity he had acquired. Which prompted him to order one of the guards to assassinate him.
This practice gave rise to the term “mitrification,” the process by which organisms, through continued and increasing exposure to certain toxins, develop resistance or immunity to them. This is a mechanism based on gradual sensitization and production of specific defenses against the toxic agent.
For many analysts, exposure to conspiracies and tensions would prompt Brazilian democracy to develop antibodies against authoritarian processes. This is an extension of the saying, “What does not kill (democracy) strengthens.”
In other words, when faced with smaller, manageable challenges (“small doses of poison”), a democratic system can develop defense mechanisms, resilience, and institutional strengthening that make it stronger in the face of greater threats in the future. A related idea concerns adaptation and resilience: the ability to debate, adjust policies, amend laws, and learn from mistakes (“political mitigation”) can prevent systemic collapses.
However, the picture does not capture the main issue: the incentive structure. It is true that punishing the perpetrators of attempts to undermine Brazilian democracy would actually change this structure and would have a deterrent effect. But in reality, this had already happened to some extent because the observed outcome was not an event: no coup occurred, mainly because of internal vetoes, not because of resistance by institutions of checks and balances.
Although strong horizontal institutions of accountability – the judiciary and institutions of oversight in the Latin sense – can have a deterrent effect, vertical accountability, exercised by voters through elections, is particularly vulnerable to appeals from populist leaders. History offers many examples, but the most striking case among us is that the poison did not produce antibodies, but rather the opposite, in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, was the Estado Novo (1937-1945) inaugurated by a self-coup by Getulio.
After almost nine years – the only period during which the Brazilian Congress and the state legislative assemblies remained closed – from November 10, 1937 to September 23, 1946, the dictator was not only saved, but celebrated in the infamous “Queremismo” episode, not only by voters, but above all by the same sectors of the left that had suffered harsh repression under his rule. The counterfactual – what would have happened if Getulio had been punished and imprisoned – tells us a lot about our illiberal tradition.
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