[Social rights: difficult to construct, easy to destroy].

The purpose of this article is to reflect on contemporary tensions between the social protection system in Brazil - which in the past 30 years has come to be organized as a social right and has been part of the construction of democracy in the country - and the current process of its dismantling under an authoritarian populist regime. From the theoretical perspective adopted in this article, structural characteristics and circumstantial factors are examined in order to explain the difficulties that have been faced in constructing a legal and institutional architecture for social rights, and on the other hand, why at present it is so easy to destroy it in practice.