If there is one lesson the past decade ought to have imparted, it is that solid external circumstances do not automatically yield formidable movements, much less guarantee that the masses will spontaneously discern the right path.
Even though we may still witness significant social upheavals in the years ahead, there is no assurance that they will assume forms easily recognizable to the left or that they will be safeguarded from instrumental manipulation by the right.
This is typically the moment when discussions might pivot toward fake news and propaganda, and it is undeniable that a portion of Bolsonaro’s and Trump’s notable resiliency even outside of office stems from their possession of a far more efficient informational infrastructure than their adversaries have in disseminating their version of the facts.
Nevertheless, the route I intend to follow here is different. It consists in tracing the enigma of these two kinds of resilience—that of far-right discourse and that of neoliberalism after 2008—not merely to demonstrate how they communicate and reinforce one another, but also to reveal what drives the sway of disinformation and constitutes the landscape in which it thrives.
To put it plainly: if the far right has managed, through falsehoods or not, to mobilize the anti-systemic sentiment of people who feel betrayed and left behind, it is because those feelings exist. In other words, it is only because many individuals sense that something deeply wrong persists within the current economic and political order that the far right’s message can take root. Combating this message, therefore, is not solely about combating deception; it is ultimately about addressing the root causes of those sensibilities. This cannot occur, however, as long as we remain in denial about those issues.
Discipline has become starker even as—or precisely because—the normative claims behind it have become more suspect.
Let us begin with the first mystery. Those who anticipated radical transformation after 2008 underestimated two factors. First, they failed to foresee the extent to which our political systems have grown habituated to operating with low legitimacy. In the absence of a sustained challenge to their power, elites appear to trust their ability to outmaneuver the majority, regardless of whether they are genuinely trusted. This situation has been enabled by the concentration of political power that directly tracks the concentration of economic power since the 1980s, but also by decades of institutional reforms that have diminished the reach of social control—examples include the design of the Eurozone, the explicitly undemocratic character of which was laid bare by the 2015 Greek crisis, or the “expenditure ceiling” implemented in Brazil after Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016.
The second factor is the sheer inertia of the disciplinary mechanisms embedded in neoliberalism—precariat labor, shrinking social protections, rising private debt, and so on—and the reshaping of subjectivity that they continuously generate. While these processes have undoubtedly grown more severe in an era of austerity and outsourcing, we should not forget that neoliberalism has always carried a punitive dimension, which is exhibited in its intimate link to crises, famously captured by Naomi Klein in the phrase “shock doctrine.” A crisis is neoliberalism’s premier instrument of discipline:
Whenever a crisis breaks out, neoliberalism not only leverages it to intensify the economic coercion bearing down on people, but does so by reviving the foundational myth that accompanied its ascent in the 1970s and 1980s—that it represents the rational, technocratic remedy to the excesses of a prior era, thereby exempting itself from debate and turning into the sole viable alternative. It matters little that most of today’s crises are themselves products of neoliberalism: we are no longer facing a crisis of management but an era of management through crises.
If contemporary neoliberalism appears to adopt increasingly “punitive” traits, as Will Davies has noted, this is because the calls for belt-tightening are no longer paired with any real prospect that they will eventually be eased. Discipline has grown harsher even as—or precisely because—the normative claims backing it have become more dubious. If sacrifice used to be framed as a path to a better life, it now speaks more and more as an end in itself: the imperative to adjust to a horizon of diminishing expectations. This tendency culminated with the pandemic, when official discourse in places such as Brazil and the United States plainly asserted that people must choose between the economy and life. As Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick crisply stated in 2020, “There are more important things than living and that’s saving this country”—namely, the economy.
That such a political calculus could be accepted without eroding the careers of those leaders signals how deeply, since the twilight of the postwar welfare guarantees, populations have grown accustomed to lowering expectations. When Michel Foucault described liberalism as “the general framework of biopolitics,” he meant that liberal governance framed the management of population life as a cost-benefit calculation (achieving the greatest possible effect at the least possible cost), with the market serving as the ultimate arbiter of success or failure.
What he did not notice at the time is that there is an asymmetry between “greatest benefit” and “least cost”: while the former is vague and without a definite boundary, the latter is precisely defined as zero. Over four decades, neoliberalism has come to measure “greatest benefit” by how close it can bring that cost to zero, with the result that the best public intervention becomes, by definition, one that costs nothing at all.
For this is the great irony and paradox of far-right politics: what it proposes is a very conformist kind of revolt.
By largely removing themselves from the duty to intervene to safeguard life, Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson, and others tested how normalized this logic has already become; the outcome is stark. Nothing better captures this transformation than the way the term “herd immunity” shifted meaning during the pandemic: from the immunity achieved through broad vaccination effort to the notion, advanced by those who intended it as protection, that disease should be allowed to run rampant through a population.
One reason Bolsonaro’s overall polling rose by about 10 percent at the pandemic’s peak—despite losing a sizable share of his upper-class support—may have been the very basic income program he initially opposed. Yet another reason was that for poorer voters who came to back his government, presenting the dilemma as a choice between life and the economy reflected their lived reality. The inequality that made staying home a luxury they could not afford meant that portraying the situation as a choice between possibly dying from COVID-19 and possibly starving illustrated that Bolsonaro understood their situation more deeply than those who preached staying at home while they themselves had options that were not available to them.
The painful truth is that, in cases like this, the narrative the far right advances often makes more sense to many people than the counter-narratives proposed by the other side. It aligns more closely with how the majority experiences the world in everyday life; it resonates with lived reality. For many, being told that life is a procession of grim compromises in a fight over scarce resources does not ring improbable. Moreover, it corresponds with the disciplining effect these experiences produce: a deeply ingrained sense that this is all there is, that nothing else is possible, that the fundamental facts of how we live are unchangeable.
For this is the great irony and paradox of far-right politics: what it proposes is a very conformist kind of revolt.
Even while presenting itself as an assault on elites—understood not in economic terms but in cultural and political ones, which helps explain how a billionaire can campaign as the voice of the common man in the United States—the future the far right envisions resembles the present. In terms of social structure, its outlook remains largely resigned to the status quo. In short, it offers an anti-systemic politics for people who do not truly believe the system can undergo major change: Everything stays more or less the same, but with a few who feel left out receiving somewhat better outcomes.
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Excerpted from Anatomy of Disintigration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right by Rodrigo Nunes and published by Haymarket Books.
