The New Brazilian Right: Radical and Shameless

Abstract

Before Jair Bolsonaro arrived at Brazil’s presidency, a new right emerged on the country’s social media and streets. While the traditional right kept a low profile due to the stigma of having participated in the military dictatorship (what the literature calls the “ashamed right”), a new right developed: “shameless” and more radical. There are both continuities and discontinuities between the traditional right and this new right. The continuities are due in large part to the actions of pro-market think tanks founded in the 1980s and 1990s, which spread neoliberal ideas (based primarily on the work of Hayek) and facilitated intergenerational encounters between older intellectuals and businesspeople and younger enthusiasts who were active online, in student movements, and in street demonstrations. The discontinuities, for their part, can be understood through the concept of counterpublicity. Based on the notion that there is a “leftist cultural hegemony” in Brazil, initially proposed by philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, the new right sought to craft a counter-hegemonic discursive strategy. With rhetoric characterized by aggressiveness, breaks with decorum, and a disruptive shock politics, the new right started to translate and reproduce a conservative and economically ultraliberal ideology (centered on the work of Mises), which initially spread on social media (such as Orkut) and later gained an increasingly wide audience in dominant publics, such as book publishing, the education system, the mainstream media, and the political system.