Flávio Bolsonaro kicks off his campaign for the Brazilian presidency (August 16, 2026) | Focus Pix / Shutterstock
Over the past decade, the rise of far-right movements has unsettled democracies across the globe, from Latin America and the United States to many countries in Europe. In his new book Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right (Haymarket 2026), Rodrigo Nunes argues that the rise of the far right in Brazil with the election of Jair Bolsonaro is not merely a case study from a developing country, but points to a possible trajectory for the global far right as an accelerator of social breakdown. Flávio Bolsonaro’s surprising lead in the first round of the ongoing 2026 election makes that argument particularly timely.
What the author calls the global “Brazilianization” of politics means that even countries where welfare states and social safety nets were once strong are now privatizing social risks under a neoliberal paradigm. The forces of neoliberalism have enforced a world of impoverished and desperate individuals while forms of social and collective support have been increasingly dismantled. The solution offered by the rising far right is not the recovery of social solidarity, but the violent crackdown on undesired populations—migrants, criminals, perceived deviants and dissenters—aiming at imposing a top-down order.
The far right as a conformist revolt
Nunes avoids using the term fascism to refer to the contemporary far right. Today’s right, he suggests, does not create the same type of collective solution of historical twentieth-century fascism. Rather than the totalitarian image of the undifferentiated multitude fused with the Führer, the outcome today is radically individualistic and a perpetual state of Hobbesian state-of-nature war of all against all.
The author also rejects comforting narratives that argue that the rise of far-right politics is due to pure manipulation or disinformation campaigns. Nunes notes that “the truth behind the violent picture that the far right paints is that we are living in an age of diminishing horizons.” Far-right messaging makes sense to those who are experiencing life “as a series of dark trade-offs in a deadly struggle over finite resources.” Nunes highlights the paradox of this reactionary, conformist revolt in which unhinged far-right leaders receive massive support proposing a future which dramatically resembles the present. In sum, he writes, the far right offers an “anti-systemic politics for people who do not really believe the system could change.”
Nunes’ strongest insight is precisely that neoliberalism has lost legitimacy without losing its grip on subjectivity. Facing labor precarity, reduction of social protection, and debt, individuals navigate the hardships of life without sufficient safety nets or significant social solidarity. In many instances, political and economic systems have accustomed themselves to run on low legitimacy. As a consequence, trust in institutions has eroded in many polities.
In the face of lowering expectations, social insecurity, loneliness, and existential dread, resorting to a wrecking ball to wreak havoc on the sociopolitical and economic order makes a certain sense. This is precisely what the far right has offered—vindication rather than solution. It tells disaffected people that their anger is warranted without actually proposing the reconstruction of the social conditions whose deterioration produced the anger. Social disintegration thus produces a specific type of political desire.
From individual desperation to political project
The challenge is then to understand how individual desperation becomes a collective political project paradoxically grounded in radical individualism. In Nunes’ account, Bolsonarismo connected already existing individualistic dispositions, grievances, and identities, produced under nearly four decades of neoliberal capitalism, and gradually fostered them into a common political formation.
Neoliberalism had already habituated individuals to experience risk as a private responsibility and to understand success and failure through individual effort. Job insecurity, indebtedness, and declining social mobility are therefore experienced as personal struggles in which individuals are constantly required to compete. The entrepreneurial subject becomes accustomed to navigating instability rather than expecting collective institutions to solve it. Nunes then draws attention to the “cult of the entrepreneur” under which failure is experienced as guilt, shame, and a call to keep trying. The sociological outcome of this process, repeated over time, is negative solidarity. Amid growing resentment, the far right offers scapegoating and conspiracy theories to relieve individuals from blame. For those entrapped in the precarious gig economy, this simplified explanation may more easily become politically attractive.
Brazil’s new right, for instance, developed through a multitude of political players who recognized a market for accumulated frustration, resentment, and distrust. Politicians, influencers, activists, and media personalities then mobilized outside the political control of established political parties and converted visibility into political capital. Bolsonarismo resembles a political ecosystem in which heterogeneous actors discover opportunities for political and personal advancement by offering explanations to social grievances. As Nunes puts it, they do not only favor entrepreneurship but are entrepreneurs themselves.
If social life is increasingly perceived as a ruthless and lawless competition over scarce resources, individuals are encouraged to identify those who supposedly threaten their already precarious position. Migrants, criminals, political opponents, minorities, and perceived social deviants can thus become embodiments of disorder. However, the promise offered by today’s far right is not the reconstruction of solidarity or universal protection, but the selective imposition of order against those classified as dangerous. The privatization of social risk therefore coexists with demands for an increasingly coercive state. Punitive rule and securitization thus become central pillars of the far-right political project.
Finally, religious activism provides a denser social network amid a sociopolitical environment marked by loneliness. Churches connect political messages to everyday relationships of trust. Nunes notes, for instance, how conservative campaigns around sexuality and education acquired political salience through evangelical and Catholic networks before Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential rise.
Bolsonarismo, though, was not invented by Bolsonaro, who played more of a symbolic function. The tendencies which composed the movement—entrepreneurialism, militarism, economic libertarianism, anti-intellectualism, anticommunism, and social conservatism—were already circulating. The leader offered a point of convergence through which these scattered tendencies could recognize themselves as belonging to a common political movement.
Disintegrating disintegration
The conceptual breadth of “disintegration” as an analytical category raises a difficulty. Throughout the book, Nunes deploys the term “disintegration” to refer to economic deterioration and the erosion of welfare protections as well as to institutional distrust, social atomization, affective distress, ecological crisis, digital fragmentation, ideological radicalization, and political authoritarianism. These phenomena clearly interact, and one of the virtues of Nunes’ approach is precisely to resist explanations that isolate one variable from the others. This multidimensionality is what allows the book to move between political theory, political economy, and social psychology without reducing the far right to a single cause.
However, the elasticity of the concept makes it difficult to establish what exactly is doing the explanatory work. At times, “disintegration” appears simultaneously as cause, condition, outcome, and description. This makes the causal architecture of the book less explicit. The reader is offered a powerful map of connections without being shown which roads are more important than others.
Anatomy of Disintegration is strongest when treated as an anatomy capable of exposing relationships that more linear explanations overlook. The cost of this expansive perspective is that the boundaries of the concept become difficult to establish.
The democratic question
Even if disintegration helps explain why disruption becomes attractive, an additional question remains: why does that desire so frequently claim democratic legitimacy? Why, for example, is Bolsonaro’s son in contention to take power after his father’s 2022 election defeat, and subsequent conviction and imprisonment for attempting a coup? Material and affective approaches help explain why individuals may support illiberal politics, but not why that politics can present itself as an authentic expression of democracy and popular sovereignty.
Why does the wrecking ball speak the language of democracy? Why do people who seek disruption not necessarily understand themselves as rejecting democracy, but rather as recovering popular control from elites, judges, unelected bureaucracies, establishment parties, experts, and all sorts of institutions perceived as having usurped it?
Desire for mass-led disruption is not alien to the modern democratic tradition. From the French Revolution and socialist revolutions to decolonial movements and national liberation wars, radical mobilization has often taken place marshaling the democratic language of popular sovereignty and the will of the people. By resorting to the vocabulary of radical democratization, once attached to left-wing politics, the far right has promoted some degree of collective purpose even when, as Nunes highlights, radical individualism deepens and the existing economic system is reinforced.
The strength of Nunes’s anatomy lies in showing how economic, political, affective, technological, and ecological forms of disintegration intersect.
However, it is important to add that the advances of the far right have been vast, but not total or final. Their breakthroughs coexist with electoral reversals, countermobilizations, and competing attempts to organize dissatisfaction. With the notable exception of El Salvador, far-right electoral victories have often been slim, rather than a landslide, which demonstrates that societies are increasingly polarized, not necessarily overtaken by the radical right. In Brazil, the United States, Poland, and Hungary, far-right candidates have won and lost elections and begrudgingly left power following defeat.
Anti-extremist responses have varied. In some cases, broad fronts have gathered enough voters to counter the threat. In others, particularly in recent local and state elections in the United States and Germany, the left has successfully offered appealing counterpoints to the far right, simultaneously competing with it and entrenching polarization. In many of the most consequential cases the political center has eroded, notably the center right, which points to failures of the political establishment when it comes to responsiveness to popular demands. A more durable solution to the far-right challenge seems to be the recovery of the capacity of democratic regimes to respond to what citizens deem most important to them: economic opportunities, security, and a sense of belonging and purpose—all at once.
