Por Jean Wyllys
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| Photograph Source: Danielmoreno4774 – CC BY 4.0 |
When the billionaire owner of a monthly magazine like Piauí, modelled on The New Yorker and mainly devoted to essays and culture, starts addressing his elite readers, mainly intellectuals with a guilty conscience, in a long breast-beating article lamenting “O que esses brasileiros saben. Sobre o que cada um faz diante daquilo que vê” (What These Brazilians Know: About How Each Person Reacts to What They See), it comes ten years too late.
Documentary maker João Moreira Salles argues that the economic elite prefers putting democratic stability in jeopardy to dealing with fiscal uncertainties, which then means deliberately ignoring the political history and authoritarian legacy of the Bolsonaro regime. He gives names of executives and billionaires from the banking, industrial, and construction sectors and discusses the line between economic pragmatism and moral complicity, raising awkward questions about what these people knew about antidemocratic episodes from the country’s recent past and how they chose to turn a blind eye. He gives particular attention—now, after his original silence—to Jair Bolsonaro’s vote for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment when he dedicated it to sadistic torturer (of Dilma Rousseff and many others) Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra. Some people, in fact many people, recall the exact words spoken on that occasion by the future President of the Republic: “To the memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the terror of Dilma Rousseff.”
On that occasion, I was a member of Congress and I spat in the face of the future President of the Republic. Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair’s son who had just approvingly mouthed his father’s words, spat back at me, but the good-guy self-righteousness of a straight rich white macho who’s always in command wobbles when it omits to mention the part of the story about this act of revulsion against torture and fascism by a gay, non-white, human-rights-activist congressman.
Nevertheless, the article makes a useful distinction between “believing” and “understanding” when speaking about those members of the economic elite who know and are informed about Bolsonaro and his son Flávio yet still choose to support the latter’s bid for the presidency. I take this as my starting point to consider the extent to which guilt and shame, mobilised by Big Tech—a milestone in the global resurgence of the far right after the Second World War—have been influencing decision-making processes since Donald Trump’s first election. The 2018 victory of the far right in Brazil shortly before the US mid-term elections was achieved by such means, especially because of the role played by WhatsApp.
I’d add guilt and shame to the raw materials of electoral subjectivation. Fear and anger can produce an enemy but guilt and shame forge a subject dealing with a narrative that says, “You failed because the world was taken from you and you’re ashamed of what your family has become. You’ve lost your position, you were humiliated, and you’re guilty because you believed in the wrong people. But there’s still a chance of redemption.” This is the story being told by confidence coaches and other charlatans of the far right.
The new technologies of subjectivity now rampant in the social networks and in algorithmic form can exploit guilt and shame to interfere in elections by favouring candidates whose message stirs up these feelings and holds out promises of redemption. Social networks aren’t just a means of communication. They’re environments in which voter’s attitudes are shaped. Platformisation, data extraction, recommendation systems, and the attention economy make it possible to segment and personalise messages on scales that are far beyond the possibilities of traditional communication. Hence, Big Tech companies are clearly more effective at negative campaigning that exploits hatred and fear but—and perhaps this is not so widely recognised—also guilt and shame.
This helps to explain the shortcomings of voting intention polls. A digital campaign playing on fear, hatred, shame, and guilt two weeks before elections can bring down solid candidates. This is what happened in 2018. Why did the leaders of progressive parties forget about this? Because it was shameful.
We can feel shame about poverty, skin colour, body, accent, sexuality, and social origins, not because there’s something morally or personally wrong with us but because society turns a particular characteristic into a reason for disparagement. Shame can be caused by power when it makes people meekly accept as a personal flaw what is actually social inequality. So we’re talking about a social mechanism of power.
Political messaging of the right and far right on the social media captures these feelings and reorganizes them as narrative, offering both a scapegoat and a way out. The electoral promise ceases to be a project for the country to become an illusory promise of subjective redemption. At this point it’s possible to see a convergence of Big Tech, neoliberalism, neo-Pentecostal churches, and the far right. Commercially exploiting guilt and shame, the fundamentalist churches reinforce the political message of candidates associated with and supported by them.
The Liberal Party (PL) of the Bolsonaro clan, guided for months before the elections by the US Big tech companies behind Donald Trump’s neocolonial program, offered not a government program but a narrative of restored self-esteem. With this, Flávio Bolsonaro’s deplorable public behaviour can coexist with a redeeming narrative without the voter noting any contradiction.
This is another reason I’m worried about the impotence of the left when confronted with this mechanism and its contamination by neoliberal rationality. There’s an absence of strategies that can understand and deal with the impact of Big Tech in the lives and nature of electors, so it’s almost impossible to design campaigns as a collective project. There’s an excess of the narcissistic drift.
As for voters on the left, there’s a prevailing fascination with virtue signaling and algorithmic performance, also influenced by Big Tech, plus a version of messianism that fuels the narcissistic drift. The fact that, in 2026, the PT once again focused solely on Lula’s campaign without coordinating it with the campaigns of parliamentary candidates shows that Latin America’s largest left party is still lost in the twentieth century.
It’s not enough to understand what happened with others and what they did. We need to understand what we did and what we didn’t do. We must shoulder our part of the blame and feel ashamed of our amnesia and our errors in an election that was driven by both sentiments. And do better!
Translation by Julie Wark.
Jean Wyllys is a Brazilian lecturer, journalist, and politician.
Documentary maker João Moreira Salles argues that the economic elite prefers putting democratic stability in jeopardy to dealing with fiscal uncertainties, which then means deliberately ignoring the political history and authoritarian legacy of the Bolsonaro regime. He gives names of executives and billionaires from the banking, industrial, and construction sectors and discusses the line between economic pragmatism and moral complicity, raising awkward questions about what these people knew about antidemocratic episodes from the country’s recent past and how they chose to turn a blind eye. He gives particular attention—now, after his original silence—to Jair Bolsonaro’s vote for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment when he dedicated it to sadistic torturer (of Dilma Rousseff and many others) Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra. Some people, in fact many people, recall the exact words spoken on that occasion by the future President of the Republic: “To the memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the terror of Dilma Rousseff.”
On that occasion, I was a member of Congress and I spat in the face of the future President of the Republic. Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair’s son who had just approvingly mouthed his father’s words, spat back at me, but the good-guy self-righteousness of a straight rich white macho who’s always in command wobbles when it omits to mention the part of the story about this act of revulsion against torture and fascism by a gay, non-white, human-rights-activist congressman.
Nevertheless, the article makes a useful distinction between “believing” and “understanding” when speaking about those members of the economic elite who know and are informed about Bolsonaro and his son Flávio yet still choose to support the latter’s bid for the presidency. I take this as my starting point to consider the extent to which guilt and shame, mobilised by Big Tech—a milestone in the global resurgence of the far right after the Second World War—have been influencing decision-making processes since Donald Trump’s first election. The 2018 victory of the far right in Brazil shortly before the US mid-term elections was achieved by such means, especially because of the role played by WhatsApp.
I’d add guilt and shame to the raw materials of electoral subjectivation. Fear and anger can produce an enemy but guilt and shame forge a subject dealing with a narrative that says, “You failed because the world was taken from you and you’re ashamed of what your family has become. You’ve lost your position, you were humiliated, and you’re guilty because you believed in the wrong people. But there’s still a chance of redemption.” This is the story being told by confidence coaches and other charlatans of the far right.
The new technologies of subjectivity now rampant in the social networks and in algorithmic form can exploit guilt and shame to interfere in elections by favouring candidates whose message stirs up these feelings and holds out promises of redemption. Social networks aren’t just a means of communication. They’re environments in which voter’s attitudes are shaped. Platformisation, data extraction, recommendation systems, and the attention economy make it possible to segment and personalise messages on scales that are far beyond the possibilities of traditional communication. Hence, Big Tech companies are clearly more effective at negative campaigning that exploits hatred and fear but—and perhaps this is not so widely recognised—also guilt and shame.
This helps to explain the shortcomings of voting intention polls. A digital campaign playing on fear, hatred, shame, and guilt two weeks before elections can bring down solid candidates. This is what happened in 2018. Why did the leaders of progressive parties forget about this? Because it was shameful.
We can feel shame about poverty, skin colour, body, accent, sexuality, and social origins, not because there’s something morally or personally wrong with us but because society turns a particular characteristic into a reason for disparagement. Shame can be caused by power when it makes people meekly accept as a personal flaw what is actually social inequality. So we’re talking about a social mechanism of power.
Political messaging of the right and far right on the social media captures these feelings and reorganizes them as narrative, offering both a scapegoat and a way out. The electoral promise ceases to be a project for the country to become an illusory promise of subjective redemption. At this point it’s possible to see a convergence of Big Tech, neoliberalism, neo-Pentecostal churches, and the far right. Commercially exploiting guilt and shame, the fundamentalist churches reinforce the political message of candidates associated with and supported by them.
The Liberal Party (PL) of the Bolsonaro clan, guided for months before the elections by the US Big tech companies behind Donald Trump’s neocolonial program, offered not a government program but a narrative of restored self-esteem. With this, Flávio Bolsonaro’s deplorable public behaviour can coexist with a redeeming narrative without the voter noting any contradiction.
This is another reason I’m worried about the impotence of the left when confronted with this mechanism and its contamination by neoliberal rationality. There’s an absence of strategies that can understand and deal with the impact of Big Tech in the lives and nature of electors, so it’s almost impossible to design campaigns as a collective project. There’s an excess of the narcissistic drift.
As for voters on the left, there’s a prevailing fascination with virtue signaling and algorithmic performance, also influenced by Big Tech, plus a version of messianism that fuels the narcissistic drift. The fact that, in 2026, the PT once again focused solely on Lula’s campaign without coordinating it with the campaigns of parliamentary candidates shows that Latin America’s largest left party is still lost in the twentieth century.
It’s not enough to understand what happened with others and what they did. We need to understand what we did and what we didn’t do. We must shoulder our part of the blame and feel ashamed of our amnesia and our errors in an election that was driven by both sentiments. And do better!
Translation by Julie Wark.
Jean Wyllys is a Brazilian lecturer, journalist, and politician.
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