Civic Participation Faces Resentment: Right-wing Movements in Brazil and the Crisis of Dem

Abstract

Since 2015, Brazil has been experiencing the explosion of right-wing protests. These pro-tests were assembled by groups organised in digital media, which claimed forms of demo-cratic participation to propagate antidemocratic ideas, such as the shutdown of public poli-cies based on social redistribution of resources to the poorest; the criminalization of the so-cial movements linked to social minorities; and the extinction of councils of popular parti-cipation. In this article, we develop a discourse analysis on the Facebook pages of the three major right-wing groups in Brazil, namely, Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL), Vem Pra Rua, and Movimento Contra a Corrupção(MCC). Our sample is composed of 468 posts made by these three groups when they established profiles on Facebook and at the moment of the major right-wing civil protests in Brazil between 2015 and 2018. We aim to understand the discursive strategies adopted by these groups to undermine democratic citizenship purpor-tedly laying claim to its normative terms. We argue that these movements show the dark face of civic action’s supposed virtuosity: a vengeful form of resentment.