Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

For Carlos Pagni 

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Too many electoral results are described as earthquakes when in reality they are little more than mild tremors, but the self-described anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei’s victory in the second and deciding round of Argentina’s presidential election over Sergio Massa, the sitting minister of the economy in the former Peronist government, who in the eyes of many Argentines across the political spectrum has wielded far more power than the country’s president, Alberto Fernández, truly does represent a seismic shift in Argentine politics, the radical untuning of its political sky. On this, ardent pro-Peronists such as Horacio Verbitsky, editor of the left online magazine El Cohete a la Luna, and some of Peronism’s most perceptive and incisive critics, notably the historian Carlos Pagni – people who agree on virtually nothing else – find themselves in complete accord. “Demographically and generationally,” Verbitsky wrote, “a new political period is beginning in [Argentina].” For his part, Pagni compared the situation in which Argentina now finds itself, to “the proverbial terra incognita beloved of medieval cartographers,” and “heading down a path it had never before explored” — a new era in Argentine political history.

The  country’s disastrous economic and social situation was the work of successive governments, but above all its last two – the center-right administration of Mauricio Macri between 2015 and 2019, and the Peronist restoration in the form of Alberto Fernández´s government between 2019 and 2023, in which Fernández was forced for all intents and purposes to share power with his vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who had been Macri´s predecessor as president for two successive terms, from 2007 to 2015, having succeeded her husband Néstor, who was president between 2003 and 2007. Cristina (virtually every Argentine refers to her by her first name) remains — for the moment, at least — Peronism´s dominant figure. Despite some success during the first two years of his administration, Macri proved incapable of either sustainably mastering inflation or of stimulating high enough levels of international direct investment in Argentina. Cristina had left office with inflation running at twenty-five percent annually. Under Macri’s administration, that figure doubled to fifty percent, a level not seen in the country for the previous twenty years, and the key reason why Macri failed to win reelection in 2019. But during his four years in office, Alberto Fernández accomplished the seemingly impossible: making his predecessor´s failure seem almost benign. The legacy that he has left to Milei — unlike Macri, he knew better than to seek reelection — is an inflation rate of one hundred and forty-two percent, nearly three times higher than under Macri.

It is not that Argentina had not suffered through terrible economic crises before. Three of them were even more severe than the present one. The first of these was the so-called Rodrigazo of 1975 (the name derives from then President Isabel Perón’s minister of the economy, Celestin Rodrigo), when inflation jumped from twenty-four percent to one hundred and eighty-two percent in a year. The Rodrigazo was not the main cause of the coup the following year that overthrew Isabel Perón and ushered in eight years of bestial military dictatorship, but the panic and disorientation that it created in Argentine society certainly played a role. The second was the hyperinflation of 1989, during the Radical Party’s leader Raúl Alfonsín’s second term as president. Alfonsín, who was the first democratically elected president after the end of military rule in 1983, is generally regarded in Argentina, even by Peronists, as having impeccable democratic credentials, although Milei has rejected this portrayal, instead calling him an “authoritarian” and a “swindler” whose hyperinflation amounted to robbery of the Argentine people. The last and by far the worst was the economic and financial crisis of 2001-2002, which saw Argentina default on virtually all its foreign debt and brought it to the brink of social collapse. There was widespread popular repudiation of the entire political establishment, exemplified by the slogan, “Que se vayan todos,” “they must all go.” Milei own promise in the 2023 campaign to get rid of what he calls La Casta, and by which he means the entire political class, resurrects that anti-elitist revulsion in the service of the populist right rather than the populist left that took to the streets in 2001. 

But in 2001, there was finally no social collapse (even though Argentina had five presidents in a period of two weeks). That the country would weather the storm was anything but clear at the time. That it did so at all, as Pablo Grechunoff, one of Argentina’s most distinguished economic historians and himself no Peronist, was Néstor and Cristina Kirchner´s great accomplishment. (They were always a team politically, rather like Bill and Hillary Clinton.) The Kirchners, Gerchunoff has written, were not only able to “contain the social and political bloodbath [that had occurred] in 2001,” but also managed to “reconstitute both presidential authority and a [functioning] political system.” On the economic front, even most of the Kirchners’ anti-Peronist critics — except the contrarian Milei, of course — find it hard to deny that during Néstor’s presidency and Cristina’s first term in office the Argentine economy made a powerful recovery. To be sure, these critics are also quick to point out that this recovery was not only fueled in large measure fueled by the huge spike in world commodity prices — “a gift from heaven” is the way Gerchunoff has described it — but also by the fact that Néstor´s predecessor as president, Eduardo Duhalde, had instituted a series of harsh economic measures, including a brutal devaluation of the currency, and so he had a freedom of maneuver enjoyed by few Argentine presidents before or since to refloat the Argentine economy and vastly increase welfare payments and other forms of social assistance for the poorest Argentines. 

It is this seemingly cyclical character of Argentina’s economic crises — “Boom and recession. Stop and go. Go and crash. Hope and disappointment,¨ as Gerchunoff summarizes it — and at the same time the country’s repeated capacity to recover and once more become prosperous that still leads many Argentines to take something of a blase approach every time the country gets into economic difficulty. But while it is true that, so far at least, Argentina has indeed emerged from even its worst economic crises, it is also important to note that each time it was left with fewer middle-class people and more poor people. The crisis of 2001 was the tipping point. Before that, even after the Rodrigazo and Alfonsín’s hyperinflation, Argentina continued to be not only one of Latin America’s richest countries and to sustain a middle class proportionally much larger than those of other countries in the continent, but, most importantly, to be a society in which, for most of the years between 1870 and the crisis of 2001, social mobility was a reality for the broad mass of the population. After 2001, however, it was no longer possible to deny the melancholy fact that Argentina was quickly becoming — and today has become — very much like the rest of Latin America. As the sociologist Juan Carlos Torre has put it, in previous periods of its history “Argentina had poor people but it did not have poverty [in the sense that] the condition of being poor in a country with social mobility was contingent.” But in the Argentina of today, social mobility scarcely exists. If you are born poor, you stay poor for your entire life, as do your children, and, if things don’t change radically, your children’s children. As a result, poverty, and all the terrible moral, social, and economic distortions that flow from it (including narcotrafficking on a massive scale), has become the country’s central problem. 

It is in this context that Milei’s rise and unprecedented victory needs to be set. According el Observatorio de la Deuda Social Argentina (ODSA) of la Universidad Cátolica Argentina, a Jesuit-run think tank whose intellectual probity and methodological sophistication are acknowledged by Argentines across the political spectrum, by the time the presidential primaries took place on August, 13, 2023 the national poverty rate had reached 44.7%, while the rate of total immiseration had climbed to 9.6%. For children and adolescents, the figures were still more horrific: six out of ten young Argentines in these two age cohorts live below the poverty line. In aggregate, 18.7 million Argentines out of a total national population of forty-six million are unable to afford the foodstuffs, goods and services that make up the so-called Canasta Básica Total, of whom four million are not able to meet their basic nutritional needs. 

Again, the 2001 statistics had been just as bad in a number of these categories — but this time, going into the 2023 election, there was a widespread feeling that there was no way out. Neoliberalism Macri-style had been a disaster, but so had Peronism Alberto Fernández-style (though hardline Peronists rationalized this to the point of denial by claiming that Alberto had betrayed the cause and if he had only carried out the policies Cristina had urged upon him, and on which he had campaigned, all would have been well). That was why Milei’s populist promise to do away with the entire political establishment resonated so strongly. Flush with revenues from agro-business, the Kirchners had managed to contain the crisis for a while by rapidly establishing and then expanding a wide gamut of welfare schemes — what are collectively known in Argentina as los planes sociales. As the political consultant Pablo Touzon has observed, in doing so the Kirchners succeeded in achieving what had been the priority of the entire political establishment, Peronist and non-Peronist, which was “to avoid another 2001 at all costs.”

The problem is that commodity prices are cyclical and that the agricultural resource boom of the first decade of the century proved, like all such booms, to be unsustainable. And when price volatility replaced consistent price rises, for all the Kirchners’ talk of about fostering economic growth through a planned economy and a “national” capitalism focused on the domestic market, there proved to be no non-commodity-based engine for sustained growth and thus no capacity to create jobs that would restore the promise of social mobility. (The many government jobs that were created could not offer this.) As a result, the mass welfare schemes that had been created rapidly became unaffordable. The commentator who likened Argentine society in 2023 to an intensive care patient who remains in agony despite being on an artificial respirator called the state was being hyperbolic, but that such an analogy could be made at all testifies to the despair that is now rampant in the country. And it is this the despair that has made it possible for the bizarre Milei to be elected.

Joan Didion’s famous observation that we tell ourselves stories in order to live has never seemed quite right to me, but there is no question that it is through stories that most people try to grasp where they stand in the world. What the Peronists do not seem to have been able to face, even during the four year-long social and economic train wreck that was Alberto’s presidency, was that many of the voters whom they believed still bought their story had in fact stopped doing so. Some blamed Alberto, and when Massa ran in effect asked the electorate for a do-over. Others simply found it impossible to believe that Milei could be elected. Peronism is both Manichean and salvationist. Peronism has never conceived of itself as one political party among other equally legitimate political parties. It regards itself as the sole morally legitimate representative of the Argentine people and of the national cause. When Perón joked that all Argentines were Peronists whether they knew it or not, the anti-pluralist subtext of his quip was that one could not be a true Argentine without being a Peronist. And that conviction remains alive and well in Kirchnerism. So to indulge in the very Argentine habit of psychological speculation — after all, Argentina is the country which has one hundred and forty-five psychiatrists for every one hundred thousand inhabitants, the highest proportion in the world — it may be that Peronists were so slow in recognizing Milei’s threat because, for the first time since Juan Perón came to power in 1946, they faced a candidate just as Manichaean and salvationist as they are. Peronism had always seen its mission to sweep away the “anti-national” elites, so that Argentina could flourish once more. Having become accustomed to seeing political adversaries as not only their enemies but also as the enemies of the Argentine nation, the Peronists did not know what to do with someone who viewed them in exactly the same light. As a result, the Argentine election of 2023 was the confrontation between two forms of populism, which is to say, between two forms of anti-politics. 

Going into the campaign, the problem for the Kirchnerists was that Alberto was in denial about the social crisis and a few days before he left office he even saw fit to challenge the accuracy of these figures. Without offering any countervailing data, Fernández simply said that many people were exaggerating how poor they were. If the poverty rate really had reached 44.7%, Fernández insisted, “Argentina would have exploded.” To which Juan Grabois, a left populist leader and union organizer with close links to Pope Francis and whose base of support consists mostly of poor workers who make their living in what the International Monetary Fund calls the informal economy — work that not only in not unionized, but in which government labor regulations, from health and safety to workplace rights, go completely unrespected — retorted: “It has exploded, Alberto. It’s just that we got used to it; it didn’t explode, it imploded. That makes less noise, but the people bleed internally.” 

For the Argentine middle class, the situation, though self-evidently not the unmitigated disaster that it is for the poor, is quite disastrous enough. An inflation rate of one hundred and forty-two percent — which even Milei has conceded will not end soon, a bleak prediction which his early days in office supports — makes intelligent business decisions impossible, seeing that it involves trying to guess what the Argentine peso will be worth next month or even next week. In practice, the currency controls instituted by Fernández´s government damaged and in many cases ruined not only the retailer who sell imported merchandise, but also the pharmacist whose stock includes medicines with some imported ingredients, the machine tool company that, while it makes its products in Argentina, does so out of imported steel or copper, and the publisher unable to assume with any confidence that paper will be available, let alone guess at what price. Nor is the psychological dimension of the economic crisis to be underestimated. Confronted by rising prices, many middle-class people now buy inferior brands and versions of the items that they have been used to buying. In the context of a modern consumer culture such as Argentina´s, there is a widespread sense of having been declassed, of having been expelled from the middle-class membership which they had assumed to be theirs virtually as a birthright. This has produced a different kind of implosion, of being bled dry, than the one to which Grabois referred, but an implosion just the same.

An implosion is a process in which objects are destroyed by collapsing into themselves or being squeezed in on themselves, and, by extension, a sudden failure or fall of an organization or a system. What Milei´s election as president has made clear is just how fragmented and incoherent and fragile the two forces that have dominated Argentine life since the return of democracy — the Peronists one one side, and the Social Democrats and Neoliberals on the other — have now become. That this should be true of the center and center-right parties that had come together to form the Cambiemos coalition that Macri successfully led to power in 2015 is hardly surprising. For Cambiemos had united very disparate forces in Argentine politics — the neoliberals of Macri´s party, the PRO, two more or less social democratic parties, the Union Cívica Radical (UCR), the party of Raúl Alfonsín, and a smaller party led by the lawyer and activist Elsa Carrió that had broken off from the UCR in 2002 and since 2009 had been known as the Coalición Cívica. Somewhere in between were anti-Kirchnerist Peronists, one of whom, the national senator Miguel Pichetto, had been the vice-presidential candidate in Macri´s failed bid to win re-election in 2019.  These various groupings within Juntos por el Cambio, as Cambiemos was renamed going into the 2019 campaign, were united largely by their anti-Peronism. This should not be surprising. Since Juan Perón was elected president in 1946, Peronism has been for all intents and purposes the default position of the Argentine state — except, obviously, during the periods of military rule, which had their own kind of Manichaean salvationism. A central question that Milei´s election poses is whether the seventy-eight-year-long era has finally come to an end. Is Argentina on the verge of a political path that, in Carlos Pagni´s words, “has never before explored,” or will the days ahead be only a particularly florid instance of the exception that proves the rule?

Apart from the fact that it is salvationist and Manichaean, and that it is a form of populism, usually though not always on the left, Peronism is notoriously difficult to define. It is both Protean and plastic in the sense that it contains within itself such a gamut of political views that a non-Argentine can be forgiven for wondering whether, apart from the morally monopolistic claims that it makes for itself, it is one political party among a number of others or instead all political parties rolled into one. Horacio Verbitsky tried to account for the fact that it had been at various times left and at other times right by saying that Peronism must be “a mythological animal because it has a head that is on the right while its body is on the left.” A celebrated remark of Borges sums up Peronism’s diabolical adaptability. “If I must choose between a Communist and a Peronist,” he quipped, “I prefer the Communist. Because the Communist is sincere in his Communism, whereas the Peronists pass themselves off in this way for their advantage.” And as Carlos Pagni has observed, “This empty identity gives them an invaluable advantage.”   

Even assuming that Milei’s victory turns out to bring down the curtain on Kirchnerism, this does not mean that Peronism is over. After all, Argentines have been at this particular junction before. When Macri became president in 2015, his election was widely viewed as representing much more than one more anti-Peronist intermission between acts of the recurring Peronist drama. It was seen to mark the inauguration of an era of straightforward neoliberalism, which would transform Argentina both economically and socially — the instauration in the country, however belatedly, of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution.  Certainly that was what Macri thought he was going to put in motion. Instead his government was an abject failure. Macri seems to have believed that a non-Peronist government combined with what he perceived as his own special bond with the international financial world — which, as the son of an extremely rich Argentine entrepreneur, was his home ground — would lead to widespread direct foreign private investment. The problem was that not only was his economic team not up to the job, but, far more importantly, the structural problems of the Argentine economy, above all that the country had been living beyond its means for decades, would have been very difficult even in a country far less politically divided. As a result, the only important investments outside the agribusiness sector during Macri´s presidency were what in the financial markets are referred to as “hot money,” that is, speculative bets by hedge fund managers who are as happy to sell as to buy, rather than by more economically and socially constructive long-term investors.

In 2018, three years into his administration, with a currency crisis looming that was so severe it would almost certainly have led to the Argentine state becoming wholly insolvent, Macri turned as a last resort to the International Monetary Fund. There were echoes in this of the loan facility that the IMF had provided to the government of Fernando de la Rúa that was in power at the time of the 2001 crisis. But this time, instead of demanding radical austerity measures, and when these were not fulfilled to the Fund’s satisfaction cutting off the loans, the executive board of IMF, prodded by the Trump administration, which viewed the demagogic anti-elitist Macri with particular favor, voted to grant Argentina a loan of fifty-seven billion dollars — the largest in IMF history. As the institution would itself later concede, in doing so the board broke its own protocols and failed to exercise the most basic due diligence. Both Peronists and non-Peronist leftists are convinced that the IMF’s goal was simply to prop up Macri´s government, and this is certainly what impelled the Trump administration to intervene. But even if one takes at face value that, in the words of a subsequent IMF report, the institution’s main objective had been instead to “restore confidence in [Argentina’s] fiscal and external viability while fostering economic growth,” this is not at all what occurred. “The program,” the IMF report concluded, “did not deliver on its objectives,” and what had actually happened was that “the exchange rate continued to depreciate, increasing inflation and the peso value of public debt, and weakening of real incomes, [weakened] real incomes, especially of the poor.” 

It was under the sign of this disaster that the Argentine electorate voted Macri out of office, installing Alberto as president and Cristina as vice-president. One might have thought that, as the undisputed leader of Peronism, she would have run for president herself. Certainly, this is what the overwhelming majority of hardcore Peronist militants had hoped and expected. But Cristina soon made it clear that she believed herself to be too controversial a figure to carry Peronism to victory in 2019. This did not lessen the expectation among most Peronists that Cristina would be the power behind the throne. But to their shock and indignation, Alberto refused to bow to these expectations. At the same time, he was too weak to put through a program of his own, if he even had one. But the disaster that was his government should not be allowed to obscure just how dismal a failure Macri’s presidency had been. And it is in the context of these successive failures, first of the neoliberal right and then of Peronism, that Milei’s rise to power must be understood. He was the explosion that followed the implosions. 

The implosions were sequential. The first round of Argentine presidential elections includes a multitude of candidates, and this often leads to a run-off between the two top vote-getters. In that first round, it was the turn of Juntos por el Cambio’s candidate, Macri’s former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, to come up short. Bullrich campaigned almost exclusively on law-and-order issues, and there is no doubt that her emphasis on these questions resonated with an Argentine population increasingly terrified by the dramatic rise over the past decade of murder, assault, violent robberies, and home invasions — the regular disfigurements of present-day Argentine society. On economic questions, however, she more or less followed a standard neoliberal line, but in a manner that did not suggest that she had any intention of shaking up the political status quo. To the extent that she spoke of corruption, Bullrich pointed exclusively at Kirchnerist corruption, whereas corruption in Argentina is hardly restricted to Peronism. 

To the contrary, every Argentine knows full well that their entire political class, regardless of party, faction, or ideology, has nepotism, corruption, and looting all but inscribed on its DNA. As Argentina’s most important investigative journalist, Hugo Alconada Mon, wrote in his definitive analysis of the phenomenon, The Root of All Evils: How the Powerful Put Together a System of Corruption and Impunity in Argentina, “Argentina is a country in which prosecutors don’t investigate, judges don’t judge, State supervisory bodies do not supervise, trade unions don’t represent their rank and file, and journalists don´t inform.” Given all that, Alconada asked, “Be they politicians, businessmen, judges, journalists, bankers, or trade unionists, why would any of them want to reform the system through which they have amassed illegitimate power and illicit fortunes with complete impunity?” To which the answer, of course, is that they don´t, as Alconada has illustrated in his most recent investigation of phantom jobs on a massive scale within the legislature of the province of Buenos Aires. As the evidence mounted and a prosecutor was named, the Peronists and anti-Peronists in the legislature finally found there was something on which they agreed: a blanket refusal to cooperate with the investigation.

The reality is that the only way not to see how corrupt Argentine politics are is to refuse to look. But since Peronist corruption is generally artisanal, that is to say, a matter of straightforward bribes in the form of money changing hands, or, at its most sophisticated (this innovation being generally attributed to Nestor Kirchner) officials being given a financial piece of the companies doing the bribing, Peronist corruption is more easily discerned. When pressed, those Peronists who do concede that there is some corruption in their ranks still insist that it has been wildly overstated by their enemies in what they generally refer to as the “hegemonic media.” In any case, one is sometimes told, too much attention is paid to what corruption does exist. “What should be clear,” wrote the Peronist economist Ricardo Aronskind in Horacio Verbitsky’s El Cohete a la Luna in the wake of Milei’s victory, “is that the decency or indecency of a political project cannot be defined by certain acts of corruption that arise within it, but rather by the great economic and social processes that it sets in motion in the community: its improvement and progress, or its deterioration and degradation.” In other words, Peronists are not just on the side of the angels, they are the angels, and their blemishes should not trouble anyone that much.

Whether Peronist corruption is worse than that of their neoliberal adversaries is a separate question. There is no doubt that the alterations to the tax code that Mauricio Macri made over the course of his administration made it possible for his rich friends to make fortunes, thanks both to the insider information they seem to have secured and to various forms of arbitrage they were able to execute in the currency markets. And this “white-gloved” variety of corruption is thought by many well-informed observers to have involved profits at least as large and possibly larger for those who had benefitted from it than whatever the Kirchners and their cronies have been able to secure for themselves. Milei´s promise to sweep away La Casta, the entire political elite, made no distinction between Peronist and ant-Peronist corruption. It was his promise throughout the campaign to sweep it all away — a pledge that he routinely illustrated in photo-ops with him waving around a chainsaw — combined with a far purer and more combative version of neoliberalism than Bullrich could muster that allowed Milei to see her off in the first round. Nothing that she could possibly say could have competed with Milei´s rhetoric of rescue, as when he shouted at rallies, “I did not come here to guide lambs, I have come to wake lions!” No one was surprised by the result — by some accounts not even Bullrich herself. 

Against the pollsters’ predictions, however, it was Massa, not Milei, who came in first. This was somewhat surprising, since on paper Massa should never have stood a chance. For openers, Massa had been minister of the economy from July 2022 to the 2023 elections. It was on his watch that inflation had reached triple digits. Massa was more than just an important figure in Alberto’s government. Owing to the looming threat of hyper-inflation, the economy eclipsed all other issues during the last eighteen months of Alberto´s presidency. The president did not know the first thing about economics, and by late 2022 he had become a kind of absentee president, who, with the exception of some foreign-policy grandstanding that largely consisted in paying homage to Xi, Putin, and Lula, seemed to prefer to play his guitar at Olivos, the presidential retreat. As a result, almost by default, Massa became in practical terms the unelected co-president of Argentina. This gave him enormous power, but it also meant his taking the blame for the government´s failure to do anything to successfully mitigate runaway inflation.

And yet Milei seemed so unstable personally and so extreme politically that many Argentines, particularly in the professional classes, in the universities, and in the cultural sphere — which in Argentina, as virtually everywhere else in the Americas and in Western Europe, all but monolithically dresses left, including in the Anglo-American style of identitarianism and wokeness — allowed themselves to hope that Massa would pull off the greatest comeback since Lazarus. They drew comfort from how many civil society groups, not just in the arts but also in the professions, the trade unions, feminist groups, even football associations, were coming out in support of Massa, presumably because they assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that these groups´ members would vote the way their leadership had called for them to vote. Even seasoned journalists and commentators with no love for Massa took it as a given that he was in command of the issues that confronted Argentina in a way that Milei was not. In contrast, it was generally agreed that Milei was barely in command of himself. After his televised debate with Massa, the gossip among political insiders was that Milei’s handlers were less concerned with the fact that Milei had lost the arguments so much as relieved that he had not lost his cool and given vent to the rages, hallucinations, and name-calling that had been his stock-in-trade as a public figure since he burst onto the Argentine scene in 2015.

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To describe Javier Milei as flaky, as some of his fellow libertarians outside of Argentina have done as a form of damage control, is far too mild. This is a man who in the past described himself as a sex guru, and now publicly muses about converting to Judaism. During the trip he made to the United States shortly after his election to speak with Biden administration and IMF officials, Milei took time out to visit the tomb of the Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in Queens. At the same time Milei is a proud devotee of the occult, confessing without the slightest embarrassment to his habit of speaking to a dead pet through a medium. He also claims to have cloned the pet in question, an English mastiff named Conan, to breed the five English mastiffs that he now has, four of which are named after neoliberal and libertarian economists. Cloning, Milei has declared, is “a way of reaching eternity.¨ It often seems as if he lives entirely in a world of fantasy and wish-fulfillment that closely resembles the universe of adolescent gamers. And he is, in fact, an avid devotee of cosplay, though here Milei´s fantasy life is harnessed to the service of his economic views: at a cosplay convention in 2019, Milei introduced his character General Ancap, short for “anarcho-capitalist”, the leader of “Liberland, the country where no one pays taxes.”  The life mission of General Ancap is to “kick the Keynesians and the collectivist sons of bitches in the ass.”

Milei´s public persona seems designed to reflect these wild convictions and obsessions. He has a mop of unruly hair, which he proudly claims never to comb. He thinks it makes him look leonine, and being a lion leading a pride of Argentine lions is one of Milei´s most cherished images of himself, and one that proved to resonate deeply with the Argentine electorate. In public appearances Milei always seems to be on the verge of a hysterical tantrum, and often he explodes into one. And Milei’s economic program can seem at least as wild as his fantasy life. He has promised to address the collapse of the Argentine peso by scrapping the national currency and replacing it with the dollar; to abolish the central bank; to privatize many industries, from the national airline to the national oil company; and to open up the Argentine market to foreign competition while at the same time abolishing such protectionist boondoggles as the electronic assembly plants in Tierra del Fuego in Argentina’s far south, where, free of federal tax and VAT, some Argentine entrepreneurs have made fortunes assembling electronics from Korea, Vietnam, and China that could have just as easily and much more cheaply assembled in the factories that produced them in their countries of origin. Milei has spoken of offering people educational vouchers as an alternative to public education. Some of this, such as educational vouchers and privatization, are straight out of Margaret Thatcher’s playbook. Milei has said that he greatly admires her, which is an odd stance for an Argentine politician to take regarding the British prime minister who repelled the Argentine effort to seize or (depending on your flag) regain rightful control of the Malvinas or (depending on your flag) Falkland Islands. At least Milei has backtracked from his proposals to allow the commercial trade in human organs, even if he did so reluctantly, indignantly demanding in an interview: “That the state should want to enslave us is allowed, but if I want to dispose of some parts of my body…What’s the problem?”

The irony is that in large measure it was the widespread belief within the Peronist establishment that Milei was too extreme to be electable that proved crucial to Milei´s successful quest for the presidency. Born in 1970 into a lower middle-class family in Buenos Aires, educated in parochial schools and trained as an economist, Milei worked for a number of financial institutions before becoming chief economist at the privately held Corporación America, the holding company of Argentina´s sixth richest man, Eduardo Eurnekian, whose fortune largely rests on Aeropuertos Argentina 2000, which manages Argentina’s thirty-five largest airports as well as roughly the same number internationally. He is also rich from media interests and agribusiness. By most accounts, it was Eurnekian who in 2013 launched Milei´s media career. Why Eurnekian did this remains unclear. According to one version, Eurnekian had become deeply dissatisfied with the policies of Cristina´s government and wanted a mouthpiece to express this dissatisfaction in the noisiest way possible in the media. According to another, it was Milei himself who had had decided that he wanted to do more than work behind the scenes at Corporación America and chose to seek a more public role. Whatever the case, it hardly seems likely that it was coincidence that a media outlet which hired Milei, first as an occasional contributor in 2013 and then, the year later, as a full-time columnist, was the website Infobae America, a news outlet in which Eduardo Eurnekian´s nephew Tomás held a twenty-percent stake.  The first article that Milei published in Infobae was titled “How to Hire a Genius.” 

Four years later, in 2017, halfway into Macri´s term in office, at the time when the government was facing its first major economic crisis, Milei became an important media figure. He moved from print to television and social media and came to national prominence as a pundit — a success that was largely due to his propensity for provocation, his seemingly unslakable thirst for on-air confrontation. At the time of Eurnekian´s break with Macri, then, Milei certainly did not require Eurnekian´s, or, indeed, anyone else´s help to secure public exposure. In 2021 a magazine named him the fourth most influential person in Argentina. (The top spot went to Cristina.) He was giving forty speeches a year preaching his anarcho-capitalist gospel, initially in person and then, during the pandemic, over the internet. He even mounted a theatrical piece to proselytize his ideas, El consultorio de Milei, in which, in the form of a psychotherapy session, he offered a whirlwind tour of the previous seventy years of Argentine economic history from a libertarian perspective. 

Milei once said of himself: “Take a character out of Puccini and put him in real life and you have me.” Tosca or Scarpia? A bit of both, I think. But what seemed to most turn him on in his media appearances was hurling very unPuccinian insults in all directions. “The state,” he said in one interview, “is the pedophile in a kindergarden where the little kids are chained up and covered in Vaseline.” Pope Francis is one of his favorite targets. Over the years Milei  has called him an “imbecile who defends social justice” (coming from Milei’s lips “social justice” is a slur), and a “son of a bitch preaching Communism,” and “the representative of the Evil One on earth.” When Horacio Rodriguez Larreta, a major political figure of the center-right, was head of government of the City of Buenos Aires, Milei characterized him as “a disgusting worm” whom he could “crush even while sitting in a wheelchair.” He confessed on a talk show that one of the ways he let off steam is by throwing punches at a mannequin across whose face he has glued a photo of Raúl Alfonsín. 

In the midterm elections of 2021, which inflicted a stinging defeat on Alberto Fernández´s government, Milei was elected to Diputados, the lower chamber of Congress, as a member of a new libertarian political party called Avanza Libertad, which counted among its members another libertarian economist, José Luis Espert. Once seated, Milei remained true to his libertarian creed, even opposing a law to expand Argentina’s congenital heart disease treatment program for newborns on the ground that could well lead to more opportunities for the state to “interfere in the lives of individuals.” The Avanza Libertad delegation not only included libertarians such as Espert and Milei himself, but also figures of the hard right such as Victoria Villarruel, an activist lawyer notorious in human rights circles for what they view as her denial of the crimes of the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, accusations that she has denied though not very convincingly. Avanza Libertad never made any secret of its hard-right sympathies. Milei, Espert, and Villarruel were enthusiastic signatories of “The Madrid Charter: In Defense of Freedom and Democracy in the Iberosphere,” which had been produced by La Fundación Disenso, the think tank of Spain’s extreme conservative Vox Party. (The current Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and the rightwing Chilean politician José Antonio Kast were also among the signatories.) Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, the radical right party in Spain, has said that his feeling for Milei is one of “brotherhood.” Milei subsequently broke with Espert, renaming his own party La Libertad Avanza . He did not, however, break with the hard right, and few Argentines were surprised that it was to none other than Villarruel to whom he turned as his running mate in the recent election.

In the speech that he made at his inauguration — a ceremony one of whose more curious sideshows was Cristina giving the finger to journalists as she was driven onto the grounds of Congress, and then chatting amiably with Milei while ignoring Alberto completely — Milei spoke of the political class in Argentina as having followed “a model that considers it the duty of a politician to oversee the lives of individuals in as many fields and spheres as possible.” Milei´s solution was the classic libertarian one: Liberland! The state simply needs to get out of the way. Only when this happens can the free market flourish, and people live up to their potential to be “a pride of lions and not a flock of sheep.” Quoting the Spanish libertarian economist Jesús Huera de Soto, whose work has greatly influenced him, Milei declared flatly that “anti-poverty plans only generate more poverty, [and] the only way to exit from poverty is through more liberty.” And he went on to contrast the Argentina of the pre-World War I boom, when it was one of the richest countries in the world, when it had been, as he put it, “the beacon of the West,” with the Argentina of today, drowning in poverty, crime, and despair. This, he insisted, was because the model that had made Argentina rich had been abandoned in favor of a suicidal collectivism. “For more than a hundred years,” he thundered, “politicians have insisted on defending a model that has only generated more poverty, stagnation, and misery, a model that as citizens we are here to serve politics rather than that politics exists to serve citizens.”

The problem with this account of Argentine history is that it is spectacularly selective. It leaves out too much to be quite credible. Yes, Argentina´s pre-1914 economic golden age did indeed make the country rich — if proof were needed, the grand bourgeois architecture of Buenos Aires attests to the prosperity. It was also an era in which the foundations of mass education in Argentina were laid and great advances took place in public health. But the Argentine middle class kept expanding prodigiously until 1930, sixteen years after Milei claimed its prosperity had been shattered by statism, and it began to expand again, if anything more prodigiously, between 1946 and 1955, during Juan Perón’s first two terms as president. Nor would you know from Milei´s account that universal male suffrage was not introduced in Argentina until 1912, during the presidency of Roque Sáenz Peña with the support of Hipólito Yrigoyen, the leader of la Union Cívica Radical (UCR), or that the first time it was applied was in the presidential election of 1916, which brought Yrigoyen to power, while Argentine women did not get the right to vote until 1947, under Perón. Nor would you learn that when, in his inaugural address, Milei eulogized Julio Argentino Roca as “one of Argentina’s best presidents,” he was paying tribute to a figure who, in 1878, while still General Roca, two years before his election as president of Argentina, had led the genocidal Campaña del Desierto against the indigenous peoples of the south of the country, and for this reason is one of the most controversial figures in Argentine history. Milei’s revered Roca had fiercely opposed not just universal suffrage, but also the secret ballot.

When Milei speaks of the disastrous model of the past hundred years, what he is actually talking about is the Argentina that began to take shape in 1916, when Yrigoyen became president. What Milei certainly has in mind is Yrigoyen´s creation of a state-owned national railway system and his partial nationalization of Argentina´s energy resources. What he leaves out is not only Yrigoyen´s role in establishing democratic practices such as the secret ballot and universal male suffrage, but also the reform and expansion of the university system and the creation of the first retirement funds for workers. In Milei´s version of the twentieth century in Argentina, the great movements of social reform that led to the legitimization of trade unions, paid holidays for workers, progressive tax regimes, and so on, were all wholly unnecessary, because the markets eventually would have sorted all these problems out to everyone´s satisfaction. Forget communism: on this account, even social democracy was an act of collective self-harm. Milei said as much in the speech he gave at the World Economic Forum in Davos five weeks after his inauguration. Whatever they might call themselves, he declared, “ultimately, there are no major differences” between Communists, Fascists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists, and globalists. All are “collectivist variants” that held that “the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals.”  Milei made no bones about his ambition to redeem not just Argentina but the entire Western world. “We have come here today,” he told his tony audience, “to invite the Western world to get back on the path to prosperity” and to warn it “about what can happen if countries that became rich through the model of freedom, stay on this path of servitude.”

To accept this, one would have to believe that sometime around a century ago the Argentine people lost its collective mind and that it took the advent of Milei to bring them back to their senses and guide them back to the prelapsarian days of the late nineteenth century. As for Peronism, it was either completely imposed on the population, or it remains one of history’s most extraordinary examples of the madness of crowds. The historical facts say otherwise. What Milei is pleased to call the liberal order but what was in fact an oligarchic one was first seriously challenged when Yrigoyen was elected, and it was finally broken only in 1946 with the rise of Perón. Indeed, Perón´s own personal ascent from obscurity was at least partly due to the fact that the earthquake that reduced most of the Province of San Juan to rubble in 1944 was widely understood at the time, both regionally and nationally, as demonstrating the bankruptcy of the old social order, while Colonel Perón´s successful effort to rebuild the province offered a glimmer of a different and better Argentina. (Mark A. Healey’s brilliant study, The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake, shows this in painstaking detail.) The reason that so many Argentines remained loyal to Peronism for so long was because of its accomplishments, beginning with that of upholding the rights of the working class. (Good libertarian that he is, Milei would doubtless respond that classes do not have rights.) Most Argentines know this, which is why, despite all its failures, they have turned back to Peronism again and again. 

The fact that, despite their knowing this, Milei could not only defeat Massa, but best him by eleven points, a landslide in Argentine political terms and the worst defeat that Peronism has suffered in seventy-five years, is eloquent testimony to the anger about the present and the despair about the future that now grips so many Argentines, including those who in the past voted Peronist. Out of Argentina’s twenty-three provinces as well as the city of Buenos Aires, Massa won only three — the Province of Buenos Aires (not to be confused with the city) and the provinces of Formosa and of Santiago del Estero. And even in the Province of Buenos Aires, Massa won only by a two percentage points, whereas to have had any chance at winning the presidency he would have had to win there overwhelmingly. Still, to view Milei´s election as a vote against the government rather than a vote for him is to misunderstand what has taken place in Argentina. 

Milei´s appeal is both deep and wide, and it cuts across all social classes. The antipathy of the cultural and professional elite towards Milei was always visceral, and with his election it is now dumbfounded as well. They are appalled by the persona that he projects, with its signature aggression and its rigidly Manichaean division of Argentine society into la gente de bien, the good people, and the corrupt elite of La Casta. It is not that the cultural elite does not believe in emotion in politics; the left is hardly immune to the excitements of populism, and the Argentine left is profoundly sentimental in its vision of the Argentine people, above all, as the Italian political scientist Loris Zanatta has argued, in their adherence to the element in liberation theology that assigns a unique moral worth to the poor. The problem, as the Kirchnerists and their supporters in the cultural left demonstrated time and time again during the campaign, is that they do not believe in the sincerity of any emotion that they do not themselves feel. The pundits, on the other hand, underestimated Milei because they viewed the campaign too rationally, as when, for example, Massa won the arguments in his public debate with Milei, as if populist politics cares a whit about arguments. For many poor people, especially poor young men who work in the informal economy, what had resonated so strongly with them in the debate, as it had throughout Milei’s campaign, were not the policy details that Milei mentioned but the promise of rescue that he offered. 

The issues of trans rights and even human rights that now have captured the moral imagination of the cultural elite and of the professional managerial classes — in Argentina just as much in the United States and the United Kingdom — are simply not of much concern to the poor and the economically stranded, and cultural issues such as whether or not Milei would cut off government funding to the Argentine cinema are irrelevant to them. As for the memory of the dictatorship: during the campaign it was repeatedly brandished by the left as a powerful argument, morally and politically, against Milei and Villarruel. This was not surprising, since it is perhaps the Argentine left’s deepest conviction that democracy and memory are inseparable. The fact that the election took place on the fortieth anniversary of the return to democracy only reinforced these feelings. But then Milei won, and they groped for answers. Some of these were of a generational high-handedness that were painful to read, as when the Lacanian Peronist (only in Argentina!) Jorge Alemán argued that “the superimposition of the images that erupt on social media has generated an empire of the ephemeral that threatens the dynamic of emancipatory narratives to the point of rendering them inoperable.” For the Peronist sociologist Fernando Peirone, La Libertad Avanza “had succeeded in tuning in to those web-based narratives that renounce argument, memory, and the idea of truth itself.” What the Argentine cultural elite still has not been able to come to terms with is that in human terms it is the purest wishful thinking to imagine that a twenty year-old voter in the slums who is too young to have experienced the dictatorship would promote this historical memory into the determining factor in their vote.

Just as the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro were to the American and Brazilian cultural elite, Milei´s election is quite incomprehensible to most of the Argentine elite. They certainly don´t know anyone who voted for him! But one must be careful here. The conventional left-liberal view of Milei, which is that he is simply an Argentine version of Trump or Bolsonaro, and that his victory is one more feather in the cap of global rightwing populism, alongside Meloni in Italy or Orban in Hungary, is at best a half-truth. Like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Orban, Milei is a savior figure. What distinguishes him from the rest of the Black International is his appeal to poor voters, many of whose opposite numbers in the United States or Brazil would never dream of voting for Trump or Bolsonaro. In this, curiously, for all the talk on the left that Milei is a throwback to the military dictatorship, and to the economic policies of the junta’s economics minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, he actually resembles Perón in 1946 more than he does Perón’s enemies in the old oligarchy. In his many impassioned defenses of Peronism, Horacio Verbitsky has often said that while there are those who associate Peronism with fascism, this is false because, as he once put it, ¨fascism is a movement of the bourgeoisie against the working class, [whereas Peronism] represents the working class, its rights, and its forms of organization.”

Although he would doubtless reject the suggestion, Verbitsky’s view helps to explain what distinguishes Milei from Trump, Bolsonaro, and Orban. While Peronism in 2024 may still be said to represent the Argentine working class, it represents only the organized working class. And with the exception of a few leaders of Peronist-leaning social movements, the most consequential of whom is Juan Grabois, Peronism has failed to address the problems, and thus have failed to sustain the allegiance, of the informal workers who now make up forty percent of Argentina’s labor force. The unionized working class may still feel that Peronism speaks in their name (though given the corruption of the trade union leadership, even this is debatable), but the workers in the informal economy most definitely do not. As Carlos Pagni has said, there is a “crisis of representation” in Argentine politics. Milei’s great strength has been his ability to make so many informal workers feel represented. He has done so by speaking to their sense of abandonment by government, to their belief that the entire political class, Peronist and non-Peronist alike, are in it only for the money and the power, and that if there is any hope of change they must put their faith in him. Again, Trump and Bolsonaro inspire the same hope in their constituencies, and Milei’s margin of victory — 55% — is roughly the same as Bolsonaro received when he was elected. But if you are a Trump-supporting Evangelical you are not someone who would ever cast your ballot for Cornel West, and Bolsonaro lost badly among Brazil’s poorest voters, whereas Milei has triumphed among the poor as well — precisely those voters whom a Juan Grabois or an Argentine Trotskyist would think of as their core constituency. 

Having ridden to office on a wave of emotion, how will Milei actually govern?  La Libertad Avanza was largely a vehicle for his presidential hopes and it fielded very few candidates for election to Congress. It is true that Milei came into office believing that that he could impose a part of his program by issuing a series of what in Argentina are called DNUs, the Spanish acronym for “Necessary and Urgent Decrees”. And ten days into his term that is exactly what he did. But instead of promulgating a handful of decrees whose urgency could indeed be justified to the public at large as an immediate response to the economic crisis, as he had justified the devaluation of the Argentine peso by one hundred and twenty percent that he had put into effect almost immediately after taking office, Milei issued a “Mega Decree¨ that included most of the major elements of the remaking of the Argentine economy and Argentine society that he had promised to enact if elected. Milei’s omnibus DNU either radically altered or annulled three hundred and sixty-six economic regulations, structures, and — most controversially — laws, including the removal of all rules governing the relations between landlords and tenants, loosening labor laws (above all employment protections), limiting the right to strike, scrapping export controls, rescinding government subsidies for public transport and fuel, and voiding regulations preventing the privatization of state enterprises. At the same time, the DNU cut off subsidies to the public broadcasting system — widely considered, much in the way National Public Radio is viewed by many in America, to skew to the left in its reporting and its commentary — as well as to other cultural institutions. 

Even many who in principle support the major changes that Milei wants to effect are disturbed by the fact that he so clearly seems to be trying to transform Argentine society without Congress’s approval. There is even some question as to whether what Milei is doing is constitutional, and despite his threat to call a plebiscite should Congress not allow the Mega-DNU to go through, there is little doubt that the issue will eventually be decided by Argentina’s Supreme Court. Milei’s decision to go forward is the standard populist leader’s playbook for dealing with a recalcitrant legislature: claim that his election is all the justification that he needs go forward with his program, in defiance of Congress if necessary. He is the leader who incarnates the people. Whether this strategy will work is another matter. For now the DNU has largely taken effect, though one change in labor law has been blocked by a court. But if both the Senate and the Diputados reject it, its provisions will have to be rescinded. Meanwhile, day by day omnibus legislation is being whittled down in order for the government to secure the votes it needs so that at least some of it is passed. Even if Milei makes many more concessions than he seems currently prepared to countenance, it is by no means clear that he will succeed. Milei won a crushing victory for himself, but he had no legislative coattails and the Peronists are close to having a majority in the Senate. To put the matter starkly, having come into office pledging to do away with La Casta, Milei now finds himself depending on it, not just in order to be successful but even to survive in office.

Many Argentines were surprised that Milei asked for so much all at once. They should have known better. Never in his career has Milei gone for less than everything he wanted. He believes that the only way to transform Argentina is to do as much as possible right away. It is the anarcho-capitalist equivalent of shock and awe. Whether Milei, who thinks that he is Argentina’s savior, can withstand the fact that Congress has other ideas is anyone’s guess. More threateningly still, the Peronist trade unions and left social movements are beginning to take to the streets. They will not topple Milei tomorrow. But if in a few months, inflation has not begun to come down and economic conditions continue to worsen, then all bets are off. In that case, there could be a social explosion that would chase Milei from office in much the way De La Rúa was chased from office in 2001. But whether it is the halls of Congress or in the streets, what is clear is that Carlos Pagni has observed sardonically, for Milei la realidad avanza.