Milei as the Argentine Messiah After the Failure of the Intellectuals
Argentine culture has often tended towards messianism. Diego Maradona was the Messiah, as is Messi. Argentinean poor youth in a stratified and enormous country, saw in Maradona somebody like them, who rose from the shantytown to becoming a multimillionaire, part of the jet-set, and a leading global opinion-maker. That’s why they called him El Barrilete More
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Argentine culture has often tended towards messianism. Diego Maradona was the Messiah, as is Messi. Argentinean poor youth in a stratified and enormous country, saw in Maradona somebody like them, who rose from the shantytown to becoming a multimillionaire, part of the jet-set, and a leading global opinion-maker. That’s why they called him El Barrilete Cósmico, “The Cosmic Kite.” He isPerón and he is Christ.
Javier Milei is similarly messianic. Milei’s voters see him not as a politician—more like an anti-political alien usurping the starship of the political class: a successful infiltrator who hacks the machine. To his fanbase, he is a folk-hero: an apocalyptic elf who appears after the total breakdown of the political system, filling the vacuum of post-politics. But who carved out the vacuum in Argentine sociopolitical life in the first place?
Hunger is on the rise in Argentina, and so is Milei. All else stagnates. Last week he got his very first piece of legislation through congress, after seven months in office. Many working-class voters, as well as lower middle-class Argentines watching their savings unravel, remain credulous that the performative politician’s shock-therapy will deliver. In May, Milei, shunned by the director of the Argentinean international bookfair, got even by filling Buenos Aires’ Luna Park stadium with a sold-out book presentation. Luna Park is not without notoriety: formerly the coliseum for sinister performances of the Peronist populist right—events where prominent European Nazis were also invited.
Wearing a trench-coat on-stage, Milei played rock guitar, then delivered an entertaining speech in which he invoked hilarious-sounding names of obscure Austrian economists—Ludwig after Ludwig, names unpronounceable to the average Argentine, evoking images of Germanic men wearing big wigs and cravats, staring wildly and ranting esoteric abstractions. What Maradona symbolized for slum youth, is what Milei represents to lower middle class café intellectuals—who form no small part of the population in Argentina, and who tired of seeing their incomes and hopes depleted under the two previous administrations which were supposed to differ radically from one another.
Milei’s command of economic data is much like Milei’s musicianship, and like his days in semi-professional football (excuse-me, “soccer”!) or his teachings on the cosmos-orgasm during his stint as a tantric sex guru. He is an amateur at everything, passing for Nostradamus or the psychics who advertise outside a carwash; a former “incel” until he secured fame in the studios of the media oligopoly that motored the Macri family’s campaigns. Milei clearly lacks understanding of what he is talking about, but that is also why he is loveable, for reasons resembling what makes Trump an endearing kabuki-theater of obscenity in the eyes of the disheartened, Fentanyl-sick American spectatorship. When it comes to politics, two decades after Madonna Ciccone’s “Evita” the Argentine heart is as shattered as the North American psyche: the belief in politics is dead, thanks to vapid post-politics of the woke left and of the right, but perhaps particularly because of the radical center, whose spin doctors have gone about colonizing left political discourse in Argentina.
So, who killed politics in Argentina? Milei was elected based on pre-existing antipolitical sentiment. He first went “viral” as an anti-state commentator during the pandemic when Argentina had the longest lockdowns of the Western hemisphere under Alberto Fernandez’ administration. It was during lockdown, and just after it, that the Argentine alliance of pro-labor parties, overconfident after the humiliating defeat of Maurizio Macri’s conservative movement in 2019, begun losing all internal coherency. Today, the Macri family and those families who are part of the Macri cabal are back, riding on the social media success of Milei’s government. How did the center-left go back to square one and is this an omen for what will happen in upcoming US elections? And why had a blander version of the Peronist center-left regained office in the first place, only to be destroyed by Milei?
These questions require a rewind, back to the 2019 elections. Macri’s crushing defeat—celebrated for days by euphoric mass mobilizations—had several driving forces:
+ Initially, voters had voiced discontent with Macri’s authoritarianism. For example, Macri’s weaponization of the tax department to shut down critics in the press like the Buenos Aires Herald; seeking to rewrite history books and museum exhibits to blot out condemnation of the past dictatorship; legislating by veto to bypass congress. During those years, militarized police sprayed rubber-coated bullets onto protesters who opposed the gutting of pensions. All this is now having a replay in Argentina with Milei’s arbitrary incarceration of activists. Fernandez then campaigned as a restorer of civil democratic liberties, only to revert on free speech.
+ Voters rejected austerity—not knowing that Fernandez would continue the center-right project of austerity on a milder scale, obeying the IMF , while insisting that “There is no alternative”. This bolstered Milei’s claim that the root of misery in Argentina is not neoliberal austerity itself, so much as the gradualism or “kid-gloves” with which his predecessors had applied neoliberal formulas, lacking sufficient “shock therapy.”
+ A revolt against the glibness and insipidness of the management discourse. Macri’s polished right sought to displace politics, using technocracy to force an end the era of ideological struggles, a period which had died in the rest of the world, but which persisted in Argentina. Fernandez merely substituted managerial discourse with politically correct and postmodernist language, hardly sounding distinct.
+ After securing victory, the Peronists failed to keep channeling these energies of popular discontent. Milei accurately tapped into these reservoirs.
Post-ideology
Part of the right’s neoliberal project of “plugging Argentina back into the globe”, from Macri to Milei (whose relationship has resembled Geppetto vis a vis Pinocchio, despite recent turbulence) is about eliminating the bureaucratic “red tape” of the Peronist’s protectionist economic policies. Argentine nationalist protectionism is at odds with the modern Latin American internationalist project of Mercosur (a South American common market). That system conceived by the Perons in the 1940s was applied by subsequent generations of leaders who dreamt of one day establishing a self-enclosed autarky in Argentina, spearheaded by a national bourgeoise that Peronism had sought, but failed, to found by way of elevating domestic workers to middle class levels of well-being and education. The hope for Peronism was to turn Pro-Peronist workers into conscientious and patriotic business leaders, who would in turn pioneer new national industries, thereby creating dignified mass employment, and an alternative to the agro-export economic model, whose interests had traditionally been defended by military coups and by feudal landowners.
But the other and more dominant feature of the Argentine neoliberals’ project of “reinsertion” of Argentina into the wider globalized world, was to force Argentina to catch up with what is called the “post-ideological era:” in which democratic political process and debates are futile, powerless against the impetus and the desires of a technologically literate oligarchy. Macri’s party, which today backs and influences Milei, strove for an “update” in which Argentina finally joined the post-Cold War worldwide consensus, in which countries are not to be governed, but instead are “administered”, preferably with the help of NGOs, militarized police, HR departments, drones, AI and other devices that defuse the challenges posed by workers and electorates.
Despite Argentina’s role as an innovator for the Latin American continent, and as a global food-producer, the state at this point has no foreign policy. Argentina also remains one of the few countries in which the left is typically identified by the adjectives “national” and “nationalist” rather than “internationalist”. All debate here boils down to the local match between Peronist vs. anti-Peronist forces, of which Milei is only the latest Tiktok-toting figurehead.
The failure of center-left intellectuals pre-Milei
Kirchner-era intellectuals had attempted to fill the gaps in a society riven by partisan feuds. They renovated Peronism by pursuing an image-driven politics of appeasement towards Argentina’s secularized middle classes, appealing to these primarily through the language of gender and sexual politics, while downplaying class realities. This resulted in a sense of orphanhood experienced by poorer sectors who were once traditionally serviced by Peronism’s militant social organizations. That political homelessness, caused by Peronism’s re-marriage to an educated urban middle-class constituency which had in the past vehemently supported anti-Peron police-states, paved the way for Milei’s upsurge amongst the resentful poor. The very same people who once envisaged themselves in Peron and in Maradona, now saw themselves in Milei. In the pandemic, when the nanny-state took a draconian turn, feminists like Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato—whose cited words displaced those of Jorge Luis Borges on ministerial buildings—began to speak in the mass media of a “maternal state”, or a “mothering state” of the lockdown, when praising the enforcement of prolonged quarantines, in contrast to the rugged individualism and Marlboro-man machismo of the free market (incarnated by Milei). Figures like Segato owed their platforms to Peronist partisan media. Here, a nominally Peronist state, functioning as the inverse of Peron’s pro-worker welfare state, oppressed the mass of outsiders who survived on informal labor, by denying their right to earn livelihoods inside the grey areas of the economy, all while official media denounced the “toxic masculinity” of those who questioned the Fernandez-Fauci consensus.
Fernandez’ and his supporters’ moralistic hectoring of young people about covid-rule-flouting also boosted Milei’s appeal, which strangely endures. Fernandez’ authoritarianism was not, however, limited to lockdowns during a crisis which no government in the world knew how to deal with. In a desperate attempt to impress the youth, the previous government accommodated the worst tendency of the identitarian left, which is cancel culture. The former Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity (scrapped by Milei), receiving 3.4 % of GDP at the time, enforced an esoteric new law against “symbolic violence” which could easily be used to censor art and speech in public space and in the press. Dissidents emerged such as YouTube influencer Roxana Kremer, whose massively popular series explained to an audience of over 666000 subscribers how constitutional guarantees of due process were being eroded once radical feminists began implementing an Argentine version of the American 1980s legal activism of Catharine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin. A slew of popular artists got cancelled, while “gender-neutral” de-sexed Spanish became the official language in bureaucracies. It was as if engaged intellectuals were taking recipes from a Weimar cookbook: fomenting sexualized paranoia in conservative rural societies whose members already felt the future was lost unto inflationary chaos.
Feminism has reshaped political spaces in Argentina, sometimes in necessary ways. But it is unpopular to point out that this likely alienated some workers who later became Mileistas. Argentine feminism was one of the few oppositional movements that could temper the repressive tactics of the Macri-era and still dominate the streets while other protests met with rubber bullets. Anti-austerity marches more often led to participants being hospitalized. This disparity owed to the fact that women are not a strictly partisan issue. Police who killed Patagonian activists like Rafael Nahuel and Santiago Maldonado, were all too weary of the very high likelihood that a judge’s daughter or a landowners’ or conservative law-maker’s daughters were among the women chanting “Muerte al Macho!” at manifold demos. That elicited the repressive apparatus’ greater caution while shooting: a rare toleration which further encouraged the precedence of sexual politics over all other protest cultures. This is, of course, a very unpopular thesis, of the kind that seldom gets airtime in the public discourse of a country where white leftist celebrity intellectuals –people who have read Hegel, Lacan and Zizek on the subway since middle school and who have frequented the opera—nevertheless compete to be overheard quoting a semi-illiterate Diego Maradona to win popularity and show that we be down wit’ the hood. Many such intellectuals found employment and fame through the Alberto Fernandez administration. For them, glory was guaranteed, provided a few caveats were met:
1) That the hierarchical nature of Peronist political organization went unchallenged.
2) That the sacrosanct status of the Faucist lockdowns went unquestioned.
3) That the usefulness of identity politics—which in the Argentine case is mostly about sexuality, gender and feminism—as means to secure the middle-class sympathies for Peronism, would continue to be seen as the panacea it never was.
4) That Cristina Kirchner’s repeating tendency to always choose a center-right liberal as her successor in the leadership of the Peronist movement, would be regarded as wise, and never up for debate, despite how it led to catastrophic defeat thrice in a row.
5) There is yet a fifth unbreakable piety in contemporary Peronism: when it comes to the politics of memory vis a vis the last dictatorship, one must begin counting the disappeared and the crimes of the juntas only from 1976 onwards, and never begin counting at 1974, when Isabela Perón, widow of the late heterodox general, led her relentless campaign to weed out the Marxist and Red elements from the movement by way of forced disappearances, censorship, torture and targeted assassinations which provided a dress-rehearsal for Videla’s 1976 coup.
All that makes for quite a laundry list of orthodoxies to digest, before exercising the duties of “public intellectual” within suffocating confines. Yet the acclaimed University of Buenos Aires has successfully inculcated precisely such a generalized “new common sense” among progressives. As a result, intellectuals no longer resonate amongst plebeian audiences as they once did, in a country known for nourishing iconoclasts and autodidact writers from all social backgrounds. Given the self-censorship and political correctness of the Argentine hegemonic-academic “public intellectual”, it is no wonder that a freewheeling, ignorant blowhard like Milei succeeded at casting himself as Galilei.
Milei has become the South’s equivalent to what Jordan Peterson is for the Global North: the intellectual we deserve, a media-savvy bogeyman who taps into elite fears and popular frustrations about meritocracy’s authoritarian turn, a Pied Piper who won’t ask for your pronouns and who effectively builds upon a growing paranoia in the popular imagination, which now associates the powerful “extreme center” with the marginal left. Figures like Chris Rufo, Milei, and Peterson can be heard fuming against a censorious technocratic establishment, whilst pretending that the Human Resources commissars—all of whom are capitalists to the bone—today embody a specter of the bygone, long-dead-and-buried Marxist-Gramscian left.
These entertainers are guided by wishful thinking. Nowadays conservatives want to believe there still is a meaningful battle against a genuine “communist” enemy out there. They are like the Israeli soldier who pretends that the starved teenagers of Gaza are the equivalent of the monolithic Third Reich who slew the ancestors. It is a desperate craving for a daunting enemy who no longer exists. Peronism’s populist left has been deadening and castrating itself since the days of Isabela Perón. This project has recently come full-circle: towards the end of the previous administration, “A House Without Curtains” appeared—a pro-Peronist documentary on Isabela, which makes little mention of how she founded the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance death-squad that later turned against her in 1976. The film granted Isabel a late cameo, and predictably met with rave reviews at festivals and in the center-left press, for casting a former dictator as a misunderstood victim of patriarchy.
The radical right wants to believe that the left still thrives, and that we are much bigger, better and more serious than we are. If only we can live up to their fantasy, if only we find a way to be what Mariátegui and Gramsci would have wanted us to be. If that were so, would we have heard of Milei?
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