Ever since the Brexit-cum-Trump dual shock of 2016, most of the international press has resorted to labeling candidates and causes to the right of establishment liberal-conservatism as “far-right,” “fringe,” or even “extreme.” To the extent these national-populist leaders have challenged entrenched orthodoxies on free trade and relatively free migration, this media hysteria is partly warranted. But what happens when the shock comes not from a conservative populist like Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro but from a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian? Someone who, taken at his word, wants not to bury but to revive a more radical version of the same neoliberal dogmas of yore about a limited state and the rejection of protectionism?
News of Javier Milei’s shock presidential primary win in Argentina this week provide a test case of how the global establishment chooses to react to one such candidate. But for the usual few neoliberal papers—the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and The Economist—the entire global press woke up on Monday affixing in unison the “far-right” label to the scruff-haired, leather-clad libertarian economist. The day before, Milei had scored a stunning 30.4% at the so-called PASO primaries, ahead of the center-right alternative to the ruling Peronist coalition and the left-wing Peronist candidate himself. And even the three outliers who sat out the pile-on underscored the result’s sheer shock effect: the WSJ spoke of a “middle-class revolt” while the FT waxed about a “Milei-quake.”
Milei is difficult to place conveniently on Argentina’s left-right political spectrum for two related reasons. To begin with, ever since rising to fame as an academic pundit in the early 2000s, he has torn up every last page of the politically-correct playbook, in both rhetoric and substance. At conferences and meetings, he has routinely referred to leftists and Peronists as “zurdos de mierda” (“f%*king zurdos” doesn’t quite do justice), indulged in trances of electrifying yelling that usually end with cries of “viva la libertad, carajo!” (a barely-translatable cheer for freedom). Formerly a guitarist in a Rolling Stones tribute act, he resists using a comb (Juan David Rojas has ably written that “the only hand he will let comb his hair is Adam Smith’s invisible hand”) and rose to the pulpit at his closing campaign rally, facing 15,000 people, singing a self-composed hymn that began with: “I am the lion!”
The second reason is about substance. What is Milei’s ideology, exactly? His program has been in the making during his entire career as an economist, both in academia and investment banks. His party, La Libertad Avanza (liberty marches on) has promised to tame Argentina’s 120% inflation rate by dollarizing the currency and effectively shutting down the central bank (adjusting for Mileiesque hyperbole, more like taking money-printing away from the hands of politicians). His fiscal agenda is no less radical. Besides pledging to cut spending by more than 15% in his first year (largely from a welfare bill that has de-incentivized work and swelled the public sector), Milei has unofficially promised to slash the number of ministries from about 20 to only 5. In a recent viral video, he is seen facing a corkboard and taking out the paper slips one by one until only five remain: treasury, justice, interior, foreign relations, and human capital.
For much of his career, Milei’s liberalism was coherent: it extended from the economy into social and cultural issues. Yet he has markedly toned down those latter views on the campaign trail to court Catholic voters. Although he is the childless owner of five dogs named after Austrian economists and once advocated a free market for buying and selling organs, he seems to have flipped the script of late. For Milei, corralling abortion and euthanasia to extreme cases of ‘necessity’ does not constitute a state-led intrusion, as he previously may have believed, into private life. To the contrary, he now says that the right to life—from the moment of conception to natural death—is the first liberty the state should seek to uphold. Milei has also tapped into other traditional concerns of the Argentinian bourgeoisie (or what remains of it). Whilst the Peronist Left has long championed the rights of victims from Argentina’s succession of military juntas in the 1970s and 1980s, much less talked about are the victims of far-left violence during that same period. Vicky Villarruel, a lawyer who made a career of pressing the state to prosecute the communist terror group Montoneros, is Milei’s VP pick.
As important social issues will certainly be in a potential Milei presidency, the maverick economist has run a campaign that mostly elided them—and for good reason. Countless opinion polls have shown that the top concerns of right-wing voters are neither life nor gender, but rather revolve around the state’s rampant corruption, its sprawling clientelist networks, the size of the state, and tax and spending levels. Milei has keenly capitalized on this ‘primacy of the material’ to make a pitch to a middle class that is beyond fatigued by decades of government boondoggles and a parasitic political class (Milei has even called this “larceny”). Although in Argentina there’s scarcely a precedent for this kind of liberal populism, Milei often invokes the century spanning from 1850 to 1950 as the country’s frontier-chasing golden age, an age when light-touch economic policies, a cultural ethic of hard work, and openness to foreign talent propelled Argentina to a world-leading economy. Revive those policies, he promises, and the Southern Cone giant could once again become the wealthy country it used to be.
How long will Milei be able to sustain his indecision on social issues? For now, merely the effort to erase his libertine views of the past are holding in lock a large share of Argentina’s Catholic electorate out of a tacit understanding that values will be dealt with once the economy is rescued from the doldrums (he can’t rely on liberal ideologues and young voters alone anyway). But even then, his winks to social conservatism come cloaked in laissez-faire dogma, in a way that bodes ill for his coalition. In another recent viral video, Milei voiced his opposition to state-funded gender transition surgery on account of its taxpayer-funded cost, not mentioning the wickedness of the policy itself. These are the thorny social and cultural questions that Milei will ultimately have to tackle one way or another. He is already some of the way there: whilst his academic talks and speeches used to ideate the free market as an end unto itself, he has lately developed more of an instrumental view of the economy, geared towards a society of productive citizens pursuing happiness as they see fit. This holistic view of the material, not as a finality but as an instrument to achieve a prosperous social fabric, could well prove decisive heading into the general election on October 22. There’s still time, but it’s running out fast.
Javier Milei and the Paradox of Freedom
Photo by Luis ROBAYO / AFP
Ever since the Brexit-cum-Trump dual shock of 2016, most of the international press has resorted to labeling candidates and causes to the right of establishment liberal-conservatism as “far-right,” “fringe,” or even “extreme.” To the extent these national-populist leaders have challenged entrenched orthodoxies on free trade and relatively free migration, this media hysteria is partly warranted. But what happens when the shock comes not from a conservative populist like Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro but from a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian? Someone who, taken at his word, wants not to bury but to revive a more radical version of the same neoliberal dogmas of yore about a limited state and the rejection of protectionism?
News of Javier Milei’s shock presidential primary win in Argentina this week provide a test case of how the global establishment chooses to react to one such candidate. But for the usual few neoliberal papers—the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and The Economist—the entire global press woke up on Monday affixing in unison the “far-right” label to the scruff-haired, leather-clad libertarian economist. The day before, Milei had scored a stunning 30.4% at the so-called PASO primaries, ahead of the center-right alternative to the ruling Peronist coalition and the left-wing Peronist candidate himself. And even the three outliers who sat out the pile-on underscored the result’s sheer shock effect: the WSJ spoke of a “middle-class revolt” while the FT waxed about a “Milei-quake.”
Milei is difficult to place conveniently on Argentina’s left-right political spectrum for two related reasons. To begin with, ever since rising to fame as an academic pundit in the early 2000s, he has torn up every last page of the politically-correct playbook, in both rhetoric and substance. At conferences and meetings, he has routinely referred to leftists and Peronists as “zurdos de mierda” (“f%*king zurdos” doesn’t quite do justice), indulged in trances of electrifying yelling that usually end with cries of “viva la libertad, carajo!” (a barely-translatable cheer for freedom). Formerly a guitarist in a Rolling Stones tribute act, he resists using a comb (Juan David Rojas has ably written that “the only hand he will let comb his hair is Adam Smith’s invisible hand”) and rose to the pulpit at his closing campaign rally, facing 15,000 people, singing a self-composed hymn that began with: “I am the lion!”
The second reason is about substance. What is Milei’s ideology, exactly? His program has been in the making during his entire career as an economist, both in academia and investment banks. His party, La Libertad Avanza (liberty marches on) has promised to tame Argentina’s 120% inflation rate by dollarizing the currency and effectively shutting down the central bank (adjusting for Mileiesque hyperbole, more like taking money-printing away from the hands of politicians). His fiscal agenda is no less radical. Besides pledging to cut spending by more than 15% in his first year (largely from a welfare bill that has de-incentivized work and swelled the public sector), Milei has unofficially promised to slash the number of ministries from about 20 to only 5. In a recent viral video, he is seen facing a corkboard and taking out the paper slips one by one until only five remain: treasury, justice, interior, foreign relations, and human capital.
For much of his career, Milei’s liberalism was coherent: it extended from the economy into social and cultural issues. Yet he has markedly toned down those latter views on the campaign trail to court Catholic voters. Although he is the childless owner of five dogs named after Austrian economists and once advocated a free market for buying and selling organs, he seems to have flipped the script of late. For Milei, corralling abortion and euthanasia to extreme cases of ‘necessity’ does not constitute a state-led intrusion, as he previously may have believed, into private life. To the contrary, he now says that the right to life—from the moment of conception to natural death—is the first liberty the state should seek to uphold. Milei has also tapped into other traditional concerns of the Argentinian bourgeoisie (or what remains of it). Whilst the Peronist Left has long championed the rights of victims from Argentina’s succession of military juntas in the 1970s and 1980s, much less talked about are the victims of far-left violence during that same period. Vicky Villarruel, a lawyer who made a career of pressing the state to prosecute the communist terror group Montoneros, is Milei’s VP pick.
As important social issues will certainly be in a potential Milei presidency, the maverick economist has run a campaign that mostly elided them—and for good reason. Countless opinion polls have shown that the top concerns of right-wing voters are neither life nor gender, but rather revolve around the state’s rampant corruption, its sprawling clientelist networks, the size of the state, and tax and spending levels. Milei has keenly capitalized on this ‘primacy of the material’ to make a pitch to a middle class that is beyond fatigued by decades of government boondoggles and a parasitic political class (Milei has even called this “larceny”). Although in Argentina there’s scarcely a precedent for this kind of liberal populism, Milei often invokes the century spanning from 1850 to 1950 as the country’s frontier-chasing golden age, an age when light-touch economic policies, a cultural ethic of hard work, and openness to foreign talent propelled Argentina to a world-leading economy. Revive those policies, he promises, and the Southern Cone giant could once again become the wealthy country it used to be.
How long will Milei be able to sustain his indecision on social issues? For now, merely the effort to erase his libertine views of the past are holding in lock a large share of Argentina’s Catholic electorate out of a tacit understanding that values will be dealt with once the economy is rescued from the doldrums (he can’t rely on liberal ideologues and young voters alone anyway). But even then, his winks to social conservatism come cloaked in laissez-faire dogma, in a way that bodes ill for his coalition. In another recent viral video, Milei voiced his opposition to state-funded gender transition surgery on account of its taxpayer-funded cost, not mentioning the wickedness of the policy itself. These are the thorny social and cultural questions that Milei will ultimately have to tackle one way or another. He is already some of the way there: whilst his academic talks and speeches used to ideate the free market as an end unto itself, he has lately developed more of an instrumental view of the economy, geared towards a society of productive citizens pursuing happiness as they see fit. This holistic view of the material, not as a finality but as an instrument to achieve a prosperous social fabric, could well prove decisive heading into the general election on October 22. There’s still time, but it’s running out fast.
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