The day before the literary festival began, the « anarcho-capitalist paleolibertarian » Javier Milei won Argentina’s open primaries by surprise. By noon the following day, Monday 14 August, the Argentine peso lost 25 percent of its value. Something changed that Sunday, though nobody knew what, how much or for how long — least of all Milei, caught unawares by the results but ecstatically ready.
Before the primaries, Milei was a loud but ineffectual representative in Argentina’s lower house of congress, known for his inexplicable hair and mutton chops. He never introduced a bill of his own (though he co-signed nearly thirty) and gave away his congressional salary to random people on social media every month. An annoying troll only ever electorally competitive in the city of Buenos Aires, where scrawny and awkward libertarian types with porn addictions and degrees in engineering or business management clustered. We (progressives with humanities or social science degrees from the kind of backgrounds that immure us from the worst of the economy’s fluctuations) determined that they would be Milei’s only supporters, that he would never seize hold of our vaunted fantasy: « the people ». We invoked « the people » with the confident solemnity of those who have never truly lost but who can recall loss’s contours, its representations, the stories we received of past crises.
Milei’s proposals were bold and a little ridiculous, but his willingness to drown in the bath of his beliefs gave him an advantage, especially online. He issued no apologies for his ideological fervor, his hatred of « zurdos de mierda » (piece of shit leftists). Dollarize and deregulate the economy, slash spending, close the central banks, privatize state-owned companies and kill the oh-so-vile deficit: this was the pitch.
Nobody quite like Milei, with his transparent market radicalism and anti-political je ne sais quoi, has ever had a real political career in Argentina, much less been a serious presidential candidate. I felt compelled to pursue an explanation, having so severely misdiagnosed the present conjuncture. What distinguished him, I thought, were distinctly literary elements: rhetoric, speech, tone, look, symbolism — plus a theoretical corpus, at the head of which stood the paleolibertarian Murray Rothbard. My political analysis has always been literary; literature is all I know. Was literature itself failing to help me make sense of Milei or had I simply misinterpreted the signs, told myself some fairytale?
Argentina’s upper crust has hated Peronism since 17 October 1945, when a spontaneous-ish mass of racialized working-class people invaded the aristocratic public spaces of Buenos Aires to call for then-social welfare minister Juan Domingo Perón’s release from prison. Perón was president from 1946 until his deposition and exile, in 1955, and was president again from 1973 until his death in 1974. Though ideologically shifting, his followers synthesize Perón’s « doctrine » into three pillars: « economic independence, social justice, political sovereignty. » His pro-worker, pro-union policies identified the movement with the working class, though sympathy for Mussolini-style corporativism (and a rightward turn in later years) is part of the cocktail.
John Ganz, « The Forgotten Man », The Baffler (15 December 2017).
His running mate, Victoria Villarruel, was a military scion intimate with the upper echelons of the military. Her main political crusade has been to deny the atrocities committed during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, which disappeared around 30.000 people in what denialists like Villarruel and Milei prefer to call a « war » against « subversion ».
Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, in Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2017), traces the development of the notion of « Latin America » to mid-nineteenth century intellectuals based in Paris, in large part as a response to the Mexican-American War and the 1856 US invasion of Nicaragua. He also links the notion to anti-Protestant as well as antisemitic sentiment widespread in the context of the post-1848 imperial revival.
Ismael Viñas, « Una expresión, un signo, » in Contorno Nro 2, Mayo 1954, p2-5.
I’m sure a residence in Miami awaits Milei once he’s finished, come what may.