By Thomas PEERMOHAMED LAMBERT

Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

“I am the king of a lost world,” Javier Milei crowed as he took the stage to proclaim his electoral victory on Monday.

The perma-coiffed, chainsaw-wielding president of Argentina had been expected to win around 30% of the vote in the country’s legislative elections, but in the event took more than 40% — enough to veto pretty much any bill he likes, and push through his programme of brutal austerity for another 12 months. Donald Trump, who made Argentina’s ally status conditional on Milei’s victory, congratulated him on his “landslide”.

Liberal commentators in the US and UK have already resurrected familiar narratives about a global “populist wave” composed of rabble-rousers with unsound economic policies and questionable hair. But anyone who has spent even a little time in Argentina will know that things are rather more complicated. “Populism” is a slippery designation in Argentine politics: Milei’s main ally in parliament is the former president Mauricio Macri — the kind of cautious, sensible, establishment politician who tends to appeal rather more to the IMF and the World Bank than the baying mass of “the people”; his main opponents, meanwhile, are the Unión por la Patria — a vast, heterogeneous bloc of self-described “populists” descended from the brash, Perón-affiliated Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. However the Anglosphere chooses to parse the political ructions of a country like Argentina, it seems incapable of capturing the facts on the ground.

The reason for this incomprehension is not so much the singular weirdness of Argentine politics as the crudeness of our own theoretical terms. In the UK and the US, we stubbornly continue to denigrate populists as “demagogues” and sowers of “division”: people who threaten to undermine our nice, efficient liberal institutions. In Argentina, by contrast, the sheer preponderance and variety of “populists” in government have forced intellectuals to come up with a far more sophisticated understanding of their techniques. The Argentine Left, in particular, is far more willing to tread on the toes of liberals and concede that there might be something about populism that is worth retaining, even as the worst excesses of individual populists are to be condemned. The names associated with this tradition of “anti-anti-populism” are not exactly familiar: no one reads David Viñas or León Rozitchner in the UK today, and only a few theory-addled postgraduate students have heard of Ernesto Laclau. But perhaps we should take this remarkable body of work more seriously. After all, what happens in Argentine politics has a habit of happening everywhere else a few years later; understand Argentina, and you understand the world.

At the centre of the debate over populism in Argentina is the controversial, and often misunderstood, figure of Juan Domingo Perón. When Perón came to power in 1946, it soon became clear that he represented almost everything the political Left despised: he commanded a deranged cult of personality, he shut down pretty much any university department or magazine that criticised him, and there was certainly a reason why so many Nazis ended up fleeing to Argentina. The well-to-do liberals of the nicer districts of Buenos Aires were terrified; the grande dame of Argentine culture, Victoria Ocampo, described Perón’s government as a “monstrous dictatorship” and was promptly thrown in prison.

“The Argentine Left is far more willing to tread on the toes of liberals and concede that there might be something about populism that is worth retaining”

Yet among the working classes — including hundreds of thousands of factory workers who should have been the Left’s natural constituency — Perón was something like a god. His first presidency saw vast rallies in Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, where thousands of shirtless industrial labourers pledged their allegiance to the leader. To Leftists of the period, the rallies were a sick parody of the revolution they had been yearning for all their lives; here was the industrial proletariat, rising up, chanting for justice outside the presidential residence, but doing so in the service of someone whom they had always considered a fascist. The parallels with the populists of today are not hard to detect.

In 1953, a few Left-leaning writers set up a magazine to try and shock the masses out of their allegiance. It was called Contorno — a word that means something like “margins”, but also suggests some kind of side dish, the kind of thing you might get with a big lump of Argentine steak. The early articles laid the blame for Perón’s ascendency squarely on Argentina’s complacent, liberal intellectual class. The first issue contained an article by the historian David Viñas called “The Betrayal of Honest Men”, in which he outlined what today is often called the “professional managerial class” — a busy hive of intellectuals, managers, establishment politicians, media personalities, all toiling away to reproduce the conventional wisdom. When the “masses” seized on politicians who carved up the world into about an “us” and a “them”, Viñas argued, they were not simply being “divisive”; they were drawing attention to this invisible class and its role in prolonging the status quo. Populism, in other words, was not a sickness in its own right, but a symptom of a political culture that refused to call the establishment by its proper name.

By the Sixties, Contorno’s affiliates had turned these insights into the kind of full-blooded critique of liberal democracy that was rarely uttered in the West during the Cold War period. Writers like León Rozitchner and Oscar Masotta made Viñas’s ideas systematic: now, it was not just Argentine intellectuals that were to blame for the emergence of Perón, but the whole political system. Parliamentary democracy, argued Rozitchner in “Proletarian and Bourgeois Experience”, accustoms its citizens to a kind of magical thinking. They no longer advocate for their own interests; instead, they cast around for someone who “represents” them — usually, a political party, or leader, or member of parliament. But once this metaphysics of “representation” is accepted, it is very hard to keep in check. If parliamentary candidates do a lacklustre job at representing the people, then what is to stop the people from casting around for someone who might offer them a better deal? Why should it be that the beneficiaries of a rickety electoral system are given the sacred task of representation? Why not a strongman? Why not a king?

Argentina’s tradition of Left-wing “anti-anti-populism” has also produced at least one of the most important contributions to the theory of populism in recent times. Ernesto Laclau was loosely affiliated with Contorno members in his youth, but did most of his academic work in the UK between 2000 and his death in 2014. At the University of Essex, he published works like Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and On Populist Reason that were, for a time, very popular among earnest postgraduate students. For Laclau, “populism” was just about the most misunderstood term in the political scientist’s lexicon. Populism, he argued, was simply the recognition that institutions that claim to be universal are, in fact, anything but. The “government” is nothing more than a clutch of careerists trying to enrich themselves. The “civil service” is just a pretext for self-aggrandising bureaucrats and greedy NGOs to siphon off public money. The “rule of law” is simply a feeding-frenzy for a few venal lawyers. Populism, he argued, wasn’t a type of politics; it was the essential procedure of all politics — which involves the building of coalitions against some established order in a bid to change the world. It’s the name we give to the moment when all the lofty abstractions that justify the status quo are suddenly revealed as crude exercises of power.

This is all very attractive in the abstract, but how useful are these ideas in real life? In Argentina, at least, the Left’s willingness to take populist energies seriously has, at various points in history, made it unusually potent in the face of international injustices. In the late Nineties and early 2000s, Argentina emerged as the epicentre of the worldwide rebellion against privatisation and IMF-driven austerity known as the Global Justice Movement. The same constituencies of industrial workers who had once turned out for Perón blocked roads, banged pots and pans in the street, and chanted their famous slogan, “¡Que se vayan todos!”: “Out with all of them”. At a time when the North American Left was still in the thrall of “political correctness”, fawning over the unctuous Bill Clinton and meekly accepting the damage to the working class wrought by Nafta, the Argentine Left had rediscovered the joys of truculence and vulgarity, and resolved to take to the streets until the technocrats listened.

It is worth remembering this forgotten tradition — not of populism, exactly, so much as of “anti-anti-populism” — as the world acquires more and more leaders who seem to deserve the “populist” label. Commentators in the US and UK have already begun to speak of a “Latin Americanisation” of their countries’ politics; perhaps they ought to “Latin Americanise” their countries’ political discourse, too. Indeed, if they did find a wider readership in the Anglosphere, writers like Viñas, Rozitchner and Laclau could be immensely useful to the political Left. At a time when the working classes have all but absconded from progressive causes, and are instead flocking into the streets in support of reactionary ones, it is up to a few all-but-forgotten Argentines to remind us that not everyone who wants to make the world a fairer, gentler place wants to do so with a sneer.

Original article:  unherd.com