Javier Milei is leading the polls as a precandidate for the 2023 presidential election in Argentina.
Let that sink in: Javier Milei, a libertarian economist, whose views in the past 10 years have shifted towards Austrian economics and anarcho-capitalism, a social media viral sensation, and for the last year, a congressman in the Argentinian Chamber of Deputies, elected as part of a conservative-libertarian coalition, is leading the polls as a precandidate for next year´s presidential election in his country, meaning he could potentially become its next president.
For anyone in the conservative and the libertarian spheres, both in the United States and overseas, this should be a huge surprise and an even greater cause for joy and hope for our political future.
It means our ideas have been successfully spread, and that their influence has expanded outside of what we could have thought was their natural environment in North America.
A lot of people and of institutions would like to claim Milei’s victory and his growing numbers of popular support in his country, as well as his popularity in other countries in the Latin American region, as a result of their work, their resources, and their lucky bet on a loud intellectual with crazy hair.
But the truth is that Milei’s case is nothing but the result of years and years of work, immense networks of people working to promote different ideas, a local tradition upon which to build a platform, the right opponents in the right circumstances, and of course, the internet.
A few years ago, for people outside the United States, Milei would have been nothing but another foreign right-wing politician, maybe aligned with the neoconservative elites in Washington DC, maybe another case of successful grooming of foreign elites as imperial prefects for the American government in their Latin American provinces.
But Milei is not part of the Argentinian traditional elites. He does not come from the same old families that have been involved in Argentinian politics for decades. He does not belong to the ruling Peronismo (in whatever form or shape it adopts, from left to right to woke), and furthermore, he actually has opposed the socialist Peronistas in government, as well as their ineffective opposition, represented by moderate right-winger Mauricio Macri (with who he has become close recently) for pretty much all of his fairly recent public life.
Milei did not have the chances of many other foreign politicians to study in the United States, and benefit from the funds and networks available to the client elites of America in their allied countries.
He got all his degrees in economics from local Argentinian universities, and yet, the Washington Post has articles about him published by their foreign press correspondents, and for many Argentinians, Milei could be their last political hope for a serious change, as their poverty rate, and their rage, continues to grow under the inflationary and price control policies imposed by the socialist and woke government of Peronista president Alberto Fernandez.
With all things considered, Milei’s success is probably the beginning of the Paleo revival outside of the United States, and for American conservatives and libertarians, this should be a real eye opener of what a good political strategy really meant for both movements back in the day and what it could actually mean today.
The thing about Milei is that he may be an Austrian and an anarcho-capitalist libertarian, but his platform and his main supporters come from all different backgrounds in the Argentinian right, from traditionalist Catholics and Nationalists, such as Juan José Gómez Centurión, a Falkands War veteran and candidate in the 2019 Argentinian presidential elections, who supported him in his 2021 legislative campaign, to anti-woke liberal conservatives, such as Agustin Laje and Nicolás Marquez, a duo of fellow social media influencers, known for their Ben Shapiro-esque pro-life rants against pro-abortion and radical feminist activists.
During all of these years, leading up to the current political moment, in which Milei has approximately 20% of the Argentinian population’s support for his presidential bid, ‘El Peluca’, as he is affectionally known for his uncombed hair, has adopted what could only be considered as Rothbard & Rockwell’s Paleo strategy from the 90s, incorporating right-wing populism into a dual conservative and libertarian platform, openly talking against the ruling Argentinian elites in his appearances in talk shows, and promoting their general despise as part of the same caste, even if they belong to different parties.
Milei’s case rests in contrast with Ecuadorian president Guillermo Lasso, who coincidentally, also comes from a libertarian background, and who only got elected in a population-wide effort to impede former president Rafael Correa’s protégé Andrés Arauz, a Keynesian economist with MMT affinities who actually proposed to de-dolarize the Ecuadorian economy and go back to printing money to be elected, as its election would probably have meant the end of the few market institutions present in Ecuador.
In his first year of government, Lasso’s brand of beltway libertarianism has proven to be ineffective to rule efficiently, given that Ecuador is currently under a national security crisis, represented by constant prison riots and massacres with increasing numbers of casualties, drug-related violence affecting the social structures of the country, and a political crisis, with a minority bench in the National Assembly, and compromise leaders, such as former Legislative President Guadalupe Llori, unseated and under impeachment threats by members of a coalition of parties that include the conservative Social Christian Party (which was kicked out of the coalition that got Lasso elected right after the election) and of course, the remaining majority of Rafael Correa loyalists.
Moreover, some of his most trusted advisors and high-ranking government officials, such as Aparicio Caicedo, a Cato Institute affiliated scholar turned public intellectual, or Bernarda Ordoñez, a known feminist activist, have been harshly criticized in local media for their lack of touch with the actual social and political situation in Ecuador: the first, for his apparent lack of empathy towards the poorer classes, and the second for her insisting promotion of hardly unnecessary progressive agenda, who recently renounced from her office as cabinet-ranking Secretary of Human Rights over her and Guillermo Lasso’s conflicting views over the ongoing national security crisis.
While Lasso has been characterized as a conservative by English speaking media in numerous occasions, especially for his personal pro-life stance in the abortion legalization issue, his policies have proven so far to be neither conservative, with his backing of nationally state-enforced rulings on same-sex marriage and even abortion itself, nor libertarian, with public spending and tax increases, in what many people think are his conflicting economic views, on one hand promoting free markets, and on the other brokering deals for IMF loans.
Lasso also got elected on an explicitly anti-populist platform, painting the Ecuadorian left as invariably populist, in what many other beltway libertarians in Latin America, such as Gloria Alvarez or Axel Kaiser have done in the past.
However, what differentiates Lasso from Milei is that the former, by adopting a mainstream, non-populist, establishment libertarian and right-liberal strategy has alienated himself from his country’s problems and even from his apparent personal political beliefs, whereas the latter, by adopting the culturally conservative aspects of Argentinian society, has got his popularity and his support, as well as the one of libertarian ideas he promotes, skyrocketing, to the surprise and fear of the elites in Argentina and in the United States.
Lasso’s decline is a textbook example of the retreat of beltway libertarians: once you get into power, you forget the ideal of freedom that got you into the fight, but Milei’s success is a reminder of what Lew Rockell said in his manifesto titled The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism:
If the American people continue to connect libertarianism with repellent cultural norms, we will fail. […] Do we want to remain a small and irrelevant social club like the LP? Or do we want to fulfill the promise of liberty and make our movement a mass one again as it was in the 19th-century? Culturally meaningful libertarianism has arrived during the greatest turmoil on the Right since the1940s. Libertarians can and must talk again with the resurgent paleoconservatives. We can even form an alliance with them. […] Together, we have a chance to attain victory.
If Milei gets elected to the Argentinian presidency next year, he will prove one again that right-wing populism was the correct strategy for the Paleo movement from the very start, and if that happens indeed, it will finally mean that Rothbard was right when he wrote in his essay Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement that:
For sensible people and paleo-libertarians, the time has come to re-enter the real world, and to help forge a coalition that will create a successful right-wing populist movement which will, by necessity, be in large part libertarian.
To go over the heads of the media and political elites, to reach the working and middle class directly, to spread the ideas of liberty and the knowledge of how they have been oppressed, requires inspiring and charismatic political leadership. It requires, in addition to intellectual cadre, political leaders who will be knowledgeable, courageous, dynamic, exciting and effective in mobilizing and building a movement.
It requires leadership able to seize the moment to act, leadership with the moxie and the fortitude to surmount the slanders and smears that will inevitably be directed against it.
It requires ideological and political ‘entrepreneurs’ in the best sense, leadership that is willing and able to forge a paleo coalition to split off heartland and paleo-conservatives from Official and neo-conservatives, to raise the banner and to build a real-world movement in which, as in the days of the Old Right, libertarians can play a valuable part.
And if paleo-libertarianism can be reborn outside the United States, it means it can be also reborn in the United States as well.
