“I am the king of a lost world,” Javier Milei crowed as he took the stage to proclaim his electoral victory on Monday.
The flamboyant, chainsaw-wielding president of Argentina had been predicted to secure about 30% of the vote in the nation’s legislative elections. However, he exceeded expectations by capturing over 40% — granting him near-complete veto power over legislation and enabling him to advance his harsh austerity agenda for another year. Donald Trump, who had tied Argentina’s ally status to Milei’s success, congratulated him on his “landslide”.
In the US and UK, liberal analysts have quickly revived familiar stories about a worldwide “populist wave,” filled with agitators promoting risky economic policies and questionable hairstyles. Yet anyone familiar with Argentina understands the situation is far more nuanced. The label “populism” proves slippery within Argentine politics: Milei’s primary parliamentary ally is former president Mauricio Macri — a pragmatic, establishment figure generally favored by the IMF and World Bank, rather than the clamorous masses. Meanwhile, his principal opposition comprises the Unión por la Patria, a sprawling, diverse grouping of self-styled “populists” descended from the bold, Perón-aligned Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. Regardless of how the Anglosphere attempts to interpret Argentina’s political turmoil, it repeatedly falls short of capturing its realities.
This misunderstanding arises less from the peculiarities of Argentine politics and more from the oversimplified frameworks dominant in Western discourse. In the UK and US, populists are persistently dismissed as “demagogues” and “divisive” figures threatening the integrity of refined liberal institutions. By contrast, the sheer number and diversity of “populists” governing in Argentina has pushed thinkers there to develop a more nuanced grasp of these figures’ tactics. The Argentine Left especially shows a greater openness to unsettling liberal sensibilities by acknowledging that populism might hold some worthwhile elements, even while condemning its most extreme manifestations. The thinkers behind this “anti-anti-populism” tradition are largely unknown in the West: names like David Viñas, León Rozitchner, and Ernesto Laclau are obscure outside academic circles. Nevertheless, their work demands serious attention, particularly given that what unfolds in Argentina often foreshadows global political trends: grasp Argentina, and you grasp important aspects of the broader world.
Central to Argentine debates about populism is the contentious and frequently mischaracterized figure of Juan Domingo Perón. Upon assuming office in 1946, Perón epitomized nearly everything the Left detested: he cultivated an intense personality cult, suppressed dissenting university departments and publications, and provided sanctuary to many fleeing Nazis. Buenos Aires’s affluent liberals were alarmed; Victoria Ocampo, the country’s cultural matriarch, denounced Perón’s regime as a “monstrous dictatorship” and was swiftly imprisoned.
“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”
Nevertheless, among the working class—especially the hundreds of thousands of factory workers who would normally align with the Left—Perón was almost worshipped. His initial presidency featured massive demonstrations at Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, where throngs of shirtless laborers pledged loyalty. Leftists regarded these rallies as a twisted mockery of the revolution they yearned for: an industrial proletariat rising in protest, yet doing so in support of a leader they had long denounced as fascist. The echoes with today’s populists are unmistakable.
In 1953, a group of left-leaning intellectuals launched a magazine called Contorno—a term meaning both “margins” and colloquially, a side dish typically served with Argentine steak. Early editions assigned blame for Perón’s popularity to Argentina’s complacent liberal intelligentsia. Historian David Viñas’s article “The Betrayal of Honest Men” described what we now call the “professional managerial class”: a collective of intellectuals, bureaucrats, politicians, and media figures who tirelessly uphold mainstream narratives. When “the masses” embraced politicians drawing sharp divisions between an “us” and a “them,” Viñas contended, they weren’t merely “divisive”; instead, they highlighted this unseen establishment class perpetuating the status quo. Thus, populism was less a malady than a symptom of a political culture unwilling to confront entrenched power.
By the 1960s, the Contorno circle expanded this into a thorough critique of liberal democracy rarely voiced in the Cold War West. Writers like León Rozitchner and Oscar Masotta formalized Viñas’s ideas: blame for Perón’s rise extended beyond intellectuals to the entire political system. Rozitchner argued in “Proletarian and Bourgeois Experience” that parliamentary democracy conditions citizens to participate in a kind of magical thinking. Instead of promoting their own interests directly, people seek out “representation” through parties or leaders. Once this notion of “representation” is accepted uncritically, it becomes nearly impossible to control. Should parliamentary representatives fail, the people naturally look for alternatives, including authoritarian figures. Why should those benefiting from a flawed electoral process hold the sacred role of representatives? Why not a strongman? Why not a king?
Argentina’s tradition of Left-wing “anti-anti-populism” also gave rise to one of the most significant recent contributions to populism theory. Ernesto Laclau, loosely connected to Contorno in his youth but pursuing most of his academic career in the UK from 2000 until his death in 2014, wrote influential works such as Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and On Populist Reason that gained traction among dedicated postgraduate students. Laclau argued that “populism” is one of the most misunderstood labels in political science. It represents an acknowledgment that institutions professing universality are, in reality, far from it. Governments are composed of self-serving careerists; civil services become excuses for bureaucrats and NGOs to divert public funds; the “rule of law” is often a feeding frenzy for corrupt lawyers. For Laclau, populism was not a political style but the fundamental mechanism of all politics: forming coalitions opposing the existing order to effect change. It marks the moment when lofty abstractions justifying the status quo fall away, revealing raw power struggles.
While these ideas may seem abstract, they have practical resonance. In Argentina, the Left’s openness to populist currents has historically granted it significant influence confronting international injustices. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Argentina became the heart of the global resistance against privatization and IMF-imposed austerity—the Global Justice Movement. The same industrial workers who had supported Perón staged roadblocks, banged pots and pans, and chanted their famed slogan, “¡Que se vayan todos!”: “Out with all of them.” At a time when the North American Left was still enamored with “political correctness,” idolizing Bill Clinton and grudgingly accepting NAFTA’s damage to workers, the Argentine Left rekindled a spirit of defiance and vulgarity, determined to protest until technocrats listened.
This overlooked tradition—of “anti-anti-populism” rather than straightforward populism—deserves attention as more global leaders emerge bearing the “populist” label. Analysts in the US and UK have already noted a “Latin Americanisation” of their political landscapes; perhaps it is time to incorporate Latin America’s political discourse as well. If voices like Viñas, Rozitchner, and Laclau gained broader Anglophone readerships, they could offer valuable insights for the political Left. Amidst working-class disillusionment with progressive causes and their shift toward reactionary movements, these nearly forgotten Argentine thinkers remind us that not all who seek a fairer, kinder world do so with contempt.
Original article: unherd.com
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