Bronze Age Pervent

The election this year in Argentina has elevated to international stardom Javier Milei. His theatrical performances and comic passion, energy on camera remind people of Trump, Bolsonaro and other anti-establishment manic-charismatic champions in recent years. These rose up mostly as a result of people’s justified desperation at the failure of modern governments to address problem of decline of life: cities dilapidated by crime, economic sclerosis, zombi mass migration. It’s not even completely right to call them “populists,” as when, because of a personal failure of nerve from individuals like Trump and Bolsonaro, many pundits jumped since 2020 and 2021 or so to proclaim “the populist moment is over, the globalist technocrats have won.” Such a frame misunderstands the fundamental modern problem, which is declining human capital, a fact of life that is being felt first of all in governance worldwide.

In some countries it was possible to label critics of stupid government “populists,” but this wasn’t true everywhere and even in Brazil, Bolsonaro wasn’t elected on the votes of the poor and the many, but on campaigning against left-wing Red demagogues who had run the Brazilian economy and life off a cliff, and on behalf of well-to-do farmers and small businessmen. The frame that a “populist moment” that never in fact existed and never was the thing that mattered is “over” is also based on individual accidents — in particular the character, experiences, and decisions of Bolsonaro and Trump themselves. But their personal hesitations don’t mean the problems that led to the rise of these men in the first place have disappeared. Nor are these problems four-dimensional Machiavellian “chess” on the part of an actually competent shadowy “elite” that is in fact “profiting” from the disorder; there is no cynical manipulator of events… things really are that stupid, and there’s no one competent at the wheel of events. Thus there will be Trumps, Bolsonaros, and Mileis going forward every year or so, and not all will have the same personal hangups. The next few decades are likely to be exciting.

Milei becoming a star, however, has led to some uncomfortable moments as many on “antiestablishment” and “dissident” spheres, both right and left, have paid any close attention to content of his words beyond the comedy. Quickly they notice he is “libertarian” and asking for reductions in government spending, government programs and size, and calling for the elimination of government departments. This goes against the Dissident Talking Points that have emerged since 2017, which dismiss Libertarianism as a “basic bitch” ideology, identify all free market rhetoric with the old guard of the GOP that Trump destroyed in the 2015-6 primaries, and are largely based on “economic populist” or “economic nationalist” positions vaguely identified with Steve Bannon or called “Bannonite.” Like all enduring Talking Points, these have some truth, maybe even 60% of truth behind them. Libertarianism, both in the form pushed by theoretical ideologues whether from Cato or Mises Institutes, or in the lite-political form pushed by the Jack Kemp wing of the GOP exemplified by men like Paul Ryan, was largely discredited not just by Trump but by manifest failures in the years leading up to 2016. The failures were of two kinds. A full discussion of these failures of rhetoric, practice, or in the case of genuine and honest Ron Paul-style libertarianism simple inability to contest in democratic political struggle — for whatever reasons — is very interesting but should be left for another time. I want to address for a moment the “Bannonite” and “economic populist” consensus that has emerged on the dissident spheres so-called of the right for the last few years, and which is now being pushed in its major zines and publications acting as the public voice of a supposed “resistance.” It is because of the widespread acceptance of this orthodoxy — really a set of unexamined talking points — that the right increasingly sounds like a version of Chomskyite Marxoid professor in cheap tuna-stained blazer, droning on about the IMF, the WEF, Neoliberalism, the supposed problem of “hypercapitalism” and Capital, “atomization,” “destruction of native and traditional communities”; while stomping with a kind of self-important frisson for “an engagement with socialism,” “class analysis,” “postracial multiracial working class democracy,” as if these things were the newest and most revolutionary ideas and as if there was a genuine prospect of being the vanguard of millions of urban proletarians against the bourgeois “Anglo Liberal” order.

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