2024-02-10 03:30:00
The political library has been surpassed: there are no books that explain Javier Milei’s government. Not because the revolution that Milei proposes is of such magnitude that no one has thought of it, but because nothing that the President of the Argentines does has anything to do with politics. He is the first democratically elected president in world history who does not want to govern. Javier Milei’s only interest is getting likes on Instagram and favs on Twitter. Milei is not a politician but an influencer who uses the political position he achieved in last November’s election to better position himself on social networks.
Milei shared on her networks a criticism of the 2024 Confluence Festival in Neuquén
For about 15 years, those who study cultural and political trends have been detecting that a considerable part of the population of democracies is fed up with traditional political forms and is betting on candidates who tell them that they are going to end the system. Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and the Dutch far-right are part of that movement that elevates politicians who promise to end (traditional) politics.
I put the “traditional” clarification in parentheses because both Bolsonaro like Trump (and the Dutch far-right or the Italian Meloni or the Spanish party Vox) rather than ending politics they want to end a progressive way of doing politics: a progressivism that began by endorsing the expansion of new rights and has ended up hunting witches for saying an “incorrect” joke. And all this while economic inequality and the loss of purchasing power of salaries condemns the less privileged to live worse and worse.
But neither Vox nor the Dutch far-right, and even less so Bolsonaro or Trump (despite the disruptive forms of their politics) were really anti-political militants. In reality, they are conservatives or reactionaries who want to impose a right-wing policy (from a conservative right to an extreme right, bordering on fascism or Nazism).
It is not that they want to end political forms, but rather that they want to end the predominance of the left and the social democratic parties and install a reactionary politics.
Milei is also spiritually and ideologically reactionary: he wants to turn the world back. Like all reactionaries, he sees the ideal he wants to reach in the past: he wants to revive the 19th century.
He wants to erase the 20th century and its legacy of struggles for the rights of the oppressed. All of this (from Martin Luther King to Mahatma Gandhi, from women’s suffrage to the end of racial discrimination, including the rights of workers to have vacations and bonuses) seems to him a communist invention to destroy the paradise that was, in his view. the world, the 19th century.
But Milei’s fight is not political. He does not want to establish a reactionary government (although everything he does is in that direction). He wants there to be no government. Not only is he against the existence of the State – except for using the security forces to repress those who protest: his liberalism is very strange, since he does not tolerate anyone who thinks differently than him -, He is against the government governing: that is, planning, managing, solving problems, proposing plans.
I thought during the first month of Milei that I didn’t know how to govern. Does not know. He doesn’t have the slightest idea. Milei is as ignorant about state politics and government as he is about nuclear physics.
But that doesn’t matter to him because (I discovered it very recently) he doesn’t want to govern: he wants to get likes. He wants to be applauded on social media. He wants to be applauded. He goes to Israel to dance at the Wailing Wall. Everywhere he goes with his production team of images worked by artificial intelligence to make his body (chubby, aged, with a double chin and wrinkles) look like that of a comic book character. He dreams of being a hero from a Marvel comic, like Batman or The Flash.
All the energy of his government is put into producing events that can be seen on Instagram. He goes to Mar del Plata to kiss Fátima Flórez in the style of the PornHub videos on the stage where she does an imitation show. There is in that virtual play that Milei performs all the time a metaphor for her rule: he pretends to kiss, he pretends to govern, he pretends to be a superhero, he pretends to be skinny, cute and without a double chin.
We are the first country to have a ruler who does not govern. It is not that he governs badly or well. He doesn’t want to govern. He just wants to Instagram.
For that, due to the role he chose to play (“President of the Argentine Nation”) he has to pretend that he governs, but he does it ironically, as a joke. 56% chose that last November. I don’t know if now that he sees it in action he likes it as much.
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#triumph #antipolitics