Since 2018 I have been investigating the new extreme rights: first with Bolsonaro in Brazil, then with Trump, Kast, Vox and Milei. What happens today in Argentina is not a surprise. Already in September 2023 I warned that if the traditional right validated Milei, I could end like the PSDB in Brazil or the Chilean right after the rise of Kast. And that happened. A privileged look was not needed to see it: the pattern was already in sight.
Pandemia and macrismo destroyed something deep: the fabric that supported the social expectation of the future, the idea that collective still made sense. Macrismo delegitimized politics. The pandemic broke the link with the State as a protection guarantor.
Therefore, more than an accident or an anomaly, Milei is the character designed for this planned demolition.
His personal history – loneliness, isolation, the exclusive link with his dogs, emotional distance with others – is not a picturesque detail. Is a functional personality to the most cruel and uninhibited neoliberalism.
You do not need to empathize with the social pain it produces: it is structurally enabled to ignore it. That indifference does not limit it, it makes it useful.
He has no party links to condition him. It does not negotiate with social actors. It does not rule from the enlightened reason, but from emotional excess, hatred and revenge. His madness does not delegitimate it: he defines it. And it makes it effective.
Milei is not a diversion of the system. It is the brutal executor that certain sectors of power needed to advance on rights, public goods and democratic structures.
That profile – the executor without empathy – could only be imposed because in front there was no alternative that could awaken illusion again.
Sergio Massa made a good electoral campaign. He lucidly narrated the authoritarian danger, gathered what was left of the Peronist front, held the unbeatable. But he was already convicted of his role as Minister of Economy of a government aimless. He was the best possible candidate to stop Milei and, at the same time, the most unfeasible to arouse hope. His image was tied to the concrete experience of economic failure.
Progressism, then, He was not defeated by lack of reason, but for his inability to rebuild desire.
And yet, the rise of Milei orHe called for society to face the broken mirror. To see the nakedness of the system. To verify that there is not enough firmness or organization to resist it because what we had to sustain us was already broken: the exhausted political system, the weakened organizations, the collective desire disintegrated.
Why a society like Argentina, who knew how to resist hard onslaught, is today dismantled?
Because the circulation of information, the ideal of entrepreneurship and technological capitalism reconfigured life forms. Today the algorithms, money and links move differently.
Against that you also have to resist. And get again.
Not from nostalgia, but from new forms of community, desire and organization.
Because if the future is in dispute, we cannot let it be administered by the cruelty disguised as freedom.
*By Ariel Goldstein, sociologist and writer of “The authoritarian reconquest” and “The Fourth Ola” (Editorial Marea).
By Ariel Goldstein
