There are phrases that sound liberal but, repeated enough, become dogma. One of them is: “unrestricted respect for the life project of others.” The mantra is an essential part of the Milestone story and is parallel to that of “the ideas of freedom.” It is a phrase written by Alberto Benegas Lynch many years ago, which Milei repeated a lot during his first electoral campaign, and it does not reflect his feelings or actions at all.
To define liberalism, it does not work. If we look at the newly elected mayor in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, he talks about marginalized life projects in the “libertarian” world, which are fuel for his populism, and he is called a communist for that. He may not be a complete liberal, but for the original Benegas Lynch he would be much more so than his current fellow militants. The supposed definition was actually intended to romanticize the purposes of those who repeated it. Before it sounded purely emotional; now she strips like a fake.
Milei says about himself with her that he is the complete opposite of what we see him to be. It’s even thicker makeup than her flirtatiousness requires. But it suited him because of the very characteristics of the language it contains.
Liberalism does not talk about anyone’s life project. And it is logical that this is so, because he does not have a “neighbor” in the first place. The phrase itself constructs others that the we, good, broad and generous, respects. Liberalism is a thought that is put in front of individuals in an impersonal way, so that it would never get into what types of life projects there are, unless some are threatened and at risk, in order to defend them. Something that MAGA-mileist liberals not only do not do, but are part of the threat. Liberalism talks about freedom, it does not make a point of respecting what it should actually celebrate.
The author’s son, the affiliate deputy Alberto Benegas Lynch (Bertie), keeps repeating that this “respect” is limited to mentioning it, because he immediately clarifies that “it does not mean that they force me” to accept what others do. Of course, his entire analysis is limited to sex and sexuality: it is the hidden soul of the cultural battle, an overstimulated Freudian hecatomb. Bertie is not just the father’s son; It is the child of the phrase itself, it is its product.
The don’t force me to accept solution is all there is to know for the nature of this liberalism. You could say: I respect that people jump over the Berlin Wall. Do I respect nothing more? But don’t force me to accept it? I respect that your skin is a different color, but don’t force me to accept it. Everything dissected from the history behind it for a reason. Can you be liberal without applauding freedom?
Respect is not enough. Respect does not define. And, in general, it is not even fulfilled, with the rather crude expedient of associating what others are or choose—or accept about themselves, something that greatly irritates those who do not accept themselves—with impositions or public spending. Opus Dei marriages do not seem to increase public spending by multiplying allowances for children or tax deductions for large families. But whoever contributes to that system and will be fiscally punished for not procreating or adopting, because he wants to sleep with even more neighborly neighbors, will find himself put under the police force of the projects that make him uncomfortable instead of a budgetary burden and imposition. More cynicism is not achieved. An unrestricted respect that covers up an unrestricted interference, victimizing the aggressor.
The attempt at definition seems rather to want to proclaim virtue than to get closer to the object, to put the user above it in a place of value. But someone who has to say that he respects others so many times makes us suspect something else. Similarly, liberalism could be defined as “avoiding hitting people with your car”: it would sound strange, right? What kind of achievement is that?
And furthermore, what is so special about life projects over simple choices? Does everything have to be part of something big? Doesn’t liberalism also respect those who simply live as they can and see their projects frustrated or are not even able to think of one? Talking about something as comprehensive as “life projects” is suspicious: it is a language that shows more by what it does not say than by what it does say, just like “cultural battle.” Since everything is sex in moral definitions within a great repressive apparatus, the translation emerges clearly, as does the compulsion to disguise it; The other has no feelings, no other emotional needs as valid as ours: he is a stranger, he lives in a distant land that is directly another completely different life project.
The use of the term neighbor also reveals a lot about its origin and its framework. It is a Christian concept. “We are good,” these Christians say, and some are—although not because they are Christians, in my opinion. It is a Christianity that wants to talk more about itself than to assume consistent responsibility. They say neighbor so as not to name those they do not consider an equal. His soul is deeply moralistic, exclusionary and mileistic. Be careful: moralist is not moral. I don’t know any moralist who is worthy of being highlighted from a moral point of view, quite the opposite. The moralist is another unrestricted respecter of things that he does not want to practice. He replaces obligations that he himself does not want to fulfill with rhetoric that weighs on others. Every puritan hides a stinking cellar. It is like an ill-gotten freedom of not being what one believes one should be, emphatically passing on the obligation to others, sometimes reaching the level of political action.
Outside of the definition of a thought like liberalism, defining those who follow it is more complex. Is Father Grassi a Christian? Probably, but it doesn’t seem to be enough for his love of neighbor to be trusted and represent what his sermons say. The truth is that something else would be expected of him being a Christian. But it doesn’t worry much to some. They choose who is a reprobate to be disowned and who is a sinner to be understood. That’s the whole system. Those who commit the most horrible acts are the ones understood, they are simple mortals. Those who choose for themselves are communists, baboons. Some are their Somozas, their dictators.
Consistent liberals respect others. Some yes, some no. But just as for the Christian the motto is to love (so feminine that the cultists of lost masculinity cannot even say it), for the liberal it would be to celebrate others pursuing their purposes. It’s not “I’m so good”; It is rather: I am like the others, it is not strange to me that there are multiple choices.
You don’t have to be liberal to respect others, on the other hand. It is necessary to understand the differences as wealth. Once that horizon of the projects of others that “respect” each other is drawn, the fruits of which we already see, everything is a trick. Respect is seen today outside the ranks of that craziest liberalism in history and nothing within. Nominal liberals, on issues such as the end of slavery, feminism or segregation, did not have any role.
Consistent liberals do not respect that everyone does what they want because they do not put themselves in the place of someone who is generous with such strange others. Maybe they are the ones who need to be looked at and accepted, and not the “neighbor.” Consistent liberals do not say “don’t force me to accept,” because they do not consider their acceptance to have any value to even proclaim how they are going to administer it. The incoherent, on the other hand, will consider any rule of behavior that excludes aggression as an attack on their freedom to express themselves as someone who respects nothing. For the coherent, every act of liberation is a conquest for humanity.
The coherent liberal applauds everyone who expresses themselves and shows themselves, who differentiates themselves, who does daring things, who takes risks and breaks social molds. That’s where you find your own security. You cannot understand economics as liberal books describe it without understanding that. Uniformity is what is dangerous.
The coherent liberal necessarily identifies with those who are vulnerable to power, not with those who exercise it in a condescending manner while shouting one thing and practicing another.
Liberalism could be defined simply as the political organization that seeks to eliminate the rule of the strongest. Mileism is the law of the strongest in the name of freedom.
That is why the phrase ended as it should have ended: being the coverage of a project that invades private life and is an enemy of diversity like no other.
by José Benegas
