“What the fuck are your cultural battles, if you are afraid of sidereal artists”, he sang in 2014 Fito Páez to Julia Mengolini, journalist related to Kirchnerism.
The “culture battle”a concept brought to the center of the debate by the intellectual group Open Letter in 2008showed a progressive, national and popular field on the offensive against a mobilized right after the agricultural conflict.
This term has currently been reappropriated by influencers and writers of the radical right such as Agustín Laje. “We are the struggle, the combat, the resistance that is born,” says the song from his documentary “Dear Resistance,” which has been seen by hundreds of thousands on YouTube and imitates an aesthetic of the musical group Calle 13.
javier milei He defended this “cultural battle” when he said in one of his books in 2015 that “if society does not change its values, we are doomed to sink into the most absurd misery.” The same happened with the concept of “caste”, which has traveled from the leftist party Podemos in Spain to be reappropriated by La Libertad Avanza.
It is an epochal climate at the international level embodied by Trump, Vox and Bolsonaro. The offensive is now from the radical right, which knows how to offer itself as an anti-system alternative and generate promises for the future. The defense of a “cultural battle” is heard in young militants of the radical right of Spain, El Salvador, Mexico, Hungary and Peru. Part of the effectiveness of this speech consists in denouncing the criticisms of their speeches that they stigmatize as biased by “political correctness” and the desire to impose “censorship”.
“Fucking lefties are losing the culture battle,” it read. Milei with Canosa in 2022. The libertarian is defining the campaign agenda. “Dollarization” and “bearing arms” are topics of debate. The left and the progressives, on the contrary, are like the boxer who receives a blow and is stunned in the back of the ring, not knowing how to position himself in the ring again. It is not just an electoral issue.
* By Ariel Goldstein, professor and researcher at Conicet, author of “The Authoritarian Reconquest” (Marea, 2022)
by Ariel Goldstein*
