It has been one year since President Javier Milei took office and weeks have passed since Donald Trump’s victory. It is a fact that has already been reiterated that there were and will be important changes in the forms and substance of politics, in the election of candidates and in the way of exercising power.
The days that are passing until the inauguration of this second Trump presidency, on January 20, 2025, are bringing us some surprises and greater certainties than before the election. The final result of a victory for Trump and the Republican Party, against their Democratic Party opponents, gave him a margin much higher than the meager numbers that previous polls and calculations gave him. Once again, the polls and electoral projections were wrong. It would seem that this fact is repeated in the last elections in different countries, including Argentina.
On the other hand, Donald Trump’s communication style, disruptive, aggressive, challenging and different from previous ones, is widespread in the rest of America, Europe and Asia. “Good manners” and political correctness do not currently generate a flow of votes. This new aggressive and disruptive style seems to be what the electorate rewards.
It is not possible to frame the new leaders who emerged unexpectedly in the last decade under the traditional parameters of “right” and “left.” The populists now proclaim ideas from the old right and the immobilists are more similar to the old left.
The center was, as a political category, depopulated, and the way of doing politics that is successful is bravado and quarrelsome, which does not respect limits and seeks to impose its absolute truth.
Politics, the electorate and social networks. Among the mutations in the way of doing politics, the surprise is the influence of social networks on voter decision-making. Campaigns and persuasion techniques are no longer seen exclusively on the street or in traditional media. Networks influence and move the wills of a very large mass of voters, especially young people. Donald Trump was clear about this change in the form of the message and the channels to conduct politics in the 2016 election and ratified it in 2024. Javier Milei used it in 2023. Communication networks and actions had a lot of influence on the final results that surprised political analysts and predictors of electoral results.
This change in the forms and channels of information through which the electorate makes the decision of how and who to vote, is a relevant cultural change. Democracy as a participatory form of government that we know as the best and most efficient to respect rights and wills, is the most used in the West for more than 200 years. But it was conceived and designed after wars, invasions and forced migrations, when humanity had only primitive means of transportation, driven by the force of nature, and communications were carried out exclusively in writing and on paper. These forms have changed, the available communication tools have multiplied and structurally mutated, and society has experienced a disruptive change and an exponential acceleration in the way it informs itself and decides.
In this sense, one of the protagonists of this change who perceived them best is Elon Musk. On October 27, 2022, it bought the social network that at that time was called Twitter, and renamed X Corp., for US$44 billion. At the time Musk carried out this notorious operation, I was surprised that a successful electric car manufacturer (Tesla), owner of an artificial intelligence company (xAI), a company that develops brain chips (Neurolink), a infrastructure (The Boring Company), a satellite communications company (Starlink) and a private space exploration company (Space X), among other initiatives, paid that sum of money to have the ability to manage a social network. But what Musk was thinking about was the power of said network, and the ability he was acquiring to manage it at his convenience.
The possibility of managing Politics and its proselytism are currently carried out on the networks and not only on the streets or in the traditional media. Analysts must design new tools to be able to quantitatively evaluate voters.
On the other hand, when Trump was excluded from the formerly called Twitter and Facebook, he decided to create his own network that he called “Truth Social”, to “promote freedom of expression.” This was announced in October 2021 (after being suspended from the other networks as of January of that year) and officially launched in February 2022. This network was also actively used in the last presidential election.
These tools, added to the economic, social and political conditions existing at the time of the election, and the use of a certain amount of traditional electoral advertising, gave the Republican candidate a resounding victory, well above the forecast estimates.
The politician and the businessman. Trump and Musk have a very great and unhidden personal closeness and ideological harmony. Quite the contrary, they both exhibit it and both act on it, as a reality that strengthens the electoral victory and the dissemination of the common ideas of both about economics, politics and world strategy. Musk became Trump’s reference consultant and will have a special position in the new government, advising him on strategic issues, the debureaucratization of the State and the opening of trade barriers. It seems contradictory that a president who won an election, in part by preaching protectionism, has as an advisor someone who calls for the fall of tariff barriers and no respect for intellectual property (he understands that all innovation must be in the public domain). A second contradiction will give rise to a potential conflict of interest, when the person in charge of the “deregulation” and “debureaucratization” of the State is one of the most important contractors of the United States government.
Research and development of new services (roads that cross cities underground for high-speed transit, satellite communications, exploration and population of outer space, etc.) that until recently generated public goods, are no longer possible to continue. in charge of the State. Society demands lower tax pressure and better management of public resources. At the same time, the rulers are not in a position to expose themselves to failures in investigations, which directly imply, for public opinion, ineffective management of contributors’ resources. The principle of subsidiarity of the State is enshrined in facts and in a new way: it does not do what individuals can do. The State buys the results of research and private investment.
Individuals (in this case, Musk) enter into million-dollar contracts with the State and invest their resources at their own risk to deliver the result of their investment. The State buys from individuals the goods and services that it previously created. The relationship is disrupted: the person who has the resources to invest in research and development is the individual, and the person who buys the result generated by that investment is the State. And individuals, with their good management, would make the generation of these public goods economically profitable.
The difference between one model and management and the other is in the originality, innovation and efficiency of the private management of the projects, very different from the public one and stripped of the policy components and the periodicity of the positions. The alternation and temporary duration in public positions, which is one of the essential characteristics of democracy, inevitably generates a time horizon of views and projects that is contrary to long-term business visions.
This inevitable narrowness of time is another reason why, except in rare cases of issues taken as state policies by stable countries, hard research has moved from the public to the private sector. A concrete fact in which the principle of subsidiarity is practically reflected.
In this case, a question is raised, shared with some analysts and developed in recent weeks regarding Musk’s incorporation into the Government: if the person who must think about how to debureaucratize the State is one of the largest contractors of the United States Government, is there not a manifest incompatibility in your person or at least an almost unresolvable conflict of interest? Does the deregulator really have an interest in reducing the State if contracting with it has one of its main sources of income?
Conclusion. Democracy, an unquestionably egalitarian form of government, which is the fairest created by man (under our parameters at the beginning of the 21st century) as it was thought and lived for more than 200 years, has changed in its form of exercise. The representatives elected by the citizens are not known directly by them, but rather we receive an image created by the electoral machines themselves and the media.
This fact, which is inevitable due to the lack of immediacy between voters and candidates in increasingly larger societies, means that the intermediations between them are inevitably conditioned by the values and interests of the intermediaries.
When non-controllable or non-measurable communication channels are created between candidates and voters, the results are much more unpredictable than in the past, as well as much more influenceable than before, when the new tools available are used.
The way of relating, informing and making decisions changed in society. Before, personal contacts and face-to-face meetings were the way to raise awareness. Now presence has turned to virtuality and contact on the web.
However, the system of electing rulers in democracy remained unchanged. In the best of cases, in some countries and elections, remote voting is allowed; but it is not generalized. This restriction and condition is based on the undeclared conviction that the voting citizen continues to inform himself and make his electoral decision in the nineteenth-century political rallies, or in society clubs, or by reading a pamphlet distributed on a corner of the city.
Some of the winning candidates warned that society had changed. But others are not and those who have the responsibility of taking care of democracy seem not to have been aware of these changes, which must be taken into account when redefining the regulation of the rules of the game.
Democracy must be defended and strengthened, but it must be taken into account that the reality to be legislated is not that of the 19th century, but that of the 21st century. The State gradually stops doing the things it did before, because it becomes aware of its limitations. And individuals are better at developing and delivering public goods than in the past.
There is a displacement of the borders between public affairs and private management. It is requested and beginning to achieve that the State is reduced and allows individuals to do things that it did before. But the individual must be controlled and possible conflicts of interest prevented.
If what is in question is the new role of the State and the way in which citizens become aware and exercise our rights, it may be necessary to begin to rethink the instrumental forms of democracy. Personally, I predict a future of greater exercise of individual rights with greater freedom, leveraging this phenomenon on the withdrawal of the State and the proliferation, cheapening and consequent popularization of new technologies.
*Marcelo Loprete is a lawyer (UBA) and a Doctor in Business Law (U. de Navarra, Spain).
by Marcelo Loprete
