In the Western world at least, 2024 will be remembered not only for the spectacular resurrection of Donald Trump who, if his many enemies were to be taken seriously, a couple of months ago was a political corpse destined to spend the rest of his days in a maximum security prison, but also because of the prominence achieved by Elon Musk, the hyperactive South African businessman living in the United States who is on his way to becoming the first trillionaire on the planet. In addition to decisively helping Trump recover the keys to the White House and, meanwhile, continuing to promote his very ambitious space project, Musk dealt a strong blow against the “progressive” enemies of freedom of expression by taking over the most social network. influential, Twitter, renaming it X, and immediately firing the censors who systematically excluded those opposed to woke doctrines.
Since then, Javier Milei’s partner in ideological adventures occupies a prominent place in leftist demonology. Many have become convinced that, in addition to being the richest man in the world, he is the most dangerous. To those who think so, Musk is an aggressive representative of a staggeringly wealthy technological elite that is reformatting the planet’s political landscape without taking into account the opinions and aspirations of its rulers, not to mention those of the other billions of people who they populate it. One word from Musk is enough to spark political storms in the United States and European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom, where it has become routine to accuse him of interfering in their internal affairs.
Musk is such a controversial figure because he has managed to combine the boundless optimism of the years following the Italian Renaissance with the apocalyptic pessimism that is typical of today’s world. At a time when there is a virtual consensus that it is foolish to spend money on “prestige” activities that do not produce immediate tangible benefits for the common man, it has been proposed to launch the colonization of Mars very soon by building cities the size of Mar del Plata for the first wave of pioneers; He says that it is urgent to conquer space in case the Earth becomes uninhabitable. He also warns that the very rapid fall in the birth rate in almost all countries of the developed West, China and other parts of the world could herald the extinction of the human species, something that is mathematically indisputable but that, except in Japan, Korea of South and Italy, is not a cause for much concern.
The indifference to the not-so-slow-motion collective suicide that is occurring can be attributed to the fact that there are other problems that are often considered more urgent, such as those related to climate change, which many believe could be stopped if prosperous countries agree to deindustrialize, thus impoverishing them. to the bulk of the population, and the willingness of a very large proportion of the inhabitants of poor and poorly governed countries to risk their lives in an attempt to relocate to the United States or Europe despite all the obstacles that arise. have been erected for the purpose of keeping them out.
The loss of faith on the part of the Western intelligentsia in the merits of its own civilization and the propensity, thanks to technological progress, of advanced economies to become increasingly less egalitarian, are contributing to the feeling that the order to which we have accustomed, his days are numbered. Not only Westerners themselves, but also their most bellicose enemies predict that the coming decades will be very different from the previous ones. In many intellectual circles, a climate similar to that prevailing a century ago has established itself when the survivors of the First World War feared that our civilization could self-destruct and premonitory works abounded, of which the most famous remains “The Decline of the West” by the German Oswald Spengler.
The confusion that so many feel as the year 2024 approaches its end is explainable; To the dismay of politicians and those who advise them, the forecasts on which they base their decisions continue to be distorted. Just twelve months ago, many reputable experts believed that Israel was retreating from Iran, whose leaders did not hide their pious desire to erase the “Zionist entity” and its inhabitants from the face of the Earth, and the “axis of resistance.” Shiite that the theocrats had expressed. Now, they believe that Israel, after having dismantled the jihadist militias of Hamas and Hezbollah that depend financially and militarily on Iran, is so radically changing the balance of power in the Middle East that the Ayatollahs’ Islamic Republic is in danger of sharing the fate. of the allied Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.
The fact that the world has already entered a period of change that is difficult to predict poses a challenge to those in charge of foreign policy in all countries, including, of course, Argentina. Fortunately, as things stand, it would seem that Milei was right when he chose to prioritize the relationship with the United States, personally approaching Trump and Musk before the presidential elections, and with Israel, which, to be more precise, is the only country of largely Western culture that has not seen the birth rate plummet. However, there are some who insist that it would be better for Argentina not to distance itself too much from China because it is an incipient superpower that, thanks to its demographic dimensions, is about to surpass the United States, if it has not already done so.
Are those who think this way correct? Probably not. To continue accumulating power, China would have to find solutions to the immense problem posed by a birth rate that is among the lowest in the world, less than the one that has the government of Japan in suspense and only a little above that recorded. in South Korea, where it is approximately “0.7” children per woman, which means that, after just fifty years, the population will have been reduced by half.
Needless to say, the awareness that China will not have the financial resources necessary to care for the expected hundreds of millions of retirees is causing a lot of unrest that, sooner or later, could have very important geopolitical consequences. Thus, while it would be sensible for the Milei government and its immediate successors to seek to take advantage of the current power of the Chinese economy, which, fortunately, is complementary to Argentina’s, it would be at least premature to assume that the rest of the 21st century will be dominated by Beijing or that the authoritarian “model” adopted by the Chinese Communist Party is superior to the liberal one.
The so-called “new right”, this informal alliance of political figures and groups that so alarms the largely progressive established power of the Western world, is a heterogeneous phenomenon that, in addition to conservatives and classical liberals who are fed up with the delirious excesses of the very influential cult woke, has adherents who do deserve to be described as “neofascists.”
All in all, if something characterizes the most redeemable supporters of the “new right”, it is optimism. Trump, Musk, the Italian Giorgia Meloni and, although the circumstances in which they find themselves are different, Milei, do not want to limit themselves to ensuring that the decline of their respective countries is as least traumatic as possible. On the contrary, they swear to believe that, as long as their leaders adhere to certain basic principles, the future will be much better than the past. This is what Trump promises when he declares his determination to restore “the greatness” of the United States and Musk when he talks about adding Mars to the human empire. Are both of you and others who express themselves similarly delusional? It is possible, but for the many who support them, the attitude they have assumed is much healthier than that of those who give the impression of having emotionally resigned themselves to seeing Western civilization, which, for the most vehement, has always been a criminal enterprise, replaced by very different ones.
Simplifying greatly, one could say that, in the democratic world, optimists are regaining ground that for several decades has been occupied by pessimists. They are waging, with increasing success, a “cultural battle” against those addicted to the demoralizing “self-criticism” of those who are convinced that the world in which they live very well is a piece of crap that will soon receive what it deserves. The reaction to the defeatism that is typical of Western academic elites and their allies in the entertainment and media industries may have come too late, but given the alternatives, what is happening is positive. Although it is undeniable that democracies are far from being perfect, they are clearly preferable to the dictatorial and intrinsically corrupt order offered to humankind by China, Russia or the societies of the convulsed Islamic world.
