Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding president-elect is a libertarian’s dream

Perhaps traditional democratic systems of government are in rude health after all. When a majority of the electorate can see that the prevailing orthodoxy is unsustainable, they ensure that it is no longer sustained. Last weekend, the Argentinian voters decided that the fruit being offered to them by the political elite was so rotten that they may as well upend the entire applecart. They have propelled the economist, showman and libertarian, Javier Milei, into the Presidential office.

Milei has not run on a reformist platform, instead he is promising a revolution. He is not offering short-term succour, but a full-blown overhaul of government to alter Argentina’s long-term trajectory. The public have voted for intensive surgery rather than palliative care.

His policy agenda makes a Thatcher or Reagan manifesto look like a mere tweak on a spreadsheet. Vast swathes of government departments will be closed, the central bank is to be shuttered and the country may abandon the peso in favour of the US dollar. State spending will be slashed. Milei has hardly made a secret of this – wielding a chainsaw above his head was a frequent feature of his campaign rallies.

To try and grasp the scale of Argentina’s woes, you could look at the problems afflicting much of the West and simply dial them up to maximum. If stubborn inflation here has fuelled a cost of living crisis, imagine the impact of prices increasing by nearly 150 per cent every year. We may be swimming in debt, Argentina is drowning it. Our state infrastructure is creaking, inefficient and pitifully wasteful; Argentina’s is in meltdown. Crony capitalism is a blight and affliction on our economy, over there it’s a full-blown cancer.

Argentina’s economic plight may be an extreme outlier and Milei may be the first leader in the modern world who properly can be characterised as a libertarian, but he’s part of a global democratic trend in which varieties of popular conservatism are on the rise. These exhibit a wide range of contrasting flavours in different jurisdictions, but there are some common features which are whetting the appetite of electorates almost everywhere.

In sections of the legacy media, this phenomenon is variously explained as the rise of the far right or by the observation that every nation now possesses its own version of Donald Trump. This is not merely over-simplified, it is wildly inaccurate. The Trump comparisons often amount to little more than noting that a politician exhibits an idiosyncratic hairstyle. What appears to be happening across the democratic world is that social democratic and statist structures – which have been the prevailing norm for decades – have reached breaking point and the electorate is noticing.

Central banks have been on a money-printing spree. Taxes have been pushed up to historically high levels and giant hikes in state spending have produced woeful results. Debts and deficits on eye-watering levels have become the norm. We are no longer on an escalator of prosperity on which we can expect to become more affluent with each passing year. Ladle on top of this an ever more yawning gap between the preoccupations of the political elites and the wider population and you have a recipe for radical, unexpected electoral outcomes.

Sizable chunks of the population are now latching themselves to mavericks who are broadly supportive of a market economy, deeply sceptical about the ability of a sprawling government system to address economic and social concerns and are focused on the key tasks that the state surely should be able to manage – such as the control of borders. A vast majority of modern electorates are disillusioned and a significant chunk are angry. Raging against the machine – rather than promising to be a well-behaved and compliant part of it – is now the route to electoral success.

But what makes Milei so exciting and different is that he has gone far beyond merely acting as a repository of fury and disenchantment. He actually has an intellectually coherent programme. He references economists such as Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises in mainstream media interviews. He waxes lyrical about “internalising externalities” – and people listen. He eschews the easy road of simply blaming his opponents for incompetence and mismanagement, rather he explains how the present systems are unmanageable whoever is in charge.

None of this means he is certain or even likely to succeed. His party has limited representation in the legislature and the range of vested interests ranged against him are awesome. He may only be able to deliver a subset of his stated programme for change – and it’s not clear how big a subset this will be. It is certainly easy to imagine he could fail.

But irrespective of how his government pans out, Milei’s victory marks a truly significant moment in the rise of pro-market, popular conservatism. This is the point at which the rise of the new radicals are no longer just shouting abuse at the status quo, but are able to put forward a compelling and consistent counter-narrative.

If he is even moderately successful, his recipe for renewal will rapidly spread beyond Argentina’s borders. Politics abhors a vacuum even more than nature does – and an appetite for change is widespread. This may be a new political credo cooked up in South America, but it would be no surprise if this free market, anti-statist option is available soon on ballot papers across the Western world.