Javier Milei is not just a former rock star, owner of five cloned dogs and self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist.” Although he was the favorite in the Argentine presidential elections of October 22, he came in second place obtaining 29.9 percent of the votes and on November 19 he will compete with Sergio Massa who will be the next president of the country. Milei’s figure has led many experts to wonder about the meaning of her candidacy.
Some commentators have described Javier Milei as a “right-wing”, “far-right” or “populist” candidate, and not without reason. He has given eloquent support to politicians such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, and, during a recent interview with conservative host Tucker Carlson, rejected the movement Black Lives Matter, LGBTI ‘ideology’, feminism and climate change, saying it is all part of an international “socialist agenda”.
Others say Milei is best understood as a principled libertarian, statement that they also defend with evidence. After all, he is a professional economist with an approach based on the “Austrian school” methodology popularized by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Milei developed his ideas under the tutelage of Alberto Benegas Lynch, whose Center for Studies for Freedom helped create and maintain the Argentine tradition of classical liberalism in the hostile environment of Peronism.
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Finally, unlike populists like Bolsonaro, who threatened violence if he saw two men kissing on the street, Milei has a “live and let live” stance on many social issues, That is why it defines homosexuality as a personal choice that must be respected and supports both gay marriage and the rights of transsexuals.
Populist and libertarian
In this debate, the defenders of the two analyzes of Milei’s political profile believe that they have mutually exclusive views: that he is a radical individualist libertarian, in the image and likeness of Ayn Rand (the philosopher who promoted libertarian thought), or that he is a right-wing populist in the style of Hungarian Prime Minister Víktor Orbán.
In reality, Milei is both, and there’s nothing particularly unusual or surprising about this combination. As John Tomasi and I document in our recent history of libertarian thought, The Individualists, Libertarianism is an intrinsically flexible ideology, which throughout its almost two hundred years of history has had both radical and reactionary forms.
In the 19th century, for example, libertarians such as Lysander Spooner and Voltairine de Cleyre They were at the forefront of a number of progressive social movements. Libertarians were radical abolitionists, fighters for women’s rights, permanent critics of militarism and colonialism and even, in some cases, opponents of the exploitation of workers and private ownership of land.
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But in the middle of the 20th century, Libertarianism began to turn to the right. Faced with the common threat of socialism, America’s libertarians forged an uneasy alliance with conservatives to fight the New Deal at home and international communism abroad. The defense of economic freedom came to the fore, to the detriment of the radical criticism of state capitalism and social hierarchies.
The base and the variables
So even assuming Milei is a libertarian, that doesn’t tell us much about what his government might be like. Although all libertarians are committed to private property, the free market, and limiting state action, Those ideas are subject to a wide variety of interpretations that make possible shifts both towards progressivism and towards reactionary positions.
An example is Milei’s opposition to legal abortion. That position is probably in the minority among American libertarians, who mostly consider that women have the right to sovereignty over their bodies. But Pro-life libertarians like Milei will say that the unborn child has rights too.
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Likewise, many American libertarians oppose the “war on drugs” and restrictive immigration policies, which they see as examples of coercive state interference in people’s peaceful and voluntary decisions. But in these matters Milei has a more conservative position, to which a libertarian rationalization can also be found., since the modern welfare state has created a world in which taxpayers must sometimes pay for other people’s decisions. What if legalizing drugs or opening borders means more taxes for current citizens (which for libertarians is synonymous with more coercion)?
After all, it is relatively easy for an intelligent philosopher (or an opportunistic politician) to find a plausible libertarian justification for almost any policy proposal. In the case of Milei has already given sufficient indications that he plans to apply a libertarian agenda with a decidedly populist tendency.
In the United States, the “paleolibertarianism” of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell gives us an idea of what a libertarian populism might look like. In the early 1990s, this school supported racist politicians such as David Duke and was a supporter of a (very restrictive) nativist immigration policy and violent police repression against criminals and “vagrants.” Positions that have re-emerged since the Trump presidency, and have even become dominant in the US Libertarian Party.
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So that, Lovers of individual freedom should be careful before supporting Milei. It is true that he is a libertarian and that libertarians believe in individual freedom. But the questions that really matter are: whose freedom? And what specific policies does the defense of that freedom imply? Milei’s answers may not be what many other libertarians (or anyone) would want to hear.
MATT ZWOLINSKI*
© Project Syndicate
San Diego
Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy at the University of San Diego.
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