The Resistible Rise of the Dog-Men

Javier Milei and the Psychotic Edge of Neo-Liberalism

In Leonardo Padura’s epic study of the assassination of Leon Trotsky The Man Who Loved Dogs, the tenderness which both the fictional Trotsky and his assassin feel towards dogs is the common point of humanity between them, as they follow their mutually-terrifying trajectories through the murderous politics of twentieth century communism.

By all accounts Javier Milei, the former tantric-yoga instructor and libertarian economist, who has just been elected president of Argentina, also loves dogs. Milei once had an English mastiff called Conan, and he believes that the two of them met for the first time in a previous life in the Roman Collosseum, where Milei fought as a gladiator.

According to Milei, he and Conan agreed not to fight each other that day, because the dog was destined to become his counsellor and help him achieve his political ambitions. Conan fulfilled this role until he died in 2017, whereupon his bereft owner contacted the animal through a medium. In the course of these telepathic conversations, Conan told Milei that God wanted him to become president, and so in 2018 Milei had Conan cloned, so that his canine consigliere could continue to advise him.

It worked well, so well that this procedure produced five versions of the same dog, which means that Milei has five canine counsellors. One of them is called Conan, and three others are named after Milei’s favourite economists. According to the Argentine media, Milei regularly seeks their advice on political and economic matters, and who would not want to be a fly on the wall during these sessions?

Even by twenty-first century standards, this is an unusual political journey. And as touching as Milei’s cynophilia might be, there was once a time, in the days when something called normal politics existed, when very few voters would have considered placing a man like this in charge of their country.

But politics in the western world has not been normal for a long time. And 14.5 million Argentinian voters - a whopping 56 percent of the electorate - have just elected a president who seeks counsel from his five hounds; who waved a chainsaw around at his rallies; who shouts and rants at anyone who contradicts him; who has called the pope a ‘filthy leftist’, and claimed to hear voices talking to him while being interviewed in an empty tv studio.

Libertyland

None of this was hidden; such behaviour was part of Milei’s very public ‘wolverine’ persona. And then there are the policies. The self-styled ‘anarcho-capitalist’ from ‘libertyland’ wants his fellow-citizens to be able to sell their organs on the open market and sell their babies too, because why not? He also wants to eliminate state-funded education and healthcare, replace severance payments to workers fired without cause with unemployment insurance, and privatise everything in sight, because, he argues - or was it Conan? - ‘It has been proven that anything the public sector does, it does it wrong.’

Like all extreme-right/libertarian ’populists’, Milei is anti-climate change (a ‘socialist lie’), anti-feminist, anti-LGBT rights, and anti-anything that intrudes on his right to absolute freedom. His antipathy to the state doesn’t extend to the army and police, however. Milei wants more police, with greater powers to crack down on ‘delinquency’. He wants to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 14, and ‘revalorise’ the Argentine armed forces. Milei questions the numbers of deaths and disappearances carried during the 1976-82 dictatorship’s campaign of state terrorism. He wants to close down the ESMA human rights museum, in the former torture centre at the Navy Mechanical School in Buenos Aires, which I visited this year.

His vice-president and possible security minister is Victoria Villarruel, a passionate defender of the dictatorship, and a co-signatory of the 2020 ‘Madrid Accord’ - an anti-communist alliance created by the Spanish fascist Vox party that sees communism even in places and institutions where communism has long since vanished or never been present.

Some of these more out-there policies were put on mute during the presidential run off, in order to avoid terrifying wavering voters. And already Milei’s plans to dolarise the Argentinian economy have been put on hold, though not his plan to abolish the central bank. Argentina is a country with strong labour unions and a strong civil society, and it remains to be seen whether he will be able to push all his ‘reforms’ through. But the indisputable fact remains: he is the president, and a man like this should not be sitting in the Casa Rosada or any other governmental institution.

When I was in Argentina earlier this year, I heard enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that many voters despised their incumbent government, and were not necessarily disposed to put it back in power, let alone go leftwards. So on one level, Milei’s victory is the latest grim chapter in the tragic historical enigma that is Argentina: a country that until the 1930s seemed destined to become one of the great world powers, and since then has been in an almost constant state of crisis, despite its wealth of natural resources.

With a history like this, Milei’s promise to ‘make Argentina great again’ has a very specific if nebulous resonance, regardless of whether it is actually achievable. And then there is the economy. Inflation in Argentina currently stands at 143 percent, which has pushed some 40 percent of the population below the poverty line. So there is no reason why many Argentinians should feel warmly about the government they have just thrown out.

But still…a poor set of choices shouldn’t mean that you make the worst of all the choices available, should it?

After all, you don’t help the poor by slashing the programmes that provide them with what little assistance they receive. You don’t make people wealthier by adopting the dollar as your main currency when you don’t even have enough currency reserves to pay for it, and when you also plan to abolish your main instrument - the central bank - for controlling monetary policy if things go wrong.

You don’t achieve greatness by electing a ranting, foul-mouthed maverick to the presidency, or by closing Argentina’s National Cinema Institute and CONICET - a scientific institution that any country that considered itself ‘great’ would be proud of. And yet all this is part of Milei’s ‘chainsaw plan’, and it feels disturbingly like regurgitated Milton Friedman vandalism from the Pinochet era mixed with culture war-era ranting demagoguery.

It all threatens to intensify the political and economic stresses of a democracy that remains more fragile than most, where the sinister legacies of political violence and state terror have yet to be laid to rest.

The Insurgent Curve

Milei’s triumph is also another dire symptom of the extremist right-wing virus that has been spreading through western democracies ever since Americans decided that an extreme-right wing reality tv star and brazenly-crooked businessman with a well-established reputation for sexual harassment and even rape, would make a suitable president.

And, lest we forget, that same man could become president again, despite more than 90 criminal charges against him. So Argentina’s embrace of the dog-man is very much part of the extreme-right insurgent curve that is wreaking havoc on democracies across the world. As if we needed any more proof, Geert Wilders picked up 37 seats in the Dutch elections a week later, with an anti-immigrant message and - you guessed it - a pledge to ‘make the Dutch number 1 again.’

All this is good news - to some. This is why Twitter was awash with trolls from way beyond Argentina posting images of young Argentinians crying after Milei’s victory, because cruelty is the point here, as it always is with these people. Dog-men hunt in packs, and Milei was visited by Tucker Carlson before his election victory, and instantly congratulated by Donald Trump, by Vox’s Santiago Abascal, by Jair Bolsonaro (another dog lover), and also - surprise, surprise! - by Elon Musk, who tweeted happily that ‘Prosperity is ahead for Argentina’. Of course it is, Elon.

Rocket Boy has made his extreme right sympathies increasingly clear these last few months, and no one should be surprised that he accompanied his inane ‘History has been made today’ tweet with the Trumpie/militia variant on the Gadsden flag.

Milei also got a warm response from the markets, and from cryptocurrency leaders. All these people see Milei as one of them, or at least as someone who can benefit them financially. So if Milei is insane, his insanity is part of a wider social and political insanity. To put it more precisely, he is yet another freakish manifestation of the psychotic edge of neo-liberalism, where tech bros, millionaires, fascists, and white nationalists all swirl together in the same locust-like formations, eating away at divided, paranoid, and increasingly insecure democracies and proclaiming their sociopathic relish for liberal/leftist ‘tears’.

These are sado-movements that deliberately target minorities in order to win majorities; that attack migrants, asylum seekers and LGBT communities in order to convince these majorities that they are the ones under attack; that lie and twist the truth at every turn while doling out spoonfuls of snake oil, and always - always - ensuring that they and their backers get rich or richer.

Where Milei waved his chainsaw and promised to attack the political ‘caste’, millionaire sponsors were pouring money into his campaign, and one of them - the ex-president Macri - is well-placed to influence his government. This is what happens everytime, whether it applies to Brexit, Trump or Milei. In each case, supposedly insurgent right-wing movements declare war on fictious ‘liberal elites’, while some of the wealthiest men and institutions in their societies finance and support them. These revolutionaries promise to ‘drain the swamp’, even though they are the swamp. They promise to win back control and then take control. They promise to make their countries great, and help their buddies short the pound or fleece the no marks for fictitious border walls.

Whatever happens, they get the lucre, while their base gets the liberal tears and a chance to get one over on the feminazis. It’s gross, but they are gross.

Milei’s stunning victory is clearly drawn from various emotions with which so many countries have become depressingly familiar: disgust, anger and despair at an immovable and unresponsive political establishment; confusion, boredom, nihilism and desperation; status anxiety and toxic masculinity.

Movements like Milei’s ‘Freedom Advances’ party have learned how to use this combination to their advantage, and others have seen the advantages of putting their money into buffoonish snake-oil salesmen who offer the temporary satisfactions of political cruelty or simply entertainment. This is why the dog-men are always so well-financed, well-organised and increasingly, internationally-coordinated. And these entertainer-grifters will always benefit from a supine or supportive media that enables them to push their messages into the mainstream, and present themselves as legitimate contenders - not to mention their skilful use of digital technology and social media.

If Nigel Farage emerges from I’m A Celebrity with his profile enhanced, he will merely be one more person, like Milei or Trump, who has followed the dreary trajectory from reality tv star to political contender and paladin of the extreme-right/nationalist/libertarian swivel-eyed tendency. Whatever their differences, and regardless of their immediate prospects, men like Farage, Abascal, Milei, Bolsonaro, Trump and Wilders are all playing the same long game.

Behind their divisive culture wars, and contrived anti-woke and anti-globalist campaigns, lies a destructive and authoritarian agenda that is deeply and potentially irredeemably-damaging to the common good. Such men may not end democracy altogether. Most of them would undoubtedly prefer the Viktor Orban model of an authoritarian managed democracy, as long as it gives them what they want. But they will attempt to strip democracies across the world of any inability to effect any meaningful change, and the chaos, chauvinism, and hatred they have unleashed is laying the basis for something far worse than we have seen so far.

Anyone who doubts this should consider what Donald Trump proposes to do if he wins a second term. Mass deportations of millions of immigrants; the weaponisation of the criminal justice system against ‘Marxist’ prosecutors and lawyers who have crossed Trump in the past; the purging of all independent governmental institutions that he calls - echoing Milei - the ‘sick political class that hates our country’- these are only some of the steps that will accelerate America’s political decomposition from authoritarianism into something like fascism.

Such possibilities now stalk democracies everywhere. And this dangerous convergence has taken place at a perilous moment for humanity, when a wounded planet needs to be protected and repaired, for its sake and ours; when technological transformation threatens socioeconomic consequences affecting millions that we are only beginning to understand.

These are not the priorities of the dog-men. Their future is a sociopathic wilderness where the common good is only their good; where the individual is ‘sovereign ‘, and anything that impinges on that sovereignty is a ‘scam’ or ‘communism’; where the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and other beneficiaries of the most insane and obscene accumulation of wealth in human history, seek to ride the dark politics of the twenty-first century for their own advantage.

Obviously we need to stop them. And that will require the broadest possible mobilisation, and the broadest coalitions possible - from the left and centre and even into mainstream conservatism. No time for sectarianism here. Nor do we need pale imitations in the hope of fending off the genuinely feral predators. Whatever you give these hellhounds, they will always want more.

We need governments that can stand up to them; that can act with humanity, vision, courage and principle for the greater good. We need educated voters who are able to tell the difference between the ersatz and the real, or at least between the decent and the indecent, and ensure that we get governments that meet these requirements.

Until we can do that, we will be all be at the mercy of the dog-men with chainsaws, who never should have been allowed to get this far in the first place.