Milei And Trump: On Nazis, Outsiders And Politicians

Elon Musk's controversial gesture: what matters is how much everyone speaks about it, not whether it ... More is a Nazi salute.
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Javier Milei abhors being associated with Nazism. Several years ago, when he was still an up-and-coming national deputy, the leader of the new-right La Libertad Avanza coalition gave an interview to one of Argentine TV’s eternal polemicists, Viviana Canosa. He lambasted “lefties,” but added some peculiar comments too – visibly excited, Milei told Canosa: “We are so much better than them [i.e. “the left”]
, we are crushing them in the culture wars, we are running them over.” And then came the kicker: “Not only are we beating them on the productive front, but we are also morally superior, aesthetically superior, we are better in everything and that’s what hurts them.”
Several journalists from across the ideological spectrum reacted by associating Milei’s statements with the Nazi concept of racial superiority. This sparked Milei’s ire, who accused the media of purposefully trying to misinterpret what he said and started legal cases against several of them. He sought reparations in the range of $1 million, and ultimately extracted apologies from several of them. Milei is a profound admirer of Judaism and has the intention of converting, he argued in a response, while ideologically and methodologically there could be nothing farther from anarcho-capitalism than the corporatism of fascist Germany and Italy (maybe only socialist Communism). The architecture and philosophy of liberalism is superior to that of Communism, Milei would say.
Still, at that time, when it appeared highly unlikely that Milei would become the center of Argentina’s political universe, several analysts and commentators sought to connect his style and rhetoric with the infamous movement led by Adolf Hitler. There was something about his level of aggression, particularly during debates on late-night cable TV. His look also had something about it too: a distinct hairstyle, generally dressed in black and the use of long leather trench coats. And as Milei got closer to power, so did the specter of rising authoritarianism, particularly in the face of a distaste for the Republic, representative democracy, and the separation of powers, pushing instead for a dismantling of the institutions of government, particularly Congress.
The ‘N’ word issue ireturned to the center of the discussion in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Not only has the “new right” begun to build a global network that could lead to some level of hegemony that could have an air of bellicose expansionism, but also because of Elon Musk’s controversial gesture — which he repeated twice. You know the one, the one that very much could have been a Nazi salute. Musk, a master “troll” who comments on almost everything online, didn’t reject the accusations outright. Rather he took the opportunity to continue trolling the digital airwaves, mocking the “mainstream media” and the left. Whether he did it on purpose or not didn’t seem to matter, it went viral anyway.
One of Musk’s staunchest defenders was Milei, who wrote a long post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter, renamed by Musk), titled: “My balls [he’s a] Nazi” (a rough translation from a colloquial Argentine expression). In his defence of the tech mogul, Milei noted that Musk is a staunch supporter of the ideals of freedom and a crusader against the ideas of “wokeism.” He capped it off with a threat: “We are not afraid of you, we will go after you to the farthest corners of the Earth in defence of the ideals of freedom. Tremble, lefty sons of bitches.”
Interestingly, Milei’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos shortly after showed a marked change from his debut lecture a year before. The Argentine leader, the now consolidated global rockstar of the “new right,” switched from an anti-collectivist stance closely associated with the economic precepts of his libertarianism to full-on “culture war mode.” The decline of Western civilization was tied to the “mental virus” of “wokeism,” he said, going on to enumerate specific examples of immigration and the LGBT agenda, which have apparently led to pedophilia and rape in Europe and the United States. While Milei mentioned some of the economic highlights of his administration as a model to replicate around the globe, his focus was on the culture wars, particularly tying himself to what felt like a Northern Hemisphere agenda. It’s not that he hasn’t espoused similarly vehement anti-woke views in the past, but the drastic change from the technical econometric lecture to an ideologically charged political speech was curious.