COMMENTARY Democrats might not have been so dismissive of populist Donald Trump's inflation exploitation strategy if they'd noticed, as he did, how well populist Javier Milei used it in Argentina.
A year ago this month, Argentines awoke to a presidential election result much like the one Americans awoke to this week.
An erratic right-wing bully, Javier Milei, who’d menacingly brandished chain saws at campaign stops, had decisively defeated the liberal incumbent party, the Peronists.
Two things catapulted now President Milei to victory: steep inflation — and a resentful feeling among Argentines that a smug, technocratic and largely Peronist elite was responsible for, and could care less about, their economic frustration and sense of social alienation.
That collective grievance ushered in Milei’s sociopathic populism, replete with his disdain for democratic institutions and his penchant for racism, misogyny, narcissism, homophobia, thuggish vulgarity and a 'roid-rage pledge to burn the whole elitist edifice down.
So good morning, American liberals. Welcome to your Milei moment.
READ MORE: Argentina's threat to democracy feels like a preview for America's
I don't say that to force a comparison between a dangerous Latin American demagogue and America’s dangerous demagogue, former Republican President Donald Trump — who’s now, again, President-elect Donald Trump after his stunningly easy defeat of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
I say it because the libertarian Milei's triumph gave Trump an important psychological boost as he mounted his political comeback last year — something Democrats and U.S. liberals seemed not to notice.
At the time, Trump didn’t have any right-wing buddies in power in this hemisphere to endorse his MAGA crusade. His favorite Latin American leader, Brazil’s reactionary President Jair Bolsonaro — whose pandemic denialism pact with then President Trump helped give the U.S. and Brazil the world’s two highest COVID death tolls — had lost his re-election bid the year before.
Milei was a maverick godsend as a result. When he won, Trump quickly congratulated him on his Truth Social platform: “The whole world was watching! I am proud of you. You will turn your country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again!”
Milei’s triumph even made for a new MAGA acronym!
When voters feel uncertain of their financial worth, they question their self-worth — and that's when they're most vulnerable to the Trumps and Mileis.
More important, it affirmed the populist playbook Trump was taking into the 2024 election. He would stoke Americans’ understandable anger about stubborn, post-pandemic inflation into a bonfire of umbrage toward every conceivable scapegoat for their life problems. That meant especially the go-to goat — immigrants — who are also a target of hateful xenophobia in Milei’s Argentina.
It’s a simple, reliable premise: when folks struggling with groceries, gas and rent become as uncertain of their financial worth as so many Americans have since the pandemic, they also start to question their self-worth.
Snake-oil salesmen
That’s when they’re most vulnerable to snake-oil salesmen like Trump and Milei, who prey on their just as understandable fears about social standing. And in Trump’s and Milei’s telling, the forces that are beating down the standing of real Americans and real Argentines are non-white, non-Christian, non-heterosexual and non-male.
So how did President Biden, Democrats and U.S. liberals fail to connect all those dots?
Like a good Argentine Peronist, Biden downplayed Americans’ outcry about inflation; he seemed annoyed they didn't see the FDR halo around his Keynesian economic policies. Those admittedly succeeded in a macro-economic sense — but not enough in the micro-economic sense that matters most to voters: the price of eggs, cars and mortgages.
That haughty dismissal only helped reinforce the MAGA message that Democrats — all those woke, college-educated, globalization-pushing gender-semantics police, the bleeding-heart hypocrites who live in comfortable townhouses in coastal cities — are to blame for a U.S. wealth gap more reminiscent of a developing country like, well, Argentina.
Inflation hits Blacks and Latinos particularly hard — particularly when it comes to rental housing, where more than half of those two communities live, compared to just a quarter of whites. That helps explain why so many Blacks and Latinos, especially males, opted for Trump in this election.
Sure, you can call that irrational when you consider the ghastly racism Trump and his campaign poured out at every rally. But that irrationality is precisely part of the appeal — another reality too many U.S. liberals don't get.
In his reflection on toxic populism, The Revolt of the Masses, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset calls this the empowering high of “the right not to be reasonable, the ‘reason of unreason.’”
It’s what Argentina’s Peronists awoke to last year. It’s what America’s Democrats awoke to this week.
And it’s time both parties woke up.
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