Category: Political Science

My name is Josh Neuman, and I’m writing from Buenos Aires, Argentina where Peter Thiel’s move is all over the news here. He lives in [redacted], only a xx minute drive from my own apartment in Recoleta.

I want to pitch a piece…arguing that Thiel is right to be in Argentina, but wrong about why. The libertarian revolution he thinks he’s found simply doesn’t exist in the way it’s being advertised in the international press. Milei has accomplished some real things since December 2023, such as lower inflation and a fiscal surplus, in part underwritten by Washington. But the effect of many of his policies has been exaggerated by both supporters and opponents alike, with widespread pessimism across all parts of society.

Much of the Argentine status quo he sought to abolish remains intact, such as retenciones on agricultural exports, union control over the labor market, while many of his reforms have had little impact beyond Buenos Aires, particularly in the northern provinces still dominated by entrenched Peronista governors. Distrust of the peso remains high, while much of the economy is still black market, with the informal sector still being around 40-50% of employment. The lines outside the Spanish and Italian consulates of Argentines reclaiming European citizenship are as long as ever, while major business figures like Marcos Galperin still live in neighboring Uruguay. Peronism as I’m sure you know has mutated several times throughout its history to each contemporary crisis, and will prove far more durable in the long run as a social identity as much as a political machine.

Argentina’s retenciones are export taxes levied on agricultural commodities like soybeans, wheat, and corn at the point of sale, before producers receive any income, which goes towards the government, and is how Argentine governments (especially Peronista ones) have historically paid for the country’s welfare state. The system also functions as a price mechanism because by taxing exports, the government keeps more supply in the domestic market, suppressing local food prices. The retenciones are deeply unpopular among the crop producers and landowners, and Milei campaigned on eliminating them. He has largely kept them, because he needs the revenue to maintain the fiscal surplus that is the centerpiece of his program.

But I think there’s a deeper cultural dynamic that I’m not sure Thiel understands. Argentine youth aspire much more towards la dolce vita than towards Weber’s protestant work ethic. They essentially want their country to be like Spain or Italy, with a chill work-life balance,  high leisure and consumption, underwritten by a generous welfare state, even if that model is becoming fiscally and demographically unsustainable in Europe. I think it’s a completely reasonable and in many ways admirable goal, but companies like Paypal, Palantir, and Facebook did not come out of Spain or Italy.

Among my Argentine peers, I hardly meet anyone who aspires to move to the United States. When I tell friends that the American economy has been growing at twice the rate of Europe in recent years, I am met with genuine disbelief. I think Thiel may have been captivated by a small teleological elite in Milei’s inner circle who do not necessarily represent the country they govern. The average Argentine who voted for Milei did not vote for Austrian economics or for a libertarian revolution. They voted out of exhaustion with Peronism, as many of Milei’s supporters were former Peronists themselves, much as many Trump supporters in the American Rust Belt were former Obama voters.

Argentina’s genuine case for Thiel rests on things that have nothing to do with Milei: a younger demographic than Europe, world-class human capital, abundant lithium and rare earths, and geographic isolation from great power conflict. He may be right for entirely the wrong reasons, on a longer timeline than he expects, through considerably more turbulence than the current narrative suggests. Argentina’s laid-back mentality is precisely what makes it exciting to foreigners. But as a project for civilizational renewal? Unless you’re talking about surviving a nuclear war, absolutely not.

I’m an Argentine-American master’s student in international relations at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella…

Best,
Joshua Raoul Neuman

That is the topic of my latest column for The Free Press.  Excerpt:

It is important to distinguish between the positive side of wokeism and the unreasonable side. The positive side supported gay rights and discouraged racism in the public sphere. The unreasonable side brought us cancel culture, stifled discussion, insisted on very particular views of race and gender identity, boosted DEI and other race-discriminatory policies, and generally made America a more intolerant place. It was most of all about who had the right to steer the agenda of public discourse, and who had the right to push out dissenters.

The unreasonable side, since it was about power and control, had negative vibes built into its core. Fortunately, American society pushed back against many of the most objectionable manifestations of those negative vibes, but did we get rid of the negative vibes themselves? I do not think so. The American people still seem pretty low in trust, unhappy with America’s position in the world, glum about the economy and cost of living, and increasingly skeptical of both AI and billionaires. That is all happening at a time when the American economic situation, while mixed, is by no means as terrible as it was in, say, 2009. Happiness and mental health seem to be lagging behind the country’s actual achievements.

So what has been happening? The forces behind wokeism no longer command so much public attention and respect when they argue about terms and pronouns. Instead, left-adjacent movements have arisen with a contrasting emphasis on action, and often action of a terrible sort. California is considering, for instance, an unworkable tax on billionaires in the state, one that even most left-leaning Democratic politicians do not support. It might nevertheless pass through via referendum…

What’s more, it is possible we are entering an era with a new culture of assassinations. There have been assassinations of Charlie Kirk, of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and several attempts on the life of President Trump. It can be debated how many of these killers had direct connections to the political left, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that left-wing rhetoric about democracy destruction helped make such actions conceivable.

The social energies of the American left have moved away from the realm of speech and into plans for concrete action, whether in politics, through attempted wealth confiscations, or through organizing violence. In retrospect, wokeism, for all its problems, was a relatively harmless way of distracting activists and keeping them  Negative busy with wars over words—a less-bad allocation of social energies than what we are now seeing. So while I would not say I long for the return of high wokeism, I recognize it has been replaced by a left-adjacent movement that is worse.

Worth a ponder, do read the whole thing.  I should note I do not let the right off the hook either, though the column is mainly about what has succeeded Wokeism.  Negative emotional contagion has affected both the left and right wings today.  Here is one simple case in point.