Lessons from Milei

Since his election in December of 2023, Argentine president Javier Milei has permanently transformed the nation’s politics. In a show of political will and pure, unrelenting focus, Milei arrested a catastrophic inflationary spiral, drastically slashed government spending to produce a budgetary surplus for the first time in decades, and completely restructured the Argentine economy and government. The aggressive libertarian has more than proven that he was not just being theatrical when he wielded a chainsaw at his rallies to symbolize his political objectives.

Milei’s approach to political reform should be particularly instructive to leaders on the American right. A professed anarcho-capitalist, Milei approaches politics from the severe perspective of the economist. His theory of his political enemies is simple: they are parasites, dependent upon the largesses of the state provided at the expense of the taxpayer. They produce nothing of value to the public, they depend on patronage. The solution is equally simple—the chainsaw. Cut off the flow of money, dissolve the government ministries and departments, end the subsidies and the regulatory carve-outs and the board-room sinecures at state-run corporations, and they will starve to death.

The Milei government has pursued these ends with unwavering enthusiasm. One of his first actions as president was to completely restructure the executive branch of the government, collapsing 18 government ministries into only nine. Some departments were merged to eliminate as many redundancies as possible; others, like the Ministry of Women, were shuttered completely, their functions discarded as unnecessary and even vicious. Other decrees from the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, soon followed, massively deregulating the Argentine economy—a harsh blow to the labor unions which have, under various Peronist governments, maintained a stranglehold over much of the country’s workforce.

Despite having only a small minority in the legislature, Milei and his allies also managed to carefully shepherd through Congress a law simplifying taxation and permitting the government to divest itself of many of Argentina’s anemic state-owned enterprises. The vast majority of these are miserably unproductive, wholly dependent on state subsidies for survival, and dominated by corrupt union bosses who use their influence among workers to extract concessions from the government.

Just last week, Milei managed another unexpected success in his war against the institutional power of the left: the veto of a popular law that would have dramatically increased funding for the Argentine public university system, which—as it is here in the United States—is both a bastion of left-wing activism and plagued by wasteful management of public resources. The law originally passed with more than the two-thirds majority necessary to override the presidential veto but Milei managed to put together a coalition of legislators strong enough to halt the override in the Chamber of Deputies. The universities will now have to dance to his tune: if they would like a modestly larger budget, they will be required to submit to auditing and oversight by the government, to ensure that the funds are being used appropriately.

In addition to destroying the institutional economic and political power bases of the Argentine left, Milei has also taken his chainsaw to the parts of the state he intends to maintain. A notable example is the Argentine security services. Over the summer, the president dissolved the Federal Intelligence Agency that had been created by the Peronist President Cristina Kirchner and reorganized it into the Secretariat of State Intelligence. As part of the reorganization, the government implemented a thorough review of all intelligence staff, alleging that it had become infested with political operatives incompetent to carry out their duties effectively. The government has already relieved hundreds of the roughly 1,300 employees in the agency, with one government official asserting that “the majority will not be retained.”

Milei has even taken a hatchet to government contractors. Now, instead of having their contracts automatically renewed, they will be required to submit to competency testing and state evaluation. The unions, of course, are furious—contracting served as a lucrative source of patronage. No more.

While the powers of the Argentine presidency are far more extensive than those of the American presidency—Milei can issue “Decrees of Necessity and Urgency” which have the full force of law in limited areas, including the power to revise or abrogate existing laws—his approach and method deserve to be carefully considered and applied where appropriate by American conservatives at all levels of government, federal, state, even local. Politics, no less than war, is a matter of position and approach. In modern liberal society, the left tends to dominate institutionally, and the American right has done a very poor job of responding.

The recognition of this fact is a significant factor in the rise of the New Right, which, motivated by frustration at the impotence of the conservative movement in the past, has often focused on discovering ways to reconquer or repurpose institutions dominated by the left. This is a good beginning, but far from sufficient. The current contours of elite opinion and institutional organization are inherently favorable to left-wing positions, which makes them resistant to a conservative takeover. Furthermore, in many cases conservatives simply do not have the expertise and personnel available to effectively control said institutions. Left-wing dominance over universities and other mechanisms of elite production has slowly strangled much of the talent that would otherwise be available to the right. Those capable of maintaining their ideological independence frequently self-select out of processes inherently hostile to them and their interests, even where they might be able to carve out a productive career, simply because the process is unpleasant.

A large part of any right-wing political strategy, then, must be the relentless use of whatever political power is available to destroy the economic patronage and political sinecures that subsidize the American left. The administrative state must be purged, unnecessary government departments shuttered, the vast NGO pseudo-state defunded, universities reined in, and budgets slashed. Tinkering around the edges will not be enough. Reagan attempted that and managed only to slow the growth of the bureaucracy, rather than reduce it.

This will often have a libertarian tone to it, as perhaps it should. Milei’s economic approach to politics can be limited, at times, but it has been extremely effective. He is absolutely correct in his assessment of the left as essentially parasitic, and that is a major weakness that should be exploited by competent politicians to the maximum extent possible. Creativity and a great deal of willpower will be required to make it stick—but we already have a very good foundation upon which to build a program.

It’s time to take out the chainsaw.