Let me state my prejudice forthrightly: I spent four years in Coming-out Group in Long Beach, California. What was so arresting was that so many of the attendees were Mormon, and for the most part College age, academic achievers. All were frightened by their parent’s negative reaction to their sexuality. That fear ruled their lives from the first sexual awakening.
So @JosephAddington identification with Javier Milei is utterly predictable given his matriculation from Brigham Young University, and its culture of strict political/moral/civic/sexual conformity. The first paragraphs exalts Milei’s toxic Neo-Liberalism in its most extreme iteration.
Editor: The first two paragraphs give the game away :
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.
Editor: The reader might think that even the Neo-Liberal Triad of Hayek/Mises/Friedman, might find both Milei & Addington’s celebration of political nihilism, a prescription for state violence as utterly toxic! Addington wallows in the warm bath of that nihilism. Note too that this triad were all academics, in which caution is an imperative! Addington is a propagandist, whose intention is about stirring the pot!
Chainsaw :
Chainsaw, chainsaw, hatchet , chainsaw. It’s time to take out the chainsaw.
Left:
Left, left-wing activism, Argentine left, the left, left-wing positions, Left-wing dominance , the American left, the left as essentially parasitic.
Editor : Addington’s essay is saturated with violent metaphors, and various derisive descriptions of the Left: there can be no doubt this is propaganda, that includes the American Left. In sum, it’s the voice of a Lynch Mob on a 21 inch black & white T.V. screen of 1952!
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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