Why Don't Republicans Admire Any Societies That *Aren't* Poverty-Stricken Nightmares For Almost Everyone?
Argentina under Millei, Chile under Pinochet, and The Gilded Age in the USA ... it's not looking great!
While the Republican administration walked back its plan to end all federal loans and grants on Wednesday — and then unwalked it back again; no, nobody has any idea what’s going on! — one of the things we really need to sit with as a nation is the fact that they wanted to do it at all. (And may still! See above about nobody knows!) Not to mention how dazzled many supporters were by the idea of it.
And at least part of the reason they wanted to do it is because they are all very big admirers of Javier Milei, the current president of Argentina.
Milei is doing things a lot of people on the Right have been begging for for decades. He’s dismantled and fired a large percentage of the entire federal government, killed social programs that were helping poor people survive (defunding the soup kitchens was a big one), got rid of regulations of all kinds, etc. etc. As a result, the country’s central bank no longer has a deficit. Also, as a result, poverty and child hunger have gone through the roof. So if you care more about a “deficit” than you do about children starving to death, this seems like a pretty reasonable trade-off.
Classic right-wing free speech absolutist, he has also cracked down protests and demonstrations across the country.
Milei also wants to increase the workday to 12 hours, end overtime, and allow employers to pay people partially with tickets they can use in specific places, like grocery stores, instead of with actual money.
He claims that this “shock therapy” will only hurt for a while, after which the nation will be fabulously prosperous. This is, of course, ridiculous.
Things are not great on a human rights level either, of course. Just this week, they eliminated femicide from the criminal code, no longer recognizing gender-based violence as a specific threat or problem, on the grounds that feminism is a “distortion of the concept of equality.” Protests have been suppressed in a variety of ways. Milei himself believes that LGBTQ+ people are all pedophiles, and is a big defender of the 1976-1983 Dirty War military dictatorship, during which “an estimated 30,000 people were killed, imprisoned, tortured or forcibly disappeared in a state-led campaign that still haunts the country” — even going so far as to hire many of those responsible for it.
Another society many on the Right swoon over is Chile under Pinochet. (TRIGGER WARNING THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH. By all means skip it, you are allowed!) You may recall the hot 2016 trend of Republicans wearing shirts that said “Pinochet did nothing wrong” and talking about “free helicopter rides,” in reference to the dictator’s whimsical habit of having his political enemies thrown out of helicopters. Apparently they couldn’t find anything punchy for “training German shepherds to rape women” or “forcing parents and children to have sex in front of their families,” “sexually torturing women with live rats” and some other truly horrific things.
But you see, aside from the murder, torture, rape, and disappearings of Leftists, the thing these people really love is the way he embraced similar anarcho-capitalist/Chicago School/Austrian School economics. He, too, embraced a doctrine of deregulation and privatization and believed that austerity would provide “shock therapy” to get the economy going.
Now, libertarians have long claimed that this worked spectacularly well, even going so far as to call it the “Miracle of Chile” — except serious analysis has shown that the ultimate increase in the nation’s GDP had a whole lot more to do with copper mining than with deregulation and privatization, that the policy caused extreme poverty in the entire first decade of Pinochet’s reign, and that the country ended up pretty much exactly where it would have been, economically, had none of that happened — only without the extreme poverty, torture, rape and murder.
Again, the nation’s GDP did grow. However, that was something that only benefited the very rich.
Chile had changed since the military takeover in 1973. After some rough economic times, the economy posted strong gains in the late 1980s. Real GDP growth had averaged 6.2 percent per year, unemployment fell to 6.3 percent from a peak of 30 percent in 1982, and export growth surged. However, sixteen years of conservative economic policies and authoritarian rule had taken their toll on the working class: almost half of the population was living below the poverty line, and real wages remained 19 percent below their 1970 level. Income inequality had worsened, especially in the first decade of the Pinochet regime, when the poor had seen their wages stagnate while social spending had fallen drastically.
Moreover, these policies have had lasting negative effects on the nation’s economy.
Via The Guardian:
Chile is notorious for its income inequality: the gap between rich and poor has widened in recent years as the combined wealth of its billionaires is equal to 25% of its GDP.
But inequality is multidimensional: Chile’s employment rate languishes at 55%, while employment conditions are so precarious that 50% of the workforce cannot possibly accumulate enough savings to fund a minimally adequate pension. […]
Many Chileans live with high levels of debt and thus pay more for the same services (such as higher education or healthcare) than rich people, who get discounts because they can pay in cash.
But perhaps most importantly, they feel discriminated against and humiliated in all these areas as they battle with inadequate public services that fail to level the playing field.
Trump himself has long been obsessed by the idea that the Gilded Age — a point at which 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families lived below the poverty line — was the greatest time in American history, economically speaking. It was not! It was great for the Trumps of the time, and really, really horrible for everyone else. Andrew Carnegie was living the life. The people in his sweatshops? Not so much!
Granted, there has always been a fairly large contingent of Republicans who desperately want to live in some Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman/Murray Rothbard “utopia” in which there are no taxes, there is no social safety net, no labor laws, no regulations — where everyone is out for themselves and they either sink or they swim. For them, it’s not that they believe this is a system that would provide the most good for the most people, it is a “moral” issue. They truly do not care how much suffering it causes, because they believe deep in their little black hearts that taxes are always the greater evil.
For most people, however … this would fucking suck. Just like it’s always sucked for people other than the very, very rich, in every situation in which it has been tried. There is no point at which capitalism magically becomes socialism — in which pure capitalism produces a world in which everyone has enough to eat, everyone has a warm place to sleep at night, everyone has a job that pays them enough to live, everyone has healthcare, etc.
On the other side of things, Trump and friends may not admire Hungary’s economy (they have universal healthcare), but they do love the culture and the autocracy imposed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Steve Bannon is a known fan, calling him “one of the great moral leaders in this world.” And Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation — which, notably, produced Project 2025 — has called Hungary “the model” for “conservative statecraft.”
In Hungary, there is extreme suppression of speech. Orbán basically had his rich oligarch buddies buy most of the media in the country, which has given him and his party control of about 80 percent of the nation’s media. Teachers were punished with a “vengeance” law for protesting their pay and working conditions, and students were teargassed for opposing that law — which severely limited academic freedom in the country. Same-sex marriage is outlawed, trans people are not allowed to legally change their gender, they have a law explicitly prohibiting “homosexual and transexual propaganda” and are ranked 26 out of 27 for gender equality in the European Union.
It’s pretty horrifying, and it’s the Right’s roadmap for what they want to do here, in the United States.
It says something that every single society Trump and Musk and the rest of them admire was or is an absolutely miserable place for a large number of people. It says something that all of the leaders they admire are dictators — including some not mentioned here, like Jair Bolsonaro and Vladimir Putin. They are not looking at countries that rank high in happiness, in freedom, in free speech, or even where people are just living comfortably for inspiration, they are looking at oligarchies and autocracies and dictatorships and societies with extreme wealth inequality, where things are really good for one particular group of people and truly horrendous for everyone else.
Which, clearly, is exactly what they want for the United States.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Right Libertarians are authoritarian, money grubbing freaks wearing a cloak that says "freedom" on it. Make no mistake, a right Libertarian is an enemy of real, practical freedom. The only freedoms they want is to abuse and exploit and flout basic social responsibilities. I hate them and their double speak and their lies and their ignorance. They are feudalists in disguise, and men like Yarvin have functionally taken the disguise off.
There's a simple reason that we don't have popular uprisings here in the US to topple dictators or wannabe dictators. Our standard of living is so high and income inequality is so screwed up that the middle class isn't going to pay any attention to politics unless it affects them personally.
When I was growing up, the only times I saw people in my rural community get at all interested or angry about politics was during later stages of the Vietnam War, when their sons were up to be drafted for lost meat grinder conflict, and the Energy Crises of 1973 and 1979, when they had to cue up on even or odd numbered days, depending on their car tag number, to fill up with gas.
So here's hoping for gas rationing before the mid-terms.