The depth of the revolution that bears the name of Javier Milei

On Thursday afternoon, in the debate that took place between the candidates for national deputies in Tucumán, Ricardo Bussi said what he thought about homosexuals.

–They are human beings who deserve all our respect.. Like the lame, like the blind, like the deaf. They are small sectors of society that have to be recognized, clearly. Now, I don’t know why he should be given public office for being a transvestite. We pay for that. Anyone who decides to be a transvestite should do it alone.

The declaration of candidate of La Libertad Avanza It deserves to be analyzed for its content as well as for its author. But more interesting than that is something else: it is a very strong symptom that, apart from the electoral results, A transformation of truly revolutionary dimensions is taking place in Argentina.

Bussi established a difference between minority groups that must be respected – gays, lame, deaf, blind – and an undifferentiated majority that does not belong to any minority. Unlike gays, the lame, the deaf and the blind, that majority would be made up of supposedly normal people, like him. Then he resorted to a curious comparison. People who cannot see or hear or who have one leg longer than the other and therefore limp, suffer from a handicap, an objective physical disadvantage compared to the rest. In that category Bussi included gays: people in whom something does not work as it should.

A exercise very useful to understand the discriminating power of a statement, consists of replace the noun that defines the population referred to with another. For example, for the word “Jews”.

Bussi’s statement, then, would read like this:

-What do you think of the Jews?

-They are human beings who deserve all our respect. Like the lame, like the blind, like the deaf.

It is understood, right?

Bussi, furthermore, is part of another phenomenon: the increasingly sincere vindication of illegal repression by Javier Milei, the favorite candidate to be president in a few weeks. The first step in that direction was taken Victoria Villarruel, his running mate, when he claimed a place in history for the victims of the guerrilla. Villarruel focused on that and only that: on the neglected victims.

Then, Javier Milei explained that in the seventies there was a war initiated by subversive groups where legal forces they committed excesses that they must be punished “with the full weight of the law.” In the same speech, Milei admitted the existence of 8,500 missing. There is an obvious contradiction there. If a government disappears and tortures thousands of people, it is evident that this It is not an excess but a deliberate plan. Based on these magnitudes, among other arguments, the Argentine Justice established precisely that: the existence of a criminal plan.

But Bussi went one step further than Milei. The presidential candidate explained that these possible deviations had to be punished. Bussi, on the other hand, naturalized them. In every war innocent people fall, he said. These are things that happen.

But, nevertheless, none of that is the most important thing about those statements. Bussi belongs to a family very committed to this story. His father was convicted as one of the leaders of that criminal plan. He is the son of someone whom the Justice of democracy imprisoned as a murderer and torturer. Until a few months ago, in addition, he was marginal within Argentine politics.

His statements are relevant, not because of him but because he has been one of the first men chosen by Milei to form his political force. Also because Milei doesn’t find it an inconvenience that a man like that occupies a relevant place. A few weeks ago, Jorge Macri asked him to resign from a candidate for legislator who, in another context, had had homophobic and racist outbursts. That candidate, when the debate broke out, apologized. Despite that, when more statements became known, he resigned. In this case, the opinions are current. They happen in the middle of the campaign. There is no regret. There is no apology. And nothing happens.

The novelty lies in that exact point. Nazis, homophobes or people who demand torture are everywhere. They are human beings who belong to minority groups and deserve all our respect, to put it in the terms of the person involved. Now they are part of a team that will receive, in a few days, enormous popular support. That is where the features of the libertarian revolution that is being expressed in Argentina appear. There are limits that are moving at a speed that is even difficult to register in their real dimension.

None of this means that Milei will try to become a dictator if, as everything seems to indicate, he reaches the Casa Rosada. To be fair, disruptive figures like Milei, who won elections in the Western world, did not become dictators. Neither Jair Bolsonaro, nor Donald Trump, nor Giorgia Meloni ended the democracies in their countries. But, at least in the first two cases, this type of dynamics stressed the system like few times before. In just a few weeks, surely, we will begin to experience how this same dynamic develops in Argentina.

It is natural, on the other hand, that it arouses caution. In fact, that was the concern expressed in the title of the publisher that published The Economist, the British conservative magazine, after a three-hour interview with him: “Milei is a risk for Argentine democracy.” His intemperance in the face of any gesture of dissent, his perception that he is practically a politically persecuted person because things are said about him that he does not like – when he has also said any atrocity – reflects a personality that will be challenged by the rules -sometimes cruel- of true freedom when he is President.

The angrier you get with the boundaries, the arguments, the tumult, the more tensions there will be. This week, for example, he criticized Marcelo Tinelli, the Colloquio de Idea, the Todo Noticias channel, and the banker Gabriel Martino. Even though he may believe otherwise, none of them are communists. But, as he gets closer to power, Javier gets irritated all the time, for reasons that are difficult to understand.

During the 2021 campaign, Luciana Geuna asked him if he believed in democracy. The answer was very strange:

-Let’s say, I believe that democracy has many errors.

-It may have errors, but do you believe in the democratic system?

-I ask you the question in reverse. Do you know Arrow’s impossibility theorem?

-I ask you to give me an answer.

-And I can’t answer you with a question?

-The question is important and requires a forceful answer. Do you believe in the democratic system or not?

-If you knew Arrow’s theorem of impossibilities you would have another consideration. Arrow’s theorem of impossibilities says that, even if you believe that all individuals are rational and respect the orders of transfers in terms of transitivity, even so, in the aggregate, that does not assure the consistency of the result. If you put in a vote to choose between three wolves and a chicken who is going to be the dish of the night, do you know how it ends?

Nor does this mean, a priori, that Argentine society supports characters like Bussi when it votes for Milei. In fact, it is not even known if all the people around Milei think like the man from Tucumán. Surely there are leaders who are horrified, or do not share, the demands for illegal repression or homophobic outbursts, but who choose to be there for other reasons.

Thinking that Milei is Bussi would be a simplification. Discard it, too. Believing that a society became authoritarian because it voted for someone who vindicates illegal repression is another simplification. Discard it, too. The novelty is that Tremendous questions now appear that did not exist before.

Meanwhile, as it progresses, “freedom” generates surprising images all the time. The author of this note, for example, witnessed a dialogue between two food delivery men on Friday night. One voted for Patricia Bullrich. The other was trying to convince him to do it for Milei.

The argument:

-Patricia Bullrich was part of a government that doubled social plans. She doubled them!!!

Twelve years ago, in the same area, workers massively supported Cristina Kirchner, the creator of the universal child allowance:

-Come on, Tenembaum, vote for the Boss—She was a regular chicana on the street.

The revolution that sweeps away everything, and at full speed, will be expressed in the coming weeks in the number of votes that Peronism will receive: even if it is fortunate enough to reach the runoff, something that is very difficult at this point, it will be the worst election in Peronist history. The 54 percent of 2011, 55 percent of the sum of Daniel Scioli and Sergio Massa in 2015, 48 percent of Alberto Fernández in 2019, will, with luck, become 30 percent on October 22. This debacle was expressed in that dialogue between bikers: one voted for Milei, the other for Bullrich.

The changes are very abrupt wherever you see them: in issues of very deep values, in proposals to solve current problems, in political identities, in the emergence of unexpected characters, in a society that, in order to leave behind what it is suffering , chooses to bet on that which is as far as possible from everything that exists, from endless price increases, from lack of expectation, from venality, from bad governments.

And, of course, the fantastic yacht Martin Insaurralde.