He was speaking as an Argentine, contorting his country’s economic history into a neat ideological narrative. But he was at Davos, he said, to offer the same prescription to the rest of the world, projecting a global vision combining entrepreneurial heroism and the end of the state as we know it — or, as he put it, “to invite the Western world to get back on the path to prosperity.”
And he was applauded — not by everyone but by many. The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from the speech and gushed, “Milei gives the Davos crowd a spine transplant.” The conservative historian Niall Ferguson called the lecture “a magnificent defense of individual liberty and the free market economy.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen also celebrated Milei’s appearance, as did Elon Musk, who meme-tweeted an image of a couple having sex while watching the president pontificate onstage (commenting, “so hot rn”).
A year ago, if you had eyed the political leaders of South America and wondered who might make the biggest mark on world diplomacy in 2024, you surely would have picked Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who regained power in 2023 after 12 years in the wilderness. Riding back into office on a new Latin American pink tide, Lula seemed to embody a progressive alternative to the old neoliberal consensus that had fractured so visibly since he last held office.
But the exit from that old consensus has been bumpy, with no single obvious successor ideology to the one that largely governed the world between, say, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Donald Trump. This year, there are elections scheduled in countries that are home to half the world’s population — perhaps the single most democratic year in human history. But the meaning of those elections remains very much to be decided. There are Trumpy nationalists in a loose anti-elite alignment; old Western institutionalists across Europe and a continental new right still on the march; authoritarian alliances, oriented around China or Russia and their strongmen; and global leftists, like Lula, agitating for progressive solidarity across the developing world.
And then there is Milei. Flamboyant, combative, eccentric and erratic, he shares a certain style with Trump, but he’s more serious and ideologically committed. He has been praised by Vivek Ramaswamy and Matt Schlapp, as well as by Trump, who embraced Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference and has wished him luck in making Argentina great again. But as the culture-war intellectual Sohrab Ahmari has pointed out, “Milei rejects nearly everything ‘MAGA’ populists in the United States, and analogue movements across the developed world, claim to stand for.” What Ahmari means is that Milei is not a protectionist trade warrior speaking to the losers of globalization but a radical free marketeer who believes too much has been done to console them. In this way, Milei may have more in common with the Latin American dictators of the 1970s and ’80s — his AnCap chain saw a sort of populist shock doctrine and his Ayn Rand regime a free-market junta, this time imposed not militarily but by 55.7 percent of the popular vote.