Abraham Lincoln was a president without vanity: he slept little, visited hospitals, wrote comforting letters to mothers of soldiers, and bore criticism with serenity; he never allowed the war to steal his soul, and when his supporters urged vengeance, he refused and said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” He understood that the future of a nation is not built on rancor but on mercy. It is for all this, and also for Lincoln’s legendary modesty, that Esteban Bullrich —a scholar of his work and biography— chooses him as the emblematic example of “spiritual leadership.” This is precisely how Esteban’s latest book is titled, published by Aguilar, with an emotive subheading: “My Political Legacy.” A victim of ALS but a bearer of growing courage and lucidity, the former senator develops there his theory of spirituality as a fundamental component of a good statesman. That perspective, which is attitudinal and ethical, differs markedly from the mystical marketing that current right-wing populist messiahs use to legitimize their actions. After criticizing Trump for this very reason, the author specifically refers to Milei: “He constantly resorts to a transcendent epic. ‘The forces of heaven’ is not a peripheral expression in him: it has become a political password, a way of granting his project a higher, almost providential dimension. Added to that is his repeated invocation of God in official speeches and his visible use of Judeo-Christian religious references in the public sphere.” Both Trump and Milei, he asserts, seek to benefit from the symbolic energy of religion “without embracing the spiritual demands it imposes. They want the legitimacy of the altar without the humility of service; the epic of the chosen one without the inner burden of the listener, and they want the language of transcendence, but do not always accept the requirement to integrate, understand, reconcile. And there lies a deep distortion. Because authentic religious leadership is not, in essence, a leadership of hate.” And he adds: “When the religious becomes a tool to divide the world into the pure and the impure, into the chosen and the disposable, into God-fearing patriots and absolute enemies, it ceases to serve its own truth.” This banalization of religion —the Kirchnerism did the same with history— serves as shield, excuse, narrative, and fuel for the cohesion of the troops and for the demonization of the opponent. An expert in the field, Professor Loris Zanatta, also wrote a few days ago about this matter: “Milei wants to turn the ‘myth of the Catholic nation,’ an anti-capitalist myth, into the ‘myth of the Judeo-Christian nation,’ a turbo-capitalist myth. Both are faith dogmas, impose unanimity, are intolerant of competition among ideas and of the secular vision that fed progress.”
Milei celebrated Teacher’s Day with a video made by artificial intelligence in which Sarmiento —the author of Vida de Abraham Lincoln and an admirer of that spiritual leader from Kentucky— treated him as an equal to the Lion and justified his policy of irritability, scatology, and divisiveness. Lincoln and Sarmiento were heroes of the nineteenth century, when brutal civil wars were raging across the American continent and there was still a long way to go for liberal democracy to establish its virtuous rules of coexistence. Their ways, pardon the phrase. Milei uses the author of Facundo to absolve his misdeeds, and in passing withholds from the official narrative something relevant: Sarmiento did not intend to dismantle the State but to build it, and his revolution was based on public education. The contrast between Milei and Lincoln, by the way, could not be more stark: the lack of humility and also of serenity in the face of criticism coexists with a lack of consolation for those who suffer. Libertarian Darwinism deems just any injustice committed by the market, and the trail of occasional victims does not seem to be their concern. Likewise, the use and abuse of resentment as a political weapon seems compatible with the Judeo-Christian mercy that this messiah of pompous religious phrasing preaches, yet with scant spiritual leadership.
The Mole Who Comes to Destroy the State reaches its thousand days in power, exercising a fundamentally media-driven leadership: public administration has been wholly ceded to his sister Karina and macroeconomics and structural reforms to his two favorite ministers, with whom he has long and passionate theoretical debates. He spends hours patrolling television and checking X, and manages attacks on dissidents: today the President is merely a tweeter with security, as Emilio Monzó put it. He dedicates much time to hosting friends in Olivos, indulges in his own monologues, studies the Torah, and writes books. These latter two tasks may be commendable, but only in leaders who have long since left behind any emergency or who think — perhaps this is the case — that they have already fulfilled their mission and believe that now only Austrian magic remains to take effect. He is somewhat delayed, certainly. Nobody asks him to conceive a “plan platita” as Donald Trump is implementing these very days, but there is a growing and genuine concern among economists and observers who generally align with the government’s direction: they worry about the design of the program, rising social discontent (the adjustments were borne by the middle classes and retirees) and a construction and industrial sector in “free fall.” The July inflation decline did not alleviate the impression of stagnation in the real economy, and even the possible recession risk, and the words of Domingo Cavallo expressed this week ended up resonating strongly not among opponents of the model but among many of the convinced: “More important than inflation falling is that there be reactivation and the economy grows not at 3% but at 8%,” said the father of Convertibility. Freezing the forest to extinguish a fire is as risky as pouring gasoline on the blaze, something the Kirchnerists used to do.
I do not end with Lincoln nor Sarmiento, but with Guy Sorman, who wrote a recent essay attacking Thiel and the other “technomonarchs” that Milei admires: we are headed toward a world flooded with inaccurate information generated by machines and it is possible that this becomes “a society never seen before, completely opposed to liberal democracy.” According to Sorman, republican institutions were shaped by information: the printed press drove the world toward democracy; and much later radio allowed aspiring dictators to seize power in Italy and Germany. “Toward what political order do social networks lead us?” he asks. It is not evident how the spread of fake news and the exaltation of extremes could lead to a more civilized or more democratic society. Quite the opposite, the wildest proposals occupy more space in the media. Therefore, it is permissible to imagine the disappearance of democracy, replaced by automatic States, run by AI, in the hands of a very limited number of individuals exalted in the style of Elon Musk. “For these new monarchs, the data centers that pepper the planet are the cathedrals of modern times,” he says. “From there, their new religion, futuristic, dehumanized, strictly quantifiable, is disseminated, in which individuals will not be guided by morality, but will even ignore what it means to have a spirit of critical thinking.” Only true spiritual leadership could perhaps save us from that other sinister religion.
————————————