An account attributed to the spectral Santiago Caputo lit up the other day a veteran Peronist philosopher of prestige and low profile who studied the metaphysical foundation of Aristotle’s ethics at the Sorbonne and who became a prominent student of Argentine thought. Alberto Buela attended a streaming of Crónica and, although feeling at odds with Javier Milei, praised his speech on the “Malvinas” at the United Nations: “It moves you, it is extraordinary, it resembles Bismarck; from the top hat he pulls the idea of sovereignty, and the first thing he defines is the enemy. He comes to recall what Martín del Barco Centenera said in a poem in 1602: let us see that these beautiful and rich lands have great enemies, who are Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, the English pirates. Once and for all he determined the enemy of Argentina, and Milei joins this distinction with vehemence and produces something that in linguistics is called the performative function of language. Because language, when applied with precision, creates reality.
All the Peronism of these decades, out of fear, did not present itself in this way: “it was a spoken speech but not a speaking one, and forty years passed.” Then Buela, who is consulted by many leaders of the Justicialist movement, explained that the “third position” is no longer valid because we live in a dilem‐matic society: United States or China, Russia or Ukraine, Israel or Palestine. “How can we hold a superior position from here?” he asks rhetorically. Caputo did not tweet the rest of the interview, where the philosopher goes deep with a scalpel: “There are millions of Peronists, but Peronism does not exist anymore. It stopped being. Talking about Peronism is to fall into Peronist babble: better to do than to say, for an Argentine there is nothing better than another Argentine, every Peronist carries in his backpack the marshal’s baton. In philosophy you cannot talk about what does not exist.” For Buela, Peronism lost its nature when Juan Perón died; from then on “there was no sanction” and it transformed into a “orange grove,” where everyone takes the fruit they like or that suits them: social democrats, Christian democrats, neoliberals, and the disguises and opportunisms continue. The self-critique of this thinker of popular nationalism aligns with other reflections, for example those of the famous Peronist scholar Alejandro Horowicz, who on Canal 8 in Mar del Plata said: “When you look at Peronism of 1945 and the transformations it produced and you look at the working-class society of today, it’s as if Perón’s party had never existed. Everything that happened stopped happening. Well, a movement that produced these transformations and was not able to defend any of them makes its fate very clear.” The author of the classic The Four Peronisms points to the territory where it still prevails: the suburbs are “a depot of people who depend fundamentally on the resources of the municipal governments — he notes —. In this, Peronism has transformed: from the dynamic party of the working class and the middle layers, to the party of the poor.” He therefore contends that it embodies “a completely worn political tradition,” and suggests that Peronists should study Radicalism, which has a history of more than a century and has been “reduced to a set of splinters that can be assembled in any direction.” Horowicz reminds us that major social phenomena are created from the bottom up, not the other way around, and that “progressivism sells smoke” and is in retreat, a theme that also concerns the sociologist Pablo Semán, who mournfully analyzes Lula’s defeat in Brazil and mirrors it with Argentina. Semán asserts that Latin American progressivisms bet on the State at the moment when its capacity to respond diminished: its essential provisions deteriorated, and citizens had to turn to private sectors to obtain employment, health, education, and security, with that “every man for himself” that scarcity always imposes. This profound social transformation implies as a fatality a return to individual effort rather than a collective solution, and for the moment the right is better equipped to represent that mood of the era: in Brazil, the lowest segments are those who most disapproved of Lula. The disdain of the cultural left toward those who, in this historical context of survival, feel like entrepreneurs, and the use of improved crime statistics to relativize the overall tragedy of insecurity in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, are part of these delusions. And he adds a very suggestive anecdote about progressive flaws against religiosity and common sense operated in Brazil, where there are millions of single-parent households: “If you have to go work as a domestic worker, who will you leave your child with, the university students of the PT marching in favor of marijuana legalization, or the evangelical church?” The question exposes a progressive movement that looks through the rearview mirror and remains frivolously absorbed in respectable minority causes while losing the favor of the great popular majorities.
To all these novelties that those who know and think the “national and popular movement” from inside bring, one should add the thinning of white-collar work and the growing irrelevance that the “backbone” is taking: union leaders pushed to the margins by discredit and lack of representation. And another central matter: the old idea that “only Peronism can govern” has shattered by historical experience. Even more: the Peronist brand became tied to fiscal irresponsibility, economic disorder, inflation, and venality. The fact that the largest input to the libertarian government still comes from the faces of the main Peronist leaders — Cristina condemned, Máximo rustic, Axel dogmatic, Alberto in ostracism, Massa in Barbados — is a sign that all those failed experiences linger fresh in the collective unconscious, and also in the conscious.
For the first time, astute analysts of the “popular field” warn that mere unity sounds to them like a Scioli-Albertist mishmash and that perhaps worse than a Milei reelection would be a new Peronist failure in the exercise of power. Here are some of the problems for building from that lane a hopeful and modern model and discourse, something that even pure Kirchnerism cannot plausibly manage, now devoted to tearing its clothes at the moment in front of the libertarians’ institutional transgressions, or criticizing — so transparently — Milei’s corruption, or even denouncing — so conciliatory — the Gramscian rift that the Forces of Heaven push to divide Argentines. A pathetic example of hypocrisy and double standard was seen this week in Infobae’s streaming when Senator Fernanda Raverta complained that political rancor was fueled from the Casa Rosada, turning opponents into enemies, and sowing a strife that pitted friends and family against each other. It seemed like self-criticism, but it was not, because she immediately denied without flinching the savage agonizing policies that they themselves imposed during the “won decade,” when we were all anti-people and anti-patriotism. Practicing feudalism, worshiping Laclau, and then posing as Nelson Mandela, is an act of audacity and a macabre joke. The undeniable disasters of Milei do not necessarily improve his less illustrious predecessors, and the old “train of victory” seems like its rails have rusted.