The Argentine president Javier Milei delivering his historic speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Politics (geo) in the West is experiencing moments of great tension and change. Given the major ongoing conflicts, such as the new “Cold War” economic between the People's Republic of China and the United States, the military conflict in Ukraine following the invasion of its territory by Russia in February 2022 that triggered an open war in Europe, as well as the recurring and varied military escalations in Asia, with a special focus on the Middle East and Africa, with NATO presence, and certain transnational phenomena occurring both in Europe and America, such as migration crises, the menace of drug trafficking, and the rise of international terrorism.
These events account for a clear process of reconfiguration of powers in a post-Cold War world order that had long begun to show cracks and signs of exhaustion, not only in the international concert of nations, with the emergence and counterbalancing by new powers like China, India, Saudi Arabia, or Indonesia, but also internally. The visible consequences of the changing process resulting from the deterioration of the globalist order can be observed in the recent electoral results in major Western democracies, which show a clear and progressive shift to the right, which may embody the conservative, nationalist, liberal, or even libertarian form. The “shift” arises in reaction to the political, economic, and social consequences of the “progressive” or “social-democratic” governments aligned with the globalist ideology faithfully represented in the main institutions and organisms of the order (such as the United Nations), being them, along with their agendas, the protagonists of what is denounced as the decay of the Western value system.
With a discourse defending basic freedoms, tradition, and national identities, the New Right of the 21st century is effectively capturing the vote of the average citizen disenchanted with a political class that has upheld globalism and its core institutions to the detriment of sovereignty, alongside its allies in the deep state bureaucracy, the great economic powers linked to states, and often, with corruption. There is a sense of exhaustion of this order, and in response, the New Right is in a race to govern and reform the institutions that have been degraded over the last three decades. When merely mentioning terms like “conservative” or “liberal” (in the Hispanic sense of the term, oriented to the right) was once considered blasphemy in public discourse, due to disastrous “neoliberal” experiences that took place between the 1970s and 1990s, leading to an excess of political correctness where the right has been affected in its image and representation. Thus, since post-communism, the left has managed to reinvent itself democratically and liberally (now in the Anglo-Saxon sense, oriented towards progressivism) through expressions like “social democracy” or center-left progressivism, achieving cultural and political hegemony on behalf of the West and ultimately aligning with globalism. In this context, there is no doubt that significant works for political thought such as “A Theory of Justice” by John Rawls (1971), with its deontological arguments in favor of state intervention through distributive justice without losing sight of the democratic liberal-contractual logic nor the universal protection of individual rights of yore, have contributed to developments in liberal political culture in the United States, being its ideas fundamentally supported by the Democratic Party.
Unlike those times, in the dynamics and political thought of today, it seems that the New Right is playing the same role that the romantic left had during the second half of the 20th century, before its democratic conversion. Currently, identifying as “right-wing”, in any of its currents, means adopting a revolutionary and even anti-system stance, in a global status quo oriented towards postmodern leftist thinking. This is assumed because from its logic occupying such a position implies a political and cultural battle for the liberation of the individual or the nation (depending on how each “right” positions itself) from an oppressive political order, represented by hypertrophied and inefficient states and their prebendary allies, lobby groups, and global institutions associated with powerful minorities that influence public policy design affecting the full exercise of national sovereignty, as well as the always pointed discretionary power of bureaucracies. All of this has contributed to shaping a global political culture that degrades the historical and characteristic values of the West, such as sovereignty itself, patriotism, and republican civility, the historical values associated with individual freedom, human dignity and inviolability, and private property.
Referring to the context of the triumph and predominance of the United States in the international arena following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1991 respectively, the so-called “unipolar moment” by the internationalist Charles Krauthammer, has been suffering fractures due to the emergence of powers like those previously mentioned that rose to the ring between the years 2000 and 2010, but also for reasons that obey actions inherent to the democratic and neoconservative administrations in their military campaigns in Africa, the Middle East (both in the 1990s and the 2000s), and Eastern Europe, from Yugoslavia to Ukraine. Regarding the consequences of their foreign crusades, the image of the United States linked to the “end of history” (a term coined by Francis Fukuyama to describe the triumph of liberal democracy over other ideologies) has suffered a notable erosion. This is due to their interventionist failures, the most recent being the disastrous military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and also related to the current conflict in Ukraine, which under the Biden administration, in the capacity of NATO leader, has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars and unquantified military resources to the government of Volodymyr Zelensky. This has generated a growing discontent among American taxpayers, who once again find themselves financing (as they did from 1991 and 2001/2003) a proxy war, this time against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, “in defense of Ukraine’s democracy and against authoritarianism.” This, undoubtedly, will weigh in the final stretch of the presidential campaign leading up to November 5, when former Republican president Donald Trump faces the current Democratic vice president Kamala Harris in the presidential elections.
The ideological climate of the 1990s and 2000s was also reflected in Western Europe, which under American hegemony consolidated as the institutional center of progressivism, especially with the official establishment of the European Union in 1993. In the context of the postmodern rise, in the old continent, major globalist agendas have been pushed, coherent with the foundational narrative of the post-Cold War order, but which would leave serious social and political consequences that the New Right forcefully denounces, such as the deterioration of sovereignty and the own principles and values due to the deepening of interdependent ties that have blurred national borders. However, over the years, the globalist zeal managed to advance by greatly influencing public policy development in European democracies, where under the 2030 Agenda (an official UN program) guidelines are pushed aimed at, for example, the forced inclusion of minorities in different spaces, special laxity with uncontrolled immigration in the context of bloody conflicts in the origin zones of the flows, and the powerful lobby of environmentalism, which organized its party platform in several countries (and in the European Parliament) with the “Green” parties, going beyond the efforts of Greenpeace and its peers in the third sector and promoting reforms that affected, for example, the historically powerful European agro-industrial sectors.
This new “movement”, with its characteristic Euroscepticism, despises and denounces the globalist agenda. This is due to the fact that, in its progressive imposition, the nations of Europe have lost their essence and values, resulting in the degradation of their identities and historical interests. The tone of denunciation gained strength in recent years following the widespread crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the successive quarantines imposed by the World Health Organization's advice, which sparked criticism due to the implicit violation of individual freedoms in countries that applied prolonged isolation, in addition to the varied economic consequences of the lockdown. But the demand increased especially following the recent outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, which since then has pushed the members of the Union into an increasingly direct clash with Russia, due to NATO’s support and its strongest allies in Europe for Zelensky, under the rhetoric pushed from Brussels to defend the attacked Ukrainian democracy from Russian authoritarianism. As was the case with the exposed problems (especially with the migration crisis), narratives like this have exhausted their credibility among everyday citizens, who suffer the war with the consequent expansive fiscal policies and the indebtedness of their governments while financing it through ever-higher taxes. In response, the European New Right, in its most conservative and/or nationalist expressions, is articulating a discourse that strongly targets a stateless political class, alien to the common citizen’s reality and aligned with the global powers that have benefited from it for decades.
Regarding some of the figures that represent the rising phenomenon, and as mentioned at the beginning, it should be noted that it does not present total homogeneity in thought, varying according to whether the agendas of its representatives fall into nationalist, conservative, liberal, or even libertarian right currents. Thus, the differences in opinions emerge regarding issues such as the formulation and direction of economic policy, the existence and scope of individual rights, or the morality of the citizen in relation to the community.
Firstly, we can identify the nationalist wing. This is characterized by its desperation to return to the foundations and rescue national identities in the face of the degradation caused by globalism and multiculturalism, with even some of its representatives being critical of liberalism, adopting populism as a strategy for accessing and exercising power. This current is led by figures like Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally party, who has established herself as the second electoral force in France, and the even tougher Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who, in addition to having good relations with Vladimir Putin while being the head of a member state of the European Union and NATO, defines himself as “illiberal.” Manifestations of Spanish nationalist right led by parties like VOX and their leader Santiago Abascal are also noteworthy due to their gradual electoral rise amid the strong progressive cultural climate characterizing the mandate of socialist president Pedro Sanchez. Lastly, in the Netherlands, we find the striking case of Geert Wilders: the Dutch figure of the Freedom Party recently made history by doubling his party's seats in the elections for the lower house of Parliament with a tough campaign against radical Islamism, illegal immigration, and its relation to rising crime in big cities, in line with his European right-wing peers.
As for the conservatives, figures like Giorgia Meloni stand out in Europe. The Italian premier, who pursues a pragmatic policy mixing some intervention in markets with privatization and economic liberalism, seems to be more lenient on issues that greatly concern extreme right-wingers, such as the European Union's support for Ukraine or the sovereignist criticisms of the Union itself. However, like Le Pen and Wilders, she is firm on immigration, as Italy suffers from frequent refugee crises on its Mediterranean coasts, leading to a stricter immigration policy compared to its European peers.
Crossing the Atlantic, we can assert that conservative leadership is occupied by Donald Trump, who despite pursuing a protectionist and pro-national industrial policy under the slogan “America First” that marked the beginning of the tariff war with China, has been able to address issues concerning emphatic right-wing North Americans. Among these, the strongand opposition to uncontrolled immigration, the repudiation of progressivism and woke culture in defense of foundational values and liberties, cuts in public spending, the cooling of relations with NATO, and the historic abandonment of the Paris climate agreements in 2016.
Contemporary to Trump, and in South America, former Brazilian military leader Jair Bolsonaro managed to temporarily establish himself as a reference in Latin America with his presidential term extending from 2019 to 2022, with a sharp imprint against his leftist predecessors Rousseff and da Silva, feminism, gender ideology, and the criminal situation in Brazil, which he attended to intensely through military elements in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, always stalked by criminal groups.
Whenever Argentina is mentioned, it is stated that its political developments are characterized by escaping global patterns and creating exceptions to the rule, and the case of the rise to the presidency of the economist liberal-libertarian Javier Milei perfectly supports this legend. Relying on social media and the media, Milei has starred in a true cultural battle in a surprisingly short time, perhaps being the most revolutionary of all the references of the New Right. Politically incorrect and anti-system to the point of considering the State as a “criminal organization,” citing anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard on the coercive nature of tax collection, the leader of La Libertad Avanza achieved a historic victory in the runoff against Sergio Massa in November 2023. In addition to the emergence of libertarian thought, the victory signified the citizens’ expression of fatigue and absolute repudiation towards an immoral political class, complicit in sustained impoverishment and corruption, and identified with progressive collectivism, given that in forty years of democracy, most governments, both radical (including Cambiemos and the Alliance) and Peronist, ended with scandals in economic matters, corruption, or with intra-government crisis cases that led to their collapse. Thus, voters observed that the “political caste” that the economist denounced from the beginning as a deputy exists and wields power, that the “they all must go” from 2001 wasn't fulfilled, and that it was necessary to “kick out” those who upheld the current order, finding in an outsider with ultra-liberal economic arguments a significant capable of freeing Argentines from the yoke of the “caste.” For many, this could be identified as a characteristic trait of a right-wing populism, particularly emphasizing the division of society into two: the caste and the citizens, thus configuring the classic dichotomy of “people/anti-people.”
In the social aspect, Milei appears to be more conservative, firmly opposing issues like abortion, LGBTQ+ lobbying, and the 2030 Agenda. However, unlike many of those previously mentioned, the Argentine has positioned himself in favor of elements linked to globalism, as clearly seen in his foreign policy with the “natural alignment with the United States, regardless of whether the administration was Democratic or Republican,” unconditionally supporting causes backed by the deep state of Washington such as Israel or Ukraine. That said, and continuing with the initial line concerning the differences between currents of the New Right, as well as the fact that Argentina tends to escape global trends due to its heterogeneity, what has been mentioned can be observed within the governing formula, where Vice President Victoria Villarruel polarizes with the libertarian by representing sectors close to nationalism and conservatism, maintaining strong ties with the Catholic Church, the armed forces, and spaces advocating for national sovereignty and human dignity against the globalist threat. This polarization is a daily occurrence, and, as has historically happened in the Executive Power in Argentina, tensions between the president and the vice seem to increase as the management progresses.
In conclusion, we can assert the effective rise of the so-called New Right of the 21st century, based on what they themselves identify as the deterioration of the Western value system caused by the application of globalist ideology by national political classes over the last few decades, going against the principles and traditional practices of Western nations. It is an apparently heterogeneous “movement” in its philosophical orientation, but uniformly gaining ground in the legislative and executive elections of their respective countries, as well as in the public opinion and political ideas arenas. It is within this ongoing battle where it has moved from being marginalized and “canceled” in official discourse against reigning globalism (embodied by center-left, progressive, and social democratic sectors) to beginning to form serious and dynamic political alternatives, today representing an anti-status quo electoral offer.
The New Right today faces the main challenge of the difficult art of governing and building greater power within the system, following successful political campaigns and interventions on social media and alternative media, where they begin to find a hard core among citizens disenchanted with traditional politics associated with globalist ideology. A right that also appears to have studied the left's playbook after the fall of the Wall, by reinventing itself with a relatively greater attachment to democracy and the republic, with a determined politically incorrect, “marketing” attitude, and, fundamentally, with growing support among young sectors, generating a climate of cultural and political revolution against the established order, with the ultimate goal of recovering or reforming the Western machinery in light of its erosion.
Finally, it is a matter of further time and analysis of the developments of the phenomenon to eventually determine whether the New Right of the 21st century articulates a global proposal, with consensus and greater homogeneity, that definitively places it in a hegemonic position globally. This latter has been achieved by the left in an already noticeably worn globalist period that is still ongoing, but it could begin to yield slowly against the vigorous advance of this new phenomenon.
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