MILEI AND MAMDANI: A POLARIZED WORLD

 Last week, my brilliant former student and close friend, Juan Luis Iramain, published a highly insightful article, "The New Politics" (https://infomedia.consulting/comms/la-nueva-politica.php), in which he explained remarkable similarities between two figures whose ideologies could not be more different: Milei and Mamdani. These similarities pertain to their modes of political conduct. One might be tempted to say "different content, but similar modes," yet, considering that the medium is the message, there are also overlapping contents, despite the divergent cited authors and campaign proposals. It is not our intention here to summarize Juan Luis’s article; the reader may consult it without difficulty. It suffices to underscore the obvious: their confrontational approaches, defiant style, ostensible spontaneity, emotional appeals, and radicalism. All are strikingly alike. And voters become fascinated.

But why?

We have long asserted that the globalization anticipated after the fall of the Berlin Wall was not the free international market that many, including me, ingenuously envisioned at the time. It was, and continues to be, an interventionist economy, as Mises described in Part VI of his treatise, Human Action, published in 1949, not 1991, when a tentative hope emerged after World War II. Moreover, and most troublingly, the United Nations radicalized in two respects: an obsessive planning of the entire world and, secondly, the content of such planning, focused on what I call the third phase of Marxism: the exploitive white heteropatriarchal capitalist versus newly recognized oppressed collectives—African Americans, indigenous peoples, women, sexual minorities. The first aspect epitomizes Hayek’s grim prophecy in The Road to Serfdom and represents the peak of central planning, opposed vigorously throughout their lives by Mises and Hayek, especially the latter, who denounced central planning as the radical ignorance of complex social phenomena (The Theory of Complex Phenomena, 1964)—the culmination of a lifelong academic project denouncing the abuse of reason, initiated even before WWII with the full awareness that it sought to save Western civilization from destruction, a destruction perhaps unfolding even now.

Against this liberticidal central planning, designated the United Nations, there have been and continue to be two types of reactions. The first, more common, encompasses diverse nationalisms, religious or otherwise, where national sovereignties appear as the only bulwark against the planning beast whose tentacles reach into the minutest facets of daily life worldwide. The second is the libertarian reaction, which I consider correct, privileging the preservation of individual freedoms against this planning. This second option is crucial but...

If these reactions are somewhat unclear in academia, what can one expect in politics, where both reactions interact more intensely? Ultimately, these are reactions. Even those of us who have studied libertarian ideas for years were caught off guard by the post-1991 quasi-Soviet radicalization of planning. The bipolar world before 1991 was simpler and admitted moderate leaders like Reagan, beneath whom radical positions lurked mostly in academic corridors. Since 1991, however unnoticed, the era of moderates ended. New movements arose, which, according to Karina Mariani, represented wars lost while we slept (https://www.amazon.es/Las-guerras-perdiste-mientras-dorm%C3%ADas/dp/B0DW1GZC14). The woke culture, coercive impositions (in education and health) of the LGBT agenda by governments, postmodern culturalism, immigration contrary to the rule of law, the purported right to information and alleged hate crimes, radical environmentalism, Mother Earth ideology, and finally the Soviet-like paroxysm of the pandemic, formed the breeding ground for reactive political movements, which exclude moderates and where nationalists and libertarians coexist in uneasy, sometimes fractious, alliances.

Amid this, political actors and voters tend to react rather than act. Poor Mises: never envisioned this world of human reaction, but it is our reality. Many who voted for Trump did so against Biden; many who voted for Milei did so against Massa; many who voted for Mamdani did so against Trump, with a level of emotionalism fitting the verbose, confrontational, dichotomous—and evidently inconsistent—style of these politicians. In them coexist religious concerns, libertarian elements, a free economy, external debt, and nationalist nostalgia, all bundled together. Their campaign chief is the same: the radical left, nourished by the UN (which takes local forms in each country), pushing matters to a point of no return (as has always been the case) that decades ago triggered civil wars and military coups but now, thankfully, translates into desperate voters, factional democracies, and caudillo-like leaders. What is the option?

The future is unpredictable for me. It is also impossible for me to know what a moderate libertarian leader would do in this jungle of survival. The current Churchills, less sophisticated, set aside Chamberlains, and the present-day Hitlers and Stalins are invisible, omnipresent, and borderless.

Meanwhile, the Mileis and Mamdanis of the world multiply, and the rest remain silent, confused before a historical panorama that surpasses our best theories. Except one: central planning is not only a failure; it is the death of Western civilization.