In many countries, among them the United States, politics has degenerated into a mud-wrestling match between the loony right and the loony left. This has often been the case in Argentina, where for many years well-behaved middle-of-the road moderates were accustomed to watching from the side-lines as extremists of one kind or another battled it out, but even so they did manage to win an occasional election when the trouble-makers of left and right paused for breath.
Elsewhere people thought they had left that sort of stuff well behind them and that for the foreseeable future they would be governed by sensible folk. Few imagined that the old order would soon fall apart and that through the cracks would emerge political leaders determined to bring about drastic changes in the societies they lived in.
Until fairly recently, the left had the upper hand and had no qualms about making the most of it. According to its standard-bearers, the time had come for them to cure their particular country of its many ills, beginning with the ingrained racism of most its unenlightened inhabitants, their entrenched sexism, penchant for flag-waving nationalism, outdated religious beliefs, contempt for the environment that was overcooking the planet and much else besides.
To achieve all this, the “highly-educated” leftist elite passed laws designed to compensate selected victim groups - people “of colour”, undocumented immigrants, women, transsexuals, etc -, for what they had suffered when a heartless and irredeemably prejudiced majority ruled the land. Not unnaturally, their policies caused much resentment among those who disliked being told that they inherited whatever had come their way from a bunch of criminals and should be deprived if it.
Though supporters of what remains of the order thus established are still quick to call their critics “rightwing” or “ultra-rightwing” because they assume it will hurt them by associating them with Mussolini and Hitler, as a result of overuse such epithets have already lost most of their derogatory connotations. Indeed, some, like our own Javier Milei, are more than happy to have one attached to them.
By its excesses, the loony left created Donald Trump who, to the delight of many who otherwise would despise him for his uncouth demeanour, is gleefully shredding the “woke” legislation encouraged by his predecessors. What he wants is to restore the status quo of about 70 years ago, before the “progressive” onslaught against the Western way of life got truly underway and the collective self-criticism they stridently demanded moved into high gear.
Trump and those surrounding him say they are against all kinds of racism, including the variety favoured by the black-lives-matter crowd and other enemies of “whiteness” who want people of European origin to pay for their inherited “privileges,” think that males and females are different in many ways and that it is foolish to pretend that it is simply a question of choice, believe immigration laws should be obeyed to the letter and take an unabashed pride in their country’s achievements, refusing to accept that it is a shameful enterprise founded on slavery as many who oppose them would have it.
Trump has also mounted a frontal attack against the best-known universities, starting with Harvard, accusing them of fostering outright anti-Semitism and indoctrinating credulous young people with woke verities in the grievance-studies departments that have proliferated not just in the US but also in the United Kingdom and many other places.
In Europe, the rightwing reaction to leftist overreach has been slower in coming, but it could be even fiercer and more disruptive than in the US. In many parts of the continent and its offshore islands, violent protests against the consequences of several decades of immigration on an unprecedented scale are becoming more frequent. The buzz word, which comes from Germany where it was roundly condemned by those in power who cling to what they regard as progressive tenets, is “remigration”, by which is meant the expulsion of all those, especially Muslims, who refuse to fit in and behave as they would back in their own or their forebears’ homelands.
Had this happened decades ago, when politicians such as Angela Merkel and David Cameron were already saying that “multiculturalism” had failed dismally and something serious should be done to repair the damage, it would already have been difficult for any government to set about restoring the demographic balance which many people yearned for, but since then the situation has become far worse. This means that a serious attempt by European office-holders to emulate Trump and “send home” unwanted immigrants would in all likelihood lead to ferocious communal conflicts like those sporadically occurring in the Middle East. Is civil war coming to Europe? Some fairly sober-minded observers suspect that it could be fast approaching.
Luckily for us, Argentina’s many problems do not include the presence of a large number of people whose cultural mores are at odds with those of the bulk of the population. However, this does not mean that the rhetoric employed by top politicians hereabouts is milder than that of their counterparts in North America or Europe. On the contrary, hardly a day goes by without President Milei, who like Trump won power thanks to the short-sightedness of people who say they loathe everything he stands for, launching into another extraordinarily abusive tirade in which he excoriates all those who dare to express even a minor discrepancy with his trenchant views, as he did the other day when, yet again, he compared them to mandrills suffering from a “mental virus” that turns them into zombies, called the well-mannered Vice-President Victoria Villarruel a “brutish traitor”, and reminded Kirchnerites, who for some reason are assumed by the foreign media to be leftists, that their leader is a convicted thief. For Milei, this was par for the course and will not affect his reputation either here or in the rest of the world where he enjoys an enthusiastic following as a fire-breathing spokesman for the “new right” on the ascendant almost everywhere.
by James Neilson
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