In 1943, Alice O’Connor, the married name of the writer better known as Ayn Rand, published The Fountainhead in New York. Rand, born Alina Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, sold over 43 million copies of The Fountainhead and her subsequent novel Atlas Shrugged. These books could be seen as the marketing and branding department of her own ideology, objectivism. Quickly acquiring cult status, objectivism argues that individualism and devotion to personal productive achievement should be our only driving force.
As she states in the appendix to Atlas Shrugged: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
Set against the architectural ambition of early 20th century Manhattan, The Fountainhead’s hero is a single-minded, exquisitely talented architect Howard Roark, the embodiment of objectivism. Fanatically attracted to path-breaking work, Roark the purist is driven exclusively by the pursuit of brilliance. Objectivism regards the ego as a magnetic force which propels the gifted to create the future and this human power should not be hamstrung by concerns about the collective such as redistribution or notions of unfairness.
An early devotee of Rand’s philosophy was Alan Greenspan, later head of the Federal Reserve. Another economist enthralled by Rand’s message is the tantric sexologist, psychic medium, former Rolling Stones cover band member and the next president of Argentina. Not only is Javier Milei upending all your prejudices about dull economists but, in his own words, he is about to take a “chainsaw” to Argentina’s public sector.
Milei is the most radical, and most colourful, of all the “new-age” politicians who have emerged over the past decade. I call them “new-age” politicians because we are in a new age....Whether it is Trump, now the bookies’ favourite to be in the White House this time next year, Wilders in Holland, Meloni in Italy or Le Pen, who is leading the polls in France, these are politicians for a new era.
They are described as right-wing but the old language isn’t accurate. They are more a loose coalition of alternatives – alternatives to the status quo. Animated by corruption or demography and immigration, sometimes they are fired up by culture, other times by economics. Some of them, such as Le Pen, want a bigger and more protective state, while others, such as Milei and Trump, want to tear it down.
In Dublin we saw our own variant on Thursday night: rioting young men, galvanised online, intent on destruction and mayhem. Some were driven by racism, others simply excited by the melee. But their primary target was the gardaí, the symbol of the State. Binding those hooligans to the other movements is their sense, whether real or invented, that they have been ignored, left behind, dismissed.
One psychological disposition unites new-age politicians, they feel that they are Outsiders on a collision course with Insiders. From a pop-psychiatry perspective all new-age leaders trade on personal hurt, hurt at not being listened to, not being taken seriously, and ignored by patronising Insiders. This strikes a chord with many voters. Hurt is an extremely powerful motivational force, as is its emotional cousin vengeance.
Interestingly, many previously left positions have become right and vice versa in this new age. For example, Big Pharma was the rallying cry of the left who used to criticise large pharmaceutical companies because they owned medicine and profited from people’s misery. Being against Big Pharma came typically with another set of beliefs like pro-higher taxes, pro public health, pro-immigration and bigger government. Today the most virulent critics of Big Pharma are anti-vaxxers, who also tend to be anti-immigration, against the tyranny of enforced public heath, and want limits to government and the nanny state.
The traditional right in this country used to back censorship, banning people and ideas they didn’t like. In the US censorship reached its zenith with McCarthyism, where people suspected of being communist were hunted out of their positions in academia. These days the censorship gene has arguably morphed into cancel culture.
New-age politics is difficult to pin down and, like new-age medicine, some of it is quackery, but there is a feeling among much of the electorate that there is enough wrong with the status quo, and that feeling nourishes scepticism and doubt when it comes to the establishment.
In Argentina, a country that was once amongst the wealthiest in the world, it’s not hard to understand why people have lurched for Javier “chainsaw” Milei. In 1913 Argentina was richer than France and Germany, and almost twice as prosperous as Spain. Its per capita GDP was almost as high as that of Canada (Harvard). The country experienced rapid economic growth and attracted significant European immigration. Not that long ago Argentina had the strongest middle class in Latin America, the essential ballast to a stable society.
However, since the early 1970s spectacularly bad political alternatives – military juntas followed by successive corrupt and kleptocratic Peronist governments – have led to mass capital flight, chronic budget deficits, trade restrictions, money printing and hyperinflation. Right now inflation is running at 135 per cent and the currency is in free fall.
Why wouldn’t you vote for the guy who at least looks like change even if that change is not specified or the path from here isn’t mapped out in any detail? Desperate people will try anything. As the man said, “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing left to lose”.
Milei wants to change the currency of Argentina to the dollar and shut down the central bank, which he believes, not without some reason, is the cause of the country’s problem. He also wants to dramatically reduce the size of the state in Argentina. In his mind, echoing his hero Ayn Rand, once these collective institutions of mediocrity are brought to heel, the personal brilliance of individual Argentinians will be unleashed.
The political expression of the philosophy of objectivism is libertarianism or, in this more extreme form, “anarcho-capitalism”. Milei is a disciple of radical economist Murray Rothbard, who championed anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism on crack. In this world all government is theft, which in languishing Argentina could make sense. Other countries are not as far down the road as the formerly wealthy Argentina, but with the world changing it feels that this is the direction of travel for many formerly comfortable voters in Europe and America.
Interestingly it was Marx who predicted the inevitable end of the state brought down by the logic of the left. Today it is the implacable enemies of Marxism who predict the end of the state brought down by the logic of the right. Big business and globalisation is now the target of the right, while censorship is a go-to tool of the progressive left. The right has become left, and the left has become the right. Such blurring will continue.
Welcome to politics – new-age style.
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