The Politician-Buffoon of the 21st Century
Gone are the days of grand eloquence and infallible rhetoric, times when profound questions and socio-historical analyses sparked the curiosity of the people. The old ideals of building a society through education, the separation of powers, and the secularism of the State seem to have been cast into oblivion. None of this exists today; the question is, did it ever really exist?
In the 20th century, South America endured the murky era of dictatorships: Argentina with Videla, Chile with Pinochet, Brazil with its military junta, Peru with Fujimori, and Paraguay with Stroessner. Upon emerging from these regimes, the politicians of that time understood just how disastrous “iron fist" rule, the suppression of free speech, and the nullification of the popular will to choose its own path of progress are for society.
However, this idealism was short-lived. The eruption of television and the internet has molded a new political personality: the “media-political buffoon." The resumes of these characters lack substance; now, it is enough to give a couple of lectures to self-proclaim oneself an “expert" and write a book that is little more than a university thesis containing more citations than original critical thought. Today, any loudmouth who can string two words together in front of a microphone is considered presidential material.
Examples abound, but let us focus on the most relevant one in the Latin American context: Javier Milei, the Argentine “anarcho-capitalist-reactionary-conservative". He has numerous hours of economic histrionics under his belt. He secured a few theoretical advisory roles in banks and think tanks, and even worked for Antonio Domingo Bussi, a figure convicted of crimes against humanity. Additionally, it is worth remembering that this gentleman pushed and promoted a cryptocurrency venture ($Libra) which millions of Argentines blindly trusted. The company was subsequently deemed a scam, and the winners of that contest were certainly not the contributors.
As soon as this “buffoon" began his political career, one of his former mentors, Diego Giacomini, began to question his speeches and theories, demanding answers based on pure economics that Milei seems to evade. However, it is well known that you cannot have serious or deep debates with these blowhards. His events resemble rock concerts more than speeches, where the content dissolves into shouting.
The question that arises in this erratic Olympus is: why, in the land of Borges, Alfonsina Storni, and Cecilia Grierson, are characters like Milei elected? Have the golden days of Argentine intellectual culture come to an end? One's ears bleed every time the “buffoon" touches a microphone, for the only harangue he seems capable of articulating is his scream: “Long live freedom, dammit!" The poetry of his language seems disconnected from the leader's confused mind, and his libertarianism sounds more like that of a confused, misogynistic patriarch (he despotically closed the Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity). Even so, he pays more heed to his sister than to his own manhood.
It is evident that there is a global crisis in education; intellectual standards are decaying due to the mismanagement of social media and the development of Artificial Intelligence Language Models, into which we deposit our mental laziness. Milei seems to appreciate this situation, as any regulation of these services would undermine his principles of media manipulation via memes. Therefore, these “politician-lecturers" take advantage of the fact that the masses cannot distinguish truth from lies, with the sole objective of reaching power and looting the state coffers that we all pay into. He has already said in an interview that, after the presidency, he wants to retire to a farm to write books and give lectures...
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