The Hard Right and Anti-Statism
Trump and Milei disagree on free markets, so why do they get on so well?
"Larp Chainsaw" by aghrivaine is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend” - proverb with ancient roots
Donald Trump’s first meeting with a world leader after winning last month’s US Presidential election was with Argentina’s controversial leader Javier Milei. Both are clearly members of a new hard-right populist wave; and yet the differences between the two are even more interesting than the similarities.
I have already noted in a previous essay that there is a fundamental split going through the far/hard right. We have nationalists, like Trump, on one side; and ultra-libertarians, like Milei, on the other. They disagree about whether society is made up of large groups of people, who can be classified like insects, or of free individuals, unbound from the ties of solidarity.
In order to understand the difference between the two poles of the hard right, I’m afraid I will have to use the word “neoliberalism,” which has been much abused in academia. One of the best examples of the misuse of this term came recently in Spain. Iñigo Errejón, a former academic who became a political leader of the country’s populist left, was credibly accused of having a heavy-handed and boorish seduction technique. In a tearful resignation letter after the accusations broke, he blamed his poor sexual conduct on “neoliberalism.” The excuse had a certain “the dog ate my homework” quality to it.
Despite the misuse of the term by Errejón and many other academics, “neoliberalism” does point to something real. To see what, we need to backtrack to 1947, just after the end of World War II when state control of markets was in vogue. Friedrich Hayek - an economist who would go onto win the Nobel Prize for showing that markets are so effective because freely moving prices can react to obscure information that is unavailable to bureaucrats and state planners - convened a group of his peers at a Swiss resort called Mont Pelerin to discuss an intellectual rebellion.
Hayek and his peers vowed to re-energise old-fashioned economic liberalism - an idea that mainstream economists assumed was long past its sell-by date at the time - through a new organisation called the Mont Pelerin Society. Over the subsequent years, the group promoted tariff-free trade, proving influential with both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; and laying the theoretical foundations for globalised markets from the 1980s and beyond.
The name of one of the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society lives on in Buenos Aires. Argentinian president Milei was deeply attached to a dog called Conan, which died in 2017. He now has four clones of the same animal, one of which carries the same name as its forebear. He tried to name some of them after Hayek and his own mentor Ludwig von Mises, who attended the first Mont Pelerin meeting, but the names didn’t resonate with the canines. One of them did respond to the name of Milton Friedman, though, who was also present at the first meeting. The economist went on to chair the society and win his own Nobel Prize. One of Milei’s cloned dogs now bears his name.
Trump is a fan of tariffs (import taxes), a protectionist measure that the vast majority of economists realise is inflationary. Among the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society, Hayek argued that tariffs had made the depression of the 1930s significantly worse. Meanwhile, Von Mises thought that tariffs might help some producers for a time, but any benefits would disappear quickly while the harms for society as a whole would remain. Friedman (the human, not the dog) thought tariffs would “raise prices to customers and waste our resources.”
It is interesting to note that von Mises explicitly compared immigration controls to tariffs. Friedman also had fun defending illegal immigration, which he thought was better than legal immigration because undocumented workers lacked access to the welfare state. Hayek is a little more complicated. He was worried that large immigration flows would provoke a nationalist backlash, even though he was in theory opposed to borders for human capital.
Despite Hayek’s qualms, the main thinkers of “neoliberalism” tended to support a light touch on immigration, more or less, while fiercely opposing tariffs and refusing to accept the alleged inevitability of a communist dictatorship. Trump, who wants to round up undocumented workers and loves protectionism and foreign dictators, clearly goes against the grain of this approach. I think we can credibly see him as a rebel against “neoliberalism,” while Milei is one of the movement’s proudest standard bearers (although he is also not a huge fan of immigration). So, why do the representatives of each wing of the hard right get on like a house on fire despite disagreeing on such fundamental issues?
Leftists might imagine that both Trump and Milei set out to defend the interests of economic elites in different ways. While this is certainly not wrong, the account can be over-stated. Ideas matter, as we have argued before. And open source intelligence (OSINT) can help us find out what ideas motivate people by looking at their own words to try and understand them on their own terms.
After meeting Trump, Milei railed against “left-wing ideologies,” which taken as a whole “redistributes wealth at gunpoint.” Meanwhile, Trump himself said that Milei would “make Argentina great again” and claimed that the Argentinian was his favourite world leader at the moment.
Milei’s comment holds the key, I believe. Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan once semi-jokingly defined rightists as being anti-leftist on an emotional level. His insight makes a lot of sense in this context. Both Trump and Milei firmly believe in owning the libs and using troll tactics to fight what they see as the excesses of “wokeism.” Serious discussions around trade policies are much less important.
We can get a further clue from another of Milei’s cloned dogs, Rothbard, named after the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard. In 1992, this economist defended right-wing populism and proposed “America First” as a slogan. His troubling essay, which acts as a bridge between both sides of the hard right, is based on a defence of David Duke, a neo-Nazi conspiracy theorist, who failed to get a single delegate in the 1992 primary race for the Republican Party. Many years later, Trump declined to disavow Duke, who was openly supporting his candidacy at the time.
Anti-leftism is a big part of Rothbard’s argument:
More specifically, the old America of individual liberty, private property, and minimal government has been replaced by a coalition of politicians and bureaucrats allied with, and even dominated by, powerful corporate and Old Money financial elites (e.g. the Rockefellers, the Trilateralists); and the New Class of technocrats and intellectuals, including Ivy League academics and media elites, who constitute the opinion-molding class in society.
Chainsaw
One key factor that unites both sections of the hard right is deregulation. Milei used to pose with a chainsaw on the campaign trail to make the point that he would slash government spending. Deregulation was also a big part of conventional “neoliberalism,” as theorised by Hayek and developed imperfectly by Thatcher and Reagan, who both raised defence budgets significantly while paying lip service to a small state. Trump is also a proponent of slashing government spending and letting people for drill for oil without worrying too much about oversight.
Elon Musk - the tech entrepreneur tapped by Trump to downsize the US government - is one of the loudest voices for deregulation. His big, bold and slightly mad plan to colonise Mars would clearly be impossible if we worried too much about the health and safety of the would-be colonists, many of whom are clearly doomed to die horrible deaths in space.
In order to dig a little deeper, we need to borrow a term from libertarians, which was also used often by Rothbard - “statism.” It refers to people who love the state and want the government to solve their problems instead of trying to find solutions independently. Seen from this perspective, “wokeism” - an often illiberal defence of progressive values with an anti-markets edge - looks very much like a defence of government over-reach to the edge-lords and trolls of the hard right and their billionaire friends.
We can now return to the point about economic elites. Many of the billionaires who support Trump and Milei are driven by hostility to the left, who they see as “statists,” who want to over-tax them and bury them in red tape. They want to fight back against “wokeness,” an ideology which they see as being expensive for them personally as well as misguided in general, not to mention being preachy and bossy. In this view, “wokeness” provides cover for a power grab by unelected bureaucrats.
It is worth mentioning that a little anti-statism can be attractive. The young people who are currently rebelling in Spain because they want the government to intervene in the rental market badly need someone to take them to one side and tell them why markets tend to work better than bureaucracies, as Hayek taught, for example.
Having said that, much of the ardour for deregulation that we see on the new hard right has a nihilistic edge to it. We can see this clearly in Trump’s kakistocracy (or government by the worst). He wants to put an anti-vaxxer in charge of the US health administration; a climate denialist in charge of energy; and a defender of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in charge of the US intelligence services.
Experience running large organisations is notable by its absence among Trump’s picks. Anti-expert contrarianism and credible accusations of sexual misconduct are common - the first candidate that Trump wanted to put in charge of public prosecutors withdrew amid multiple scandals about statutory rape with teenagers. The picks appear to be designed to serve a loyalty test for any Republican Senators with a conscience; and to overwhelm Trump’s opponents by being so outrageous that it is hard to react in a calm or sane way. They also send a clear message that the populists of the hard right see the rule of law and respect for female autonomy as being long past their sell-by dates.
What could possibly go wrong with an edge-lord administration? As we discussed in a previous essay, people with black-and-white worldviews rarely govern effectively. Finance writer Michael Lewis published an excellent book called The Fifth Risk back in 2018, halfway through Trump’s first administration. It discussed the risks around incompetent project management when people who don’t believe in government are put in charge of the public administration.
Lewis’ central point about project management resonates hard in Spain after the regional and national administration mishandled catastrophic floods. It is interesting to note that the Japanese government was able to warn those of its citizens who live in or are visiting Spain a full day before the regional or national government was able to do the same (link in Spanish). Why were the Spanish authorities so incompetent at managing a disaster at home? Would slashing budgets and putting maniacs in charge have made things better or worse?
To sum up, I think the left and the right can have an honest and legitimate debate about the correct size of a functional state (and - speaking personally - my biggest arguments with full-blown libertarians are over the necessity of the welfare state and coordinated actions to tackle climate change). However, those of us who are not nihilists or trolls should be able to agree that the government must be competent in those areas where it has jurisdiction. This point is likely to act as the main flash-point between the nihilists of the hard right and any serious institutionalists of the mainstream centre right who manage to survive in public life in the years ahead.
Finally, it is worth reiterating the tension at the heart of Milei’s public persona between the lunatic with the chainsaw and the economics professor. He has governed much more like a professor than as a lunatic. As a result, Argentina’s rampant inflation has come under control and the country has exited a brutal recession.
In a similar vein, one of the most interesting questions from 2025 to 2028 will be whether Trump actually governs as a protectionist or whether he will instead use protectionism as a threat in order to gain concessions from trading partners while staying broadly committed to globalised markets. The answer is surprisingly hard to predict as matters stand.
The comments are closed, as usual when we discuss populists with authoritarian streaks. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week! Please note that next week’s column will come on Sunday instead of Saturday.
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Contradictions between ultra-liberalism and nationalism
On classifying people like insects
Free individuals unbound from ties of solidarity
Musk and the Silicon Valley right
“Wokeism” (part one, part two and part three)
Spain’s anti-housing market rebellion
People with simplified worldviews rarely govern well
Institutionalism (part one and part two)
What happened to the centre right?
Further Reading
The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis
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