When Argentine President Javier Milei scolded panjandrums at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, it brought to mind a central passage in Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22 in which the late Anglo-American writer confronted contradictions between his socialism, which was creaking by then, and his instinctive, humane liberalism.
The incandescence of Milei and Hitch illuminates how the Left and Right evolved in the past two decades, rendering Democrats and Republicans almost unrecognizable side by side with what they were at the start of the 21st century.
The Argentinian leader, whom Douglas Murray notes is sneered at as “far right” and “Trump-like,” confronted Davos-goers who increasingly advocate forms of socialism. They reject the economic and social freedom — I avoid the Marxist term “capitalism” — that lifted the world out of poverty in just the two most recent centuries of human history and especially enriched the nations from which most forum attendees come.
Milei made the crucial point that today’s states do not need to own the means of production “to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct the so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.”
He ended with a rallying cry to the world’s billions: “Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges. You are heroes. You’re the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen. … Thank you very much. And long live freedom, damn it!”
No international gathering quite matches Davos in exposing the hypocrisy of the purblind ruling class, which tries to undermine what it sees as the dangerous vulgarities of democracy and to thwart the less fortunate in their efforts to accumulate wealth and comfort that the private jet set takes for granted.
Nearly half a century ago, in 1976, Hitchens visited communist Poland and met intellectuals there who later became distinguished members of Solidarity. One of them, Adam Michnik, set aside ideological labels to adumbrate the central issue of the Poles’ predicament; “the real struggle for us,” he said, “is for the citizens to cease to be the property of the state.”
That continues to be the case around the globe, as Milei essentially said. Hitchens noted, “I knew as I wrote it down and underlined it that the last sentence was a pregnant one, that its implications for all political positions were enormous and that in order to stay true to principle — once again, the principle of consistent anti-totalitarianism — one might have to expose oneself to steadily mounting contradictions.”
These contradictions have fractured America’s political parties, moving them to positions at which they have swapped many policy positions. Michnik’s phrase “property of the state” is vitiated by Milei’s recognition that states don’t have to own the means of production and can control ordinary people’s lives with regulations and other nondemocratic tools at the disposal of apparatchiks and bureaucrats predominantly of the Left.
The language of freedom and democracy once came naturally to Left-wingers, and many still speak it with some fluency, but their movement has been demolishing both for decades. It wants to control the public’s lives in all particulars — what they believe, say, and do — whether the new oppressors are Ivy League students and administrators crushing dissent, federal agencies demanding Chevron deference for outlandish power grabs, or President Joe Biden stealing from future generations by throwing open borders to unwanted illegal immigrants from hostile alien cultures.
There are also authoritarians on the Right, notably former (and perhaps future) President Donald Trump, who claims he can set aside the Constitution if he wishes and sees foreign enemies as “very fine people.” But although his supporters give him a pass for this and even valorize his crudity, legions of others look to him and the Republican Party to free them from the “political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges” at the expense of freedom and national sovereignty.
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Those on the Right are more likely to believe in enlightened liberal ideals such as freedom of speech, conscience, religion, assembly, and enterprise, all of which are under assault primarily from the Left. The Left that now speaks with the voice of authoritarianism once said to be the preserve of the Right.
Honorable socialists of the past, like the present advocates of freedom, were champions of the underdog, of those who were workers in “the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen.” Their prosperity seems not to concern the jet set socialists who gather each year to advocate immiserating restraints on freedom. The people who have already made it to the top are trying to pull the ladder up behind them.