Javier Milei emerged from the fringe and is leading the polls ahead of Sunday’s election.
Hernán Stuchi, a 29-year-old food delivery driver in greater Buenos Aires, grew up as a left-wing activist. During this weekend’s presidential election in Argentina, he will make a starkly different choice, and back Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian trumpeting socially conservative culture war issues and explosive proposals to reshape Argentine society.
“It was a kind of innocence,” he said of his previous support for left-wing leaders. “It’s not like us poor people ever stopped being poor.”
At the polls on Sunday, Stuchi will be far from alone.
Milei shocked the country when he defeated Argentina’s two main political forces in primary elections in August. Now, he looks poised to win the most votes over the weekend (though he may be forced into a runoff). A main fount of that support is, surprisingly, young people — and young men in particular.
Polls indicate almost 50 percent of voters 29 and younger back Milei, the wild-haired outsider and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who inveighs against traditional politicians, branding them as members of a “caste” that must be done away with. (His campaign slogan, “que se vayan todos,” or “get rid of them all,” carries echoes of the Trumpian “drain the swamp.”) A win by Milei’s ascendant campaign in Argentina would serve as yet another indicator of the far right’s rise across the Americas and around the world. But young voters’ support sets Milei apart from the far-right stars he is often compared with, including Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both of whom were shut out by young voters in their recent reelection bids.
With over 100 percent inflation crushing Argentine pocketbooks, Milei’s proposed solution is a radical plan to abolish the central bank and dollarize the economy by replacing the Argentine peso with the US dollar — a move untested by countries of Argentina’s scale. He has voiced support for other extreme positions, including liberalizing gun ownership and individuals’ freedom to sell their organs. He denies human-caused climate change and opposes abortion. At rallies, he can often be seen wielding a chainsaw, symbolizing his plan to slash public spending and unravel Argentina’s generous safety nets. In Milei’s view, the state should largely limit itself to homeland security: To that end, he has pledged to axe the ministries of education; environment; and women, gender, and diversity, among others.
That Milei’s platform has seduced the likes of former Fox News firebrand Tucker Carlson isn’t surprising. But Argentina’s youth, in contrast, have traditionally not been associated with right-wing forces. For much of this century, the bulk of their support has gone to the left-wing Peronist coalition, a dominant electoral force in Argentina. As recently as 2019, when the last presidential election took place, young voters were seen as an important group in favor of the left-wing candidate and eventual winner. In the 1970s and ’80s, students and young people played a storied role in the opposition to the ruling military junta. (Both Milei and his controversial pick for vice president, who has family ties to the military, have downplayed the dictatorship’s track record of human rights abuses.) In that historical context, young voters’ current pull toward Milei represents something of a paradigm shift.
Experts say there are many reasons for that shift, but chief among them is the pain of a prolonged and worsening economic crisis, which has put many in the mood for a sharp turn away from politics-as-usual. It’s also a reactionary impulse: There is a strong backlash against pandemic-era restrictions, which helped popularize Milei’s anti-establishment rhetoric, and a spate of recent progressive wins in Argentina, including a momentous bill that legalized abortion in 2020.
What started out as a youth movement powering Milei’s campaign has now widened to include groups of all ages, all across the country — Stuchi called it a process of “intergenerational contagion” with people like him working to sway over older relatives. That expanding appeal has put Milei on the precipice of power.
In pursuit of that power, he has been accused of fomenting violence and deepening the socioeconomic crisis he says he wants to solve. His rhetoric, according to Argentine officials from the current ruling party, encouraged looting across the south of the country in August.
A win for Milei would plunge Argentina into uncertainty at best, sheer dysfunction at worst.
The politics of 100 percent inflation, explained
No matter the economic indicator you consult, the takeaway is one and the same: Things in Argentina are dire. Annual inflation hit 138 percent in September, one of the world’s highest rates. Just over 40 percent of Argentines currently live in poverty, up from 25 percent in 2017. The central bank is almost out of reserves, raising the risk of a potential currency devaluation and yet another default. No one is unscathed by the economic malaise, but young people face higher unemployment.
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Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images
“You go [buy something] and you find a price. You go back a couple of days later and it’s changed to something else … It’s like, every day, things get more difficult,” said Carolina Ramos, 19, a college student in the heartland city of Córdoba who will vote for Milei. “Inflation is so out of control that you lose the notion of how much things actually cost.”
For many in Ramos’s generation, the only Argentina they’ve known is one in a state of crisis. Since 2012, the Argentine economy has been in recession more often than not, and the International Monetary Fund has forecasted yet another economic contraction for 2023.
“I only have memories of Argentina in decay,” said Adriel Segura, a 19-year-old based in Buenos Aires. “So, you look around and you associate all the political parties and all the movements that were in power during that time … to a decaying country. And you desperately search for other options.”
Valeria Brusco is a member of the Red de Politólogas, a group of women political scientists. She says the traditional center-left and center-right candidates in this election are so inexorably linked to the economic mismanagement at the origin of the ongoing crisis that it’s as though they were “invisible” to many young voters, leaving only Milei as a viable option.
“The more anger and rage a voter has, the more probable it is that they’ll vote for Milei,” said Pablo Vommaro, a University of Buenos Aires sociologist.
Milei’s signature proposal to curb inflation — dollarization — is viewed by experts as likely unworkable, in part because of how few greenbacks are left in the central bank’s coffers. Critics say it could wind up depreciating the peso even further and inducing more pain. In the 1990s, a dollar-peso peg proved popular in the short term, but it led to a crushing devaluation, skyrocketing poverty, and bloody riots. According to Vommaro, young Milei voters are nevertheless willing to “press the red button and let everything blow up.”
“Their thinking is that it’s better for everything to explode than to keep living through this agony with the same leaders as always.”
Some analysts say young voters are under the naïve impression Milei will be able to seamlessly turn around Argentina’s troubles. But the young people I spoke with have an almost nihilistic understanding that betting on the libertarian could end badly.
“I know that those who are in power now and who were in power before will screw me over, that they’ll continue to steal,” said 24-year-old Buenos Aires resident Alan Monte Bello, referencing high-profile corruption cases. “They won’t do a good job. With Javier, I at least have the possibility that he won’t be like that. And maybe it will end up being a failure and things will be worse than now. But at least the benefit of the doubt is there.”
A radicalizing pandemic
Milei drastically raised his public profile during the pandemic, when he joined anti-confinement protests organized by young people and made frequent TV appearances, arguing that the toll of the government’s containment measures would wind up exceeding the toll of Covid itself. There was a receptive audience for those views, in part because of the lockdowns imposed by Argentina in 2020 that lasted until November of that year. That’s nowhere near the intensity of China’s zero-Covid policy, which only opened up restrictions earlier this year. But young people’s livelihoods were disproportionately compromised. In Argentina, almost 45 percent of all workers in the informal economy are between ages 18 and 29. Working remotely isn’t an option, so staying home means forgoing a paycheck.
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Tomas Cuesta/Getty Images
“The people who wanted to [flout restrictions], they had Milei as their representative,” Brusco said. “He became their hero.”
In parallel, a right-wing social media ecosystem was gathering strength, with a cadre of Milei-supporting influencers growing significant audiences on TikTok and YouTube. Clips of Milei’s TV appearances found a second life on those platforms, and they helped give the firebrand a social reach unrivaled by his competition in this election. On TikTok, Milei’s official account, helmed by a 22-year-old staffer, has garnered nearly four times as many followers as those of the center-left and center-right candidates combined.
“[Milei’s] performance on social media is very strong … I’ve interviewed lots of young people who told me that, during the pandemic, they were at home, they didn’t know what to do, and they just started watching videos of Milei,” said Ezequiel Saferstein, a sociologist and researcher at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín.
Backlash against historic abortion laws and other progressive wins
In 2021, a landmark law legalizing abortion went into effect. It capped a series of legislative advances — around issues such as gender identity, gender equality, sexual education, and gay marriage — that put Argentina on the progressive vanguard of Latin America. Since then, the government has removed barriers to contraception and established a trans labor quota in the public sector. The current president has publicly used gender-neutral Spanish — a lightning rod of controversy across the Americas.
Some see Milei’s rise as aided by a backlash against those changes. That may explain the gender imbalance in his youth support, which is a majority male phenomenon. (“I’m not going to apologize for having a penis,” Milei once said in an interview.)
In addition to opposing abortion rights, Milei has denied the existence of the gender wage gap and dodged a question on a debate stage about gender violence. Those positions fueled large feminist demonstrations across the country late last month, with participants reporting fear that their rights would be in jeopardy under a Milei presidency.
Saferstein told me that right-wing affiliation has carried a degree of stigma for much of the last 40 years because of the long shadows cast by the military dictatorship. But the institutionalization of progressive policies has changed the way the right is perceived.
“Historically, it’s the left that has been associated with being revolutionary … [but] the left has in a way become the status quo,” he said. “The conservative reaction that we have seen has positioned itself as anti-system … Milei has made a cult out of that anti-system rebelliousness.”
Other young voters are less moved by the culture wars and might even disagree with many of Milei’s controversial beliefs. But amid the severe economic crisis, their top priority is Milei’s proposal to stabilize the country’s economy. Most of the young people I spoke with in Argentina, for instance, say they denounce Milei’s assertion that climate change is a “socialist lie.” Their votes, however, are not based on that.
“It’s not that the people who vote for Milei are saying, ‘Screw the climate.’ … It’s just that I need to get some money in my pocket first. Then I can worry about the climate,” Stuchi said. “I think the only people that can care about climate change are people who have full fridges. … And it’s like that with every controversial policy item Milei might have, from the sale of organs to abortion.”
Still, Brusco says electing a president who represents a brand of “angry masculinity” is a real worry. Milei might find it significantly more difficult once in office to implement his radical economic reforms than, for instance, to undermine the implementation of the abortion law.
“Honestly, if we weren’t living through it, this [election] would seem like something out of a movie,” Brusco said.
What’s next?
Despite its moribund economy, Argentina has enjoyed a relatively stable political system in recent years. A Milei win could change that, with analysts predicting a high risk of social upheaval. Among his first priorities would be to shrink the footprint of the Argentine state, drastically reining in spending and setting up an austerity regime to try to get the country’s books in order. Such moves would disproportionately affect the working class and be almost guaranteed to mobilize powerful unions and social movements, paralyzing cities nationwide.
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Pablo Barrera/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
But it’s unclear whether Milei would even be able to enact reforms in the first place. Functionally a one-man party, the libertarian would have scant allies in the legislature and none in provincial governorships across the country — an unprecedented lack of support for an Argentine president. Coalition building might prove complicated given the Milei camp’s lack of governing experience. Resorting to decrees and referendums would be largely off-limits.
Those governability challenges could make it difficult for Milei to inspire confidence in the investor class — an ironic twist given his market absolutism. After Milei came out on top during preliminary elections in August, the country’s financial markets plummeted, accelerating the peso’s decline against the dollar.
“His government will face so many obstacles and I’m afraid there will be lootings, I’m afraid there will be revolutionaries in the streets,” said Natalia Fernandez, a lawyer in Córdoba. “That’s what I’m most worried about [if Milei wins]: the potential for unrest.”
If no candidate clears one of two bars Sunday (either receiving more than 45 percent of the vote, or notching 40 percent while also finishing more than 10 points ahead of the closest candidate), the top two contenders will advance to a runoff on November 19.
“Milei won’t have an easy time governing,” Vommaro said. “All those problems young people have, they will get worse … and that is going to generate more anger, without a doubt.”
The final scenes of Martin Scorsese’s recent films are part of a larger project.
To paraphrase Soren Kierkegaard: A movie must be watched forward, but the best movies beg to be understood backward. Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s latest epic, is such a movie. What he’s really doing isn’t evident until the film’s very final moments. The last scenes are a rhetorical gesture calculated to knock us flat.
This is not unusual for Scorsese throughout his career — people have argued about the ending of Taxi Driver for longer than I’ve been alive — but something’s been going on with him in the last decade or so. The last few shots of movies like Silence and The Irishman are revelatory filters for the hours of drama that have just transpired. Scorsese has arguably been the greatest living American filmmaker for a long time, but his late work is almost painfully reflective, introspective in a way that invites viewers to look inside themselves, if they’re willing.
For Killers of the Flower Moon, he once again holds his fire till the very end, though there are hints of what he’s doing — questions about who gets to tell the story of other people’s tragedies and whether they should at all — sprinkled throughout the film. It’s not a twist so much as an unfolding, and a bold move from a man who has spent his life telling stories. It is perhaps his boldest ending yet. Couple it with a few other recent films and a whole project emerges. He is a man approaching the end of his life (he’s turning 81 this November), reevaluating it all.
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You could reach way back to films like Shutter Island and Wolf of Wall Street, movies about men who have one delusion about themselves and discover, a bit too late, how they really look to the people around them. But this crystallized in Silence (2016), which centers on Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), a 17th-century Portuguese priest who has traveled to Japan with a fellow priest. They aim to convert the Japanese and minister to the Christians who’ve been forced underground by a government hostile to European influence, including their religion.
Scorsese spoke often about the impetus for that film (adapted from a 1966 novel by the Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō), which he tried to make for 25 years before finally succeeding. He’d first been introduced to Endō’s book after being the target of vitriol for 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which Scorsese considered to be an act of devotion while others, most of whom hadn’t seen the film, disagreed. The book addresses faith, doubt, and what it might mean for God to go silent in the face of extreme pain.
There’s a lot to say about Silence (in my review, I wrote that it was “the kind of film that cuts at everyone’s self-perceptions, including my own”). Yet the most lingering, complicating image in the film comes right at the end, when we discover that Father Rodrigues, despite having publicly renounced his faith and lived without it for decades, has been cremated with a crucifix. That scene isn’t in the novel; it’s Scorsese’s addition. Suddenly we’re not sure what exactly to believe about Rodrigues or, indeed, about the nature of faith and apostasy itself. Scorsese, a cradle Catholic who once thought of being a priest, has spoken about his return to faith in his later years, and has always been looking for God in one way or another. It’s a profound question in search of an answer, one he designed because he’s asking the question himself. The availability of divine forgiveness (and retribution) is a recurring theme throughout Scorsese’s movies. Here, though, he is asking the older man’s question: If God is really out there, caring about the actions of humans, then what would God be willing to forgive at the end of a man’s life?
That very theme deepens with The Irishman, which starts out, quite purposefully, as a redux of Goodfellas: a story of mobsters, violent men, men with egos to guard and vendettas to serve and a lot of skeletons stashed in the closet. But about an hour from the end, things flip on their head: Suddenly Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a hitman for the mob and the antihero of the story, is made to confront an important truth. All his life, he’s told himself that he did what he did to protect and provide for his family, his daughters, his friends. Now, nearing the end of his life, the truth comes into focus. He hurt his family; he betrayed his friend; his favorite daughter won’t even speak to him. At the end of his life, he is alone, wholly alone. The weight of his sins is too much to bear. He can live only through self-delusion.
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Netflix
The final shot of The Irishman is immensely painful; it might be the saddest ending I’ve ever seen. Having just been informed by a visiting priest at his nursing home that it’s just about Christmas, he asks the priest to leave the door open. Through the half-ajar opening, we see the big man, once celebrated by hundreds, now utterly alone with himself. It’s a stunning moment of self-implication for Scorsese, who in a recent GQ profile spoke at length about mortality, guilt, forgiveness, and the feeling of your friends and family slipping away. “I just wanna be as honest with myself as possible,” Scorsese says. “And if I’m honest in the work, maybe I could be honest as a person. Maybe.”
This context is good to keep in mind while watching Killers of the Flower Moon. The film, which reshuffles the elements of David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same title, centers on two characters: Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman who marries Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a dissipated veteran under the sway of his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his plot to steal the Osage people’s wealth.
As Grann notes in his book, the Osage murders — which involved dozens, maybe hundreds of people — were a media sensation after they were investigated 100 years ago, but were largely forgotten far too rapidly. Dead Osage people simply weren’t a story to America the way dead white people would have been. In 1932, the still-nascent FBI, which had investigated the case, started working with a radio program called The Lucky Strike Hour to dramatize cases the bureau had worked on, with the full cooperation of J. Edgar Hoover. Among its first episodes was the Osage murders.
In the hands of a 1930s radio show — an early true crime show, really — the story became, in essence, entertainment. Grann explains that fictional scenes were written by one of the FBI agents and shared with the producers of the program. “In one of those scenes, Ramsey shows Ernest Burkhart the gun he plans to use to kill Roan, saying, ‘Look at her, ain’t she a dandy?’” Grann recounts. The goal of the broadcast was, in essence, to convince the American public that the FBI was a great force for good: “The broadcasted radio program concluded, ‘So another story ends and the moral is identical with that set forth in all the others of this series … [The criminal] was no match for the Federal Agent of Washington in a battle of wits.”
None of this was particularly unusual in the 1930s, when the exploits of high-profile bank robbers and fugitives like Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, or John Dillinger, were followed breathlessly across America. Still, there’s an obvious queasiness in turning other people’s incredible tragedy — the exploitation and even murder of your family by men who considered themselves more worthy of their wealth simply because they were white — into entertainment. It’s a difficult ethical wicket, and especially thorny in the case of Scorsese, whose movies have often (though not always) focused on bad men doing bad things, but less often on the people who are collateral damage.
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Paramount
Had the movie ended with its nearly final scene — Mollie confronting Ernest about poisoning her insulin, him unable to confess, and her walking out — it would have been a stunner. But Scorsese tags on what feels, at first, like a hilarious but incongruous epilogue on the set of the radio show. We watch a narrator, vocal performers, and a foley artist re-create the rest of the story in a hokey old-timey way. It’s funny. You have to laugh.
Then Scorsese himself — a man who has done many cameos, in his own films and others’ — steps onto the radio stage. I was at the premiere screening at Cannes, and a hush instantly fell over the room. His lines are simple: He explains that Mollie’s obituary didn’t mention the murders. Then we cut to people of the Osage Nation, in what appears to be a contemporary ceremony, dancing in a circle, shot from overhead.
There’s more than one legitimate way to interpret this choice by Scorsese, which amounts, I think, to essentially breaking the fourth wall. What’s clear is that it’s a choice designed to make you think about everything that’s come before. As one of the film’s Osage language consultants, Christopher Cote, pointed out at a premiere while voicing his conflicted feelings, this is not a film for the Osage (though members of the Osage nation have praised the film and participated in its making and promotion). Furthermore, having DiCaprio, one of the world’s biggest stars, in one of the lead roles means that the center of gravity is continually getting pulled toward him.
Scorsese is no idiot; he knows this. He also knows the fact about Hollywood, which is that he and DiCaprio (and De Niro) are the reason this movie is getting made and heavily promoted. The complexity of making a movie, a work of entertainment, about a tragedy that’s still very much living in the memories of the Burkhart family and the Osage more broadly is complex. Having to balance the Osage perspective with the white characters — even if Gladstone’s performance is clearly the heart and soul of the film — is further messy.
Scorsese’s appearance at the end of Killers of the Flower Moon represents another anchor in his recent self-reflection, prompted by a lifetime of telling stories. He’s upfront in the GQ profile about what matters to him now, in his sixth decade of filmmaking: God, family and friends, and movies. Few filmmakers have done more to promote the work of directors from underrepresented communities than Scorsese, whose World Cinema Project and extensive work as an executive producer is stunning. He cares about the art form and about who gets to tell stories — the major reason for his much-maligned comments about the artistry of the most successful movies in the world.
Showing up at the end of Killers of the Flower Moon to specifically note how the story of the murders and of Mollie’s family was largely ignored is a tacit acknowledgment that he knows this isn’t a perfectly constructed story, either. Here he is, a man whose success comes at least in small part from proximity to the kind of men who murdered, asking for forbearance. For forgiveness, in a sense. An admission that these real events are not really fodder for an award-winning movie with a red-carpet Cannes premiere. None of it ever really has been.
Killers of the Flower Moon, he’s said in interviews, is “a story of complicity, silent complicity in certain cases, sin by omission.” Read that backward over his late career and you start to see what he’s getting at: Where have I been complicit, even silently? Where have I sinned by omission? And in an imperfect world, where is there forgiveness to be sought? That it’s conveyed in masterpieces of cinema, made by a genius, makes it easy to forget the point: These are questions for us to ask, too.
Killers of the Flower Moon is playing in theaters.
Jim Jordan lost. Now the party is searching for new speaker candidates.
Republicans’ search for a new speaker of the House has gone back to square one.
After Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) fell short of the votes he needed on the House floor a third time, House Republicans voted to ditch Jordan as their party’s speaker nominee. Jordan lost the closed-door secret ballot vote 112 to 86, per CNN.
The House GOP will open the contest up to new candidates and meet again on Monday.
Jordan’s defeat means that three of the most prominent figures in the House GOP — former speaker Kevin McCarthy, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Jordan — have now failed to unite the fractious conference.
Right-wing holdouts deposed McCarthy and doomed Scalise’s speakership bid by insisting on a hardliner as speaker. But those holdouts have now been counterbalanced by a newly emerged bloc of mainstream members who took down Jordan and are insisting the speaker not be a hardliner.
The tremendously difficult challenge is that just one GOP candidate somehow needs to unite nearly all members of both camps, even though they have seemingly irreconcilable demands.
The “some rando” option
With such long-established, high-profile Republicans falling flat, several much less well-known members of Congress will now try their luck. Reps. Kevin Hern (R-OK), Jack Bergman (R-MI), Austin Scott (R-GA), Byron Donalds (R-FL), and Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared their candidacies Friday afternoon after the GOP voted to drop Jordan. So did Tom Emmer (R-MN), who’s currently the House Majority Whip — No. 3 in GOP leadership. More may follow.
But here’s the math problem that has bedeviled every speaker contender so far this year:
- A GOP speaker candidate needs the votes of 217 out of 221 Republicans on the House floor (if no Democrats offer their backing).
- Roughly 180 Republicans appear to be team players who will happily back any nominee preferred by most of the conference.
- But there are about 20 holdouts on the right who have embraced hardball tactics to try and force a more right-wing speaker to be elected.
- And now there’s a newly emerged roughly 20-person anti-hardliner bloc composed of mostly mainstream or swing-district members.
The GOP’s new speaker candidates have little national profile. But perhaps it will take someone who is less firmly associated with either the existing leadership or the hardline-right faction to unite the GOP — someone who can make nice-sounding promises to both sides.
At least, it’s worth a shot. I guess. We are clearly at a “throwing things at the wall and seeing if anything sticks” phase of the speaker election morass. So next week, we’ll see if the “some rando” solution manages to fix things.
That will mainly be a question for the right-wingers. The mainstream and swing district members generally want to get the House back open and elect a speaker — they just had specific grievances against Jordan — but they’d likely support Generic Republican for the job. The hardliners on the right, though, will have to decide whether to keep holding out in hopes of getting the far-right speaker of their dreams, or whether to come to some sort of compromise.