Steve Bannon, the guru of the American "alt right", who designed Donald Trump's campaign in 2016, was the first ideologue of the new populist right to realize the political value, in times of fatigue and rejection of the "caste ", to charge against Davos.
"The party of Davos loves democracy until it starts to go against them," ironically stated the pioneer of the post-rational right when the single neoliberal thought, in vogue since the 1980s, began to fail at the polls. He was referring to a political consensus - from center right to center left - that promoted market globalization and multi-culturalism endorsed every January by the picturesque Alpine ski resort. After the mega crisis of 2008-2009, and the billion-dollar bailout of the banks, the Davos consensus was blown up.
Bannon seized the moment. He attacked globalism and a supposed planetary oligarchy headed by progressive billionaires such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros and Nicolás Berggruen, stalwarts of the World Economic Forum that was held this week in Davos.
Mentored by Bannon, Trump learned quickly. In the presidential campaign in 2016, he railed against the "deceptive song of globalism" in a new speech that attacked free trade and multilateralism, although the most profitable anti-globalism in the elections was the rejection of immigration.
The leaders of the already thriving extreme right in Latin America - first Jair Bolsonaro and now the new Argentine president, Javier Milei - also learned. Bolsonaro - following the instructions of his own Brazilian guru, the Virginia-based popular philosopher Olavo de Carvalho - injected conspiracy theories about a secret world government coordinated at summits such as Davos and the Bildeberg Club into the feverish imagination of Brazilian social networks.
De Carvalho - who even after his death in 2022 continues to bewitch thousands of Bolsonaro supporters through hundreds of delirious videos on YouTube - attacked the "Davos men" of globalizing neoliberalism: "The globalist elite is not just an amorphous class of capitalists and bankers; it is an organized entity" whose objective is "the construction of a global bureaucracy.
"Behind the concept of globalism there is a project of total and totalitarian control," summarized a few months ago Bolsonaro's former foreign minister Ernesto Araujo - a disciple of Carvalho - in an online course on globalism.
Milei, after his anarcho-capitalist epiphany, followed the eccentric "paleo libertarian" American economist Murray Rothbard, convinced that everything public was intrinsically bad, a thesis that not even the "Davos men" most addicted to privatization could share without blushing.
This week in the Alps Milei has turned his attack on the Argentine "caste", against multilateral institutions and many Western governments.
Of course, Milei's charge against Davos does not focus on economic globalism but on the supposed collectivist and cosmopolitan values that, as he implausibly maintains, have infiltrated the agenda of the mega-rich club. To the astonishment of the audience, the new Argentine president went so far as to say that neoclassical economics - the only school relevant to the neoliberal Davos paradigm - is, in reality, a socialist plot.
"Neoclassical economic theory ends up facilitating state interference, socialism and degradation," said the Argentine president in a speech echoed by others of his in his meteoric rise to power.
It was a historic moment: the first time that a president invited to Davos called the bank executives and CEOs of multinationals sitting in the room "neo-Marxists."
For Milei, more than the technocratic neoliberal elite of Davos, the supermen of the free economy are "those of the social Darwinism that characterizes high-risk brokers and investors in cryptocurrencies," ironically Jonathan Derbyshire, in the Financial Times.
The Swiss club that Milei most admires is the Mont Pelerina Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1945, which would later weave an enormous network of right-wing think tanks, including the Atlas Network, which has financed the campaign of the new Argentine president.
Unlike traditional nationalists like Trump and Bolsonaro, Milei is a defender of the international liberalization of trade and finance, although he has implied that international transactions should not depend on bilateral or multilateral agreements but on a "laissez faire" until now non-existent in the history of capitalism.
His attack on Davos is not against economic globalization but rather against the agenda of diversity, gender rights, feminism, defense of minorities and the environment, as well as the half-hearted attempts by Klaus Schwab, the founder of Davos, to inject a minimum dose of justice. social on the forum agenda.
Milei does agree with Bannon and De Carvalho in their denunciation of the so-called cultural Marxism that has infiltrated "the media, culture, universities and also international organizations" and, as can be seen from his intervention, even at the Davos summit.
"Milei criticizes global elites for being dedicated to socialism; but he does not agree with this idea of national sovereignty that is seen in the speech of Trump or Bolsonaro or Vox in Spain," Ariel Goldstein, an Argentine sociologist, said in an interview. , author of The Authoritarian Reconquest.
"Anti-globalism is more present in Trump's speech through Bannon and in Bolsonarism," agrees Jorge Chaloub, a Brazilian political scientist. The Argentine president's charge against Davos is a question of good versus evil, he adds. "Milei's liberalism is more moral than Davos liberalism or the Washington consensus"
But something is clear after the visits of Trump, Bolsonaro and Milei to Davos in recent years: the frontal attack against the Davos consensus, whether for the sin of globalism or for its supposed socialist agenda - is easier to carry out from Washington than from Buenos Aires or Brasilia.
Ultimately, as Latin American economies in need of strong injections of foreign capital and export markets, both Brazil and Argentina have to negotiate with the global investor class, that is, these same fund managers, CEOs of multinationals and bank executives hitting the ski slopes this week in the Swiss Alps.
"What the hell are Bolsonaro and Araujo, missionaries of anti-globalism, doing in Davos?" asked Folha de Sao Paulo columnist Clovis Rossi during Bolsonaro's visit to Davos in January 2019, four months after his electoral victory.
The answer: "They must seduce the corporate barons who dictate the directions of the planet's economy." In reality, the star guest that year was the super minister of economy Paulo Guedes, a true Davos man, who, in his spare time, managed several international investment funds.
"We need a double theory to criticize the extreme right in the US and Europe, on the one hand, and in peripheral countries like Brazil or Argentina on the other, because protectionism is not compatible with the economic reality of countries that export raw materials. "said Vladimir Safatle, the Brazilian philosopher currently based in Paris.
For Safatle, the extremist discourse of Milei or Bolsonaro is necessary for large food or mining multinationals because it dismantles resistance and legal obstacles in their extractive businesses.
Milei faces a much more complicated challenge than Bolsonaro did five years ago. She presides over a country that lacks foreign currency to buy its imports and pay its immense debt, with a currency in free fall and an inflation rate of 210%. As much as he resents multilateral institutions that he considers plagued with socialist ideas, Milei must renegotiate the largest bailout in the history of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), more than $45 billion.
After attacking the institution, Milei tried to boost the self-esteem of the men of Davos. "Let no one tell him that his ambition is immoral; if you make money it is because you offer a better product for a lower price."
But even in that Milei is no longer in tune with the Davos zeitgeist. More than 250 billionaires - including Abigail Disney and Valerie Rockefeller - took advantage of the summit to demand that governments apply a tax on their wealth.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva praised the "speed" with which Milei has acted through his draconian decree of cuts and privatizations. But Georgieva is a defender of the new Washington consensus in an IMF that already explicitly rejects the harshest neoliberalism and defends social and environmental protection measures. She supported the finance minister of the previous left-wing Peronist government Martin Guzmán, a close associate of Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz's progressive school at Columbia University in New York.
In other words, it will not be easy politically for the IMF or the Biden administration's Treasury Department to be benevolent to an Argentine president closely allied to Trump.
Even more important: while Milei urges the West to defend itself against the danger of communism, Argentina is now more dependent than ever on China, the main market for its soybean and lithium exports as well as a key source for financing its gigantic debt. Beijing has already sent a warning to the libertarian president by suspending a financing mechanism for 6.5 billion dollars as punishment for Milei's Sinophobic speech.
The truth is that Davos is no longer the Western club it was 50 years ago. 80 business executives, many of them rich billionaires, have arrived this week from China. They have met with banks JP Morgan, Bank of America, Standard Charters, Blackey, and funds such as Blackstone and Bridgewater that manage trillions of dollars on a global scale.
Milei, for her part, met with Georgieva, with British Chancellor David Cameron, architect of the unfortunate referendum on Brexit, and with the Queen of Holland.
