President of Argentina Javier Milei on Wednesday called on conservatives to wage a “cultural battle” against leftism and end “the garbage of socialism” during his closing speech at the Conservative Action Political Conference (CPAC) in Buenos Aires.
Milei, who is currently leading an astounding economic recovery in his country after the disastrous socialist policies of predecessor Alberto Fernández, stressed the importance of fighting leftism at a cultural level in addition to practicing good governance, stating that, without addressing ideas, “no matter how good we are at managing, or how good we are politically, we are not going to get anywhere.”
CPAC gathered in Argentina for the first time on Tuesday and Wednesday. The two-day event featured speeches by Argentine government officials such as Security Minister Patricia Bullrich and Economy Minister Luis Caputo. It also included the participation of conservative politicians and figures such as the head of Spain’s Populist Vox Party Santiago Abascal, War Room host Stephen K. Bannon (via video message), Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump, and Sound of Freedom producer Eduardo Verástegui, among others.
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro also participated in the event via video conference, as he remains banned from leaving Brazil since February.
The event concluded on Wednesday evening with a roughly one-hour speech by Milei, in which he delivered a characteristic condemnation of socialism and shared a “decalogue” of how he and his followers approach politics, such as “It is better to tell an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie,” “We don’t give a damn about politicians’ opinions on almost every issue,” and “You should never negotiate on your ideas to earn a vote.”
Milei defined three lines of action that, he explained, are how his government tackles the “task ahead of us.” The first one is how to manage the government, the second how to take political action, and the third, Milei stressed, is “the way of the cultural battle” against leftism.
“It is very important we have this clear because the socialists, after the fall of the wall of shame” — referring to the end of the Cold War in the 1990s — and went on to explain what they did then:
They advanced on virgin terrain, because basically there was someone who came up with the idea of saying that with the fall of the [Berlin?] wall came the end of history. We withdrew from the battlefield and they advanced without any problem: they got into the universities, they got into the media, they got into the culture. And since they had no rival, they won the cultural battle, basically because we didn’t fight it. And in that sense they organized themselves politically and were very successful politically.
The End of History and the Last Man is a famous political science essay by academic Francis Fukuyama that posited that with the fall of the Soviet Union humanity had concluded that liberal democracy was the best form of government and successfully defeated totalitarianism. Milei suggested that that conclusion led many to no longer see communism as a threat.
The Argentine president listed several examples of “politically successful” leftist administrations in the region – the back-to-back administrations of husband-and-wife Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro — stressing that, “the mentor of all this garbage” was late Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
Milei also lamented that “the poor Spaniards” have had to contend with their former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
“And they managed to impose the agenda of political correctness. That is why I want to introduce this, because the important thing is that they were successful culturally, they were successful politically, but as their ideas are a horror wherever they go, they generate misery,” Milei said.
“And that opened the opportunity that today in the world, with Donald Trump, [Nayib] Bukele, and us here in Argentina, the world is breathing new winds of freedom,” he continued.
Milei stated that therefore a “historic opportunity” to change the world has emerged, just as during the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall. He emphasized, however, that it is not enough to organize politically, but it is also necessary to “fight the cultural battle” so that leftism “does not enter us from any side.”
“If you strengthen your body but do not strengthen your ideas, the wild beasts will eat you anyway,” Milei said. “On the other hand, when you strengthen your head, you are ready and able to fight.”
“Because if the head fails, if the spirit fails, if what motivates and mobilizes us fails, we are not going to get anywhere,” he continued, “and that is what we have to feed … our vision, because to the extent that we strengthen our vision, that will make us resilient; it will allow us to face the lefties and beat them in all fields and put an end once and for all to the garbage of socialism.”
The Argentine president concluded his speech by expressing that the world has been “plunged into deep darkness and cries out for enlightenment. And we can and must shed that light. Argentina can be a beacon for the world, a beacon of beacons.”
“We can be an example for a West that desperately needs to rediscover the ideas of freedom. Therefore, may God bless the Argentines, may the strength of heaven be with us,” Milei said before closing with his famous catchphrase “Long live liberty, damn it!”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.