Argentine Political Dysfunction: A Model for Trump's America?
Is deepening political dysfunction the most likely consequence of a prospective Trump 2.0?
It is often said that nothing of importance can be done by one person alone. This is triply true in politics, where sound institutions in the context of a functioning system make all the difference. Even the most competent and well-intentioned professional cannot put up the good fight—and consistently win—in a system of perverse incentives that punishes playing by the rules and rewards illicit behavior. On that note, I confess I have a real soft spot for Argentina, where I served from 2010-2013. For Argentines too, easily the least boring people in the world. (An Africa-hand colleague once countered that Nigerians could probably give them a run for their money on this score, but I lack the personal experience to accurately compare.) I underscore my personal feelings up front for obvious reasons.
Argentina’s political system is something else entirely. Maddeningly so. Early in my time there I recall a veteran Argentine political analyst chuckling when I recounted having contacted the office of international outreach and coordination (I paraphrase) in the state of Buenos Aires to coordinate a meeting with a state government official (it seemed a self-evident approach), but gotten absolutely nowhere doing it. Why did my friend chuckle? Because the state’s formal organizational chart had nothing to do with the realities of power and the way things actually worked. Informal, personal, subterranean relationships prevailed—contradicting, negating, and completely overtaking the formal structure as depicted in the invariably irrelevant organogram. (He gave me the name and number of the appropriate contact, and I got the meeting I was seeking.) Of course, no formal bureaucratic structure anywhere perfectly reflects political realities in any mathematical sense. Informal power relations always play a role. Human beings are not machines. Not yet.
But in Argentina the difference in degree amounts to a difference in kind. If not exactly rigged, it is a thoroughly jerry-rigged system, with the countless informal “fixes” performed over time becoming the actual (maddening, byzantine, opaque) system itself. Partial thesis statement: If family ties, friendship, business interests, and political loyalty supplant professional competence and experience as the main criteria for public sector employment, here comes trouble. While other critics more perceptive than I might fear the danger of a slouch toward autocracy, I see the slide into Argentine-style dysfunction as the more likely product of a second Trump term.
Enough prologue, so here goes:
Argentine Dysfunction: A Model for Trump’s America?
We all see the world through the windows of our own experience. For former diplomats like me, the lens of past postings color our perspective and often cast into unexpected relief events occurring in our own country. But I never anticipated my professional experience in Argentina from 2010-2013 to serve as a preview of coming attractions at home.
Like the United States, Argentina benefits from an abundance of natural riches, few geographic challenges of the kind that bedevil its neighbors, and a capable, well-educated, sophisticated population. It has also long been a magnet for immigration. So great was its promise that, at the turn of the 20th century, observers believed Argentina — a near continent-sized country — was destined to become the United States’ equal and balancing power in South America.
But unlike the United States, the central national question there is “What happened to Argentina?” Some Argentine analysts acknowledge that theirs may be the most conspicuous case of an “un-developing” country in the world, in a league of its own for having managed to transform itself from a rich nation into an impoverished one – from a top 5 economy a century ago to a place where close to 50% of the population lives below the poverty line today.
Scholars have spilled lots of ink trying to explain the Argentine conundrum. Among the array of factors to draw from, it is safe to say that fraying institutions and poisonous populist politics have played a pivotal role. Many observers point to “Peronism” – a pillar of Argentine populism – as a principal culprit in this regard. The political movement named after President Juan Domingo Peron (1946-1955; 1973-74) has dominated Argentine politics for 75 years and controlled most elected governments – the current regime of renegade libertarian president Javier Milei being one of the exceptions – since the end of Military Junta rule in 1983.
It is important to pause here for emphasis: in an elegant parallel with Trump and Trumpism, Peron the political animal could cast a charismatic spell over crowds, but Peronism the political movement has no anchoring ideology apart from that of seeking and clinging to power. Its leaders have spanned the political spectrum from the “neoliberal” right of Carlos Menem in the 1990s to the toxic left enshrined in the partnership of the late Nestor Kirchner and his spouse/comrade-in-arms Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, who was president during my years there.
I remember one prominent Argentine journalist recommending I read up on the (then, to me) obscure German National Socialist political philosopher Carl Schmitt to understand Fernandez de Kirchner’s approach to wielding power. Particularly the existential distinction he made between “friend” and “enemy.” CFK (as she is known) would famously attack her political opposition as enemies of the state and withhold federal funding to regions run by rivals. She targeted the Federal District of Buenos Aires with particular vengeance, given that its then-head of government was rival-in-chief and (though few knew it at the time) future Argentine President Mauricio Macri. For Federal District residents, this meant that maintenance of critical infrastructure was neglected and trash often left uncollected in the streets.
In other improbable harbingers of our own political future, Fernandez de Kirchner engaged in a frontal assault on established media outlets that were hostile to her regime, constantly tweeted unvetted policy positions that caught government officials flat-footed, and invented issues whole cloth from thin air to distract public attention from real challenges and actual problems. Family members too were elevated to government positions to which, in a more institutional setting, they could never legitimately aspire. As baroquely entertaining as it could be, Argentine politics had by far the highest BS quotient (by which I mean an inveterate and perplexing obsession with nonsense and unreality) of any country I served in 30 years. Until I returned home.
Indeed, I was struck with a stunning sense of déjà vu during President Trump’s first term. All political opposition was now existential, Democrats “evil,” the mainstream media enemies of the people, and BS a la Steve Bannon (“flooding the zone with shit”) the name of the political game. Jared and Ivanka felt like familiar figures in a family drama too, just as Lara, Don Jr. and Eric do now. The deafening “friend-enemy” nonsense had begun in earnest during the toxic congressional reign of Newt Gingrich, but to my astonishment Carl Schmitt has now emerged into the mainstream of American political discourse too.
What happened to honest disagreement based on legitimate differences of opinion on distinct policy approaches to important national questions? Even if American politics have always been a contact sport, wasn’t fact-based debate in the context of pragmatic give and take the foundation for any functioning democracy when push came to shove? Weren’t we proud of our impersonal institutions where the rule of law rather than people, in principle, held sway? Didn’t we understand that one charismatic leader on whatever side, however supposedly strong or capable (or not), can fix little or nothing without a functioning system, practicable ideas, sound policy tools, and a competent team?
In struggling to convey the depths of Argentine political dysfunction to Americans who have not lived, worked, or studied there, I have sometimes resorted to a thought experiment: Imagine the United States after a generation or more of government by Trump, or “Trumpism” (whatever that might mean). The state of play in the US presidential elections suggests this hypothesis may soon have the opportunity to be tested. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is now complete, and a similar dominance by the MAGA movement of our national politics seems, if not exactly likely, at least more possible now than it ever did before.
It is a truism that in politics things are easier said than done. Promises are more easily made than kept. So-called “wicked” problems (which are rife in the political and policy worlds) have no solutions, and can only be managed rather than solved. Tough trade-offs are required, and not everyone gets what they want. Nothing new in all this. But the Republican party’s current challenge amounts to the need to square a kind of circle. Once you’ve done so rhetorically, how do you effect the concrete policy transition from free-market, free trade, small government, low-tax, pro-global engagement “Reaganism” to the reportedly planned across-the-board tariffs of Trump 2.0 and the narrow inward-looking nationalist conservatism embodied in VP candidate JD Vance? (My sense is that, at a minimum, you get more and more confused, gummed up, and dysfunctional along the way.) How do you improve the plight of the forgotten middle class—a necessary and laudable aim—while fueling a dynamic economy capable of competing and winning in the international arena? How do you keep the golden eggs coming without killing the goose? These are no idle questions, but lie at the core of the theory and practice of political economy in the real world. (The Democratic party has a similar challenge but within a somewhat different frame.)
One prevailing hypothesis explaining Argentina’s century-long stagnation and decline is potentially illustrative. To simplify for the sake of brevity: Argentina was considered among the most globalized economies in the world at the height of its powers over a century ago. Its meat and refrigeration industries exported unrivaled, high quality products all over the world. Then the global Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s hit. This caused the country to retreat into a protectionism, embodied most fully (if not exclusively) in Peronism, from which it has never recovered. Unlike its many starred national soccer teams, the country has remained in a defensive economic crouch ever since.
Of course, comparisons are revealing only to a point. Argentina is not the United States, and Peron is not Trump. Argentina has suffered frequent disruptions to democratic rule, with various military governments acceding to power by coup d’etat. For his part, Peron was a populist military officer from the middle class who famously doled out pork to the poor while Trump is a pseudo-populist .01% billionaire who offered tax cuts mostly for the rich. But if the differences are obvious, the similarities remain striking and the comparison instructive.
In many ways Argentina is the poster child of the fabulously rich trust-fund country gone terribly wrong, frittering away its enormous advantages in fitful displays of political frivolity, economic irresponsibility, brazen self-dealing, and absolute BS. As one Argentine observer warned, once a spirochete of this strain worms its way into the nation’s bloodstream, it becomes all but impossible to root out.
It is a warning we may still wish to heed.