In an image shared around the world, Elon Musk is seen grunting while waving a chainsaw over his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington in February. Perhaps less virally circulated was the scene just before, when the far-right libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, walked onstage to gift Musk the chainsaw—a replica with a blade etched with his now-famous motto, ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! (“Long live freedom, dammit!”).
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been called a copycat of Milei’s assault on the Argentinian state, and for good reason. Since taking office in December 2023, Milei has destroyed more than half of Argentina’s ministries (including the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity), created new ones (like the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation), and fired around 40,000 public employees. Pursuing his own brand of MAGA, Milei has explicitly called for “sacrifice” in order to Make Argentina Great Again; Musk and Trump have been less forthright on this score, with some notable exceptions. Just before the election, Musk agreed that an “initial severe overreaction in the economy” should be expected if Trump won. “We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” he insisted. “That necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”
Regarding tariffs, Trump made a similar acknowledgment the day after he issued an executive order targeting Mexico, Canada, and China: “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!)” he wrote in all caps. “But we will Make America Great Again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid.” Soon thereafter, Trump even conceded the possibility of an economic recession, leading to yet another fall in the stock market. And on April 2, which he called “Liberation Day,” Trump introduced sweeping tariffs of 10 percent on all imports, with significantly higher rates on dozens of countries—effectively a regressive tax hike for U.S. businesses and consumers. At the same press conference, Trump called for Congress to raise the debt ceiling and to lock in permanent tax cuts.
Whether or not sacrifice is acknowledged, deep cuts and steep tariffs make it the order of the day. The question is how governments justify and execute it. On this question, Milei represents a far-right vanguard of authoritarian experimentation. From the war on gender to defunding universities, from the glorification of Israel’s destruction in Gaza to rejecting an independent judiciary, new authoritarian regimes are showing how fascism can develop most rapidly and directly.
In this project, the chainsaw is not simply a metaphor. It is the logic of a new far-right wave of anarcho-authoritarian neoliberalism spreading across Latin America, North America, and Europe. As if hypnotized by a viral meme, even the center-left has been drawn in. Last month UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer floated the idea of a Milei-inspired “Project Chainsaw” that would channel the far-right attack on the public sector but “with a radical centre-left purpose.” As the chainsaw logic spreads, it strengthens the grip of an increasingly international politics of patriarchy, racism, plunder, and violence.
In 2024 the center of gravity in world politics not only moved further right; following Milei, it also shifted further south. On the anniversary of Milei’s presidency and the heels of Trump’s second victory, far-right leaders descended on Buenos Aires last December for the first Argentinian CPAC. “We could call ourselves a right-wing international,” Milei declared in his keynote address. “In the hands of Trump, Bukele and us here in Argentina, we have a historic opportunity to breathe new winds of freedom into the world.” Nayib Bukele, of course, is the president of El Salvador, who recently struck a deal with the Trump administration to hold people deported from the United States at its Terrorism Confinement Center, an infamous maximum-security prison with a capacity of 40,000.
As newly anointed members of the so-called “right-wing international,” other speakers included Spanish Vox party leader Santiago Abascal, São Paulo deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro (Jair Bolsonaro’s son), Chilean deputy Fernando Sánchez Ossa, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, Arizona politician Kari Lake, as well as online pundits like Augustín Laje and Ben Shapiro. Fresh off their respective criminal indictments in the United States and Brazil, Steve Bannon and Jair Bolsonaro appeared via video stream. The speeches featured all of the far right’s favorite targets and slurs: gender ideology, the LGBTQ+ lobby, cultural Marxism, woke extremism, migrant invasions, globalist takeovers, civilizational decline. Meanwhile, on the floor of the convention, the collective buzzed to the ironic Trumpian favorite, “YMCA.”
Milei already adored Trump in his days as a red-faced, foul-mouthed television pundit. But now the feeling is mutual. Trump’s “favorite president,” the Argentine was the first world leader to visit Mar-a-Lago after the U.S. election. “You’ve done a fantastic job in a very short period of time,” Trump said in his first post-election speech. “I am, today, one of the two most relevant politicians on planet Earth,” Milei gloats in turn. “One is Trump, and the other is me.” More than once, their mutual admiration has materialized into concrete policies. Most recently, Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, banned Cristina Fernández de Kirchner—Argentina’s former president and Milei’s archenemy—from entering the United States on grounds of alleged corruption.
Amid explosive post-pandemic inflation and overemployment, Milei took office on an agenda to radically cut government spending, eliminate public subsidies, reduce corporate taxes, and deregulate markets. Milei has not abolished the central bank, as he promised, but is instead using its reserves (now at their lowest value since he took office) to finance the price of the dollar. The effect of his reforms has been to heighten people’s use of debt financing for everything from food to rent, ensuring that everyone dealing with daily precarity is forced to engage in speculation. Milei’s austerity measures have led to skyrocketing poverty and indebtedness, particularly through the deregulation of price caps (on public transportation, telephone, and internet fees), service tariffs (resulting in higher prices for electricity, water, gas), and credit card interest (permitting banks to charge higher fees for missed payments). Under Milei, the poverty rate increased 10 percentage points to at least 53 percent of the population. While the government now claims the rate has dropped to 38 percent, the reality is that people are increasingly short on money, inflation is concentrated in key areas such as services and food, and 93 percent of households have some form of debt.
As the government targets a $20 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, a new cycle of sovereign debt is being linked to private debt, all of which is buttressed by the deepening financialization of collective life. Sovereign debt requires repayment in U.S. dollars, which in turn is sought through deregulated growth in areas from lithium extraction and mining to agribusiness and energy. Milei recently enabled young people, beginning at age thirteen, to open bank accounts in U.S. dollars. It’s a seductive but mostly symbolic promise since the majority of children and adolescents in Argentina are poor, according to UNICEF data. At the individual level, Milei calls his new paradigm “financial freedom,” epitomized in his embrace of cryptocurrency. Just as in the United States, the project has proved particularly appealing to boys and young men, deepening a toxic new form of politicized masculinity.
Younger leaders of the Latin American “new right” describe the broader project as a batalla cultural, appropriating Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s notion of a war of position. But where Gramsci aimed at the hegemony of the capitalist class, their culture war targets the supposed hegemony of progressives and leftists—progres and zurdos, Milei’s favorite epithets—by demonizing feminist, queer, indigenous, and human rights movements as well as public workers. Entire government agencies—from the Ministry of National Security (led by Patricia Bullrich) to the Ministry of Human Capital (led by Sandra Pettovello) and the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation (led by Federico Sturzenegger)—have thus been dedicated to attacking internal enemies, criminalizing protest, and defunding scientific research, public education, human rights programs, gender violence initiatives, and soup kitchens. Milei’s libertarian “revolution” can be seen as directed inward against the state, toward and for capital.
Ruling by decree, radically and immediately, Milei has not only tested the limits of the executive. His initial flurry of orders—prelude to Trump’s “flooding the zone,” in Bannon’s words—paved the ground for a massive legislative victory in Congress, the Ley Bases, which passed half a year later. One part of the law, the Large Investment Incentive Regime (or RIGI), provides legal guarantees as well as tax, customs, and foreign exchange benefits for multimillion-dollar investments in the forestry, tourism, infrastructure, mining, technology, and steel sectors. The chainsaw strikes at any regulation intended to limit the reach of capital and the extraction of natural resources.
In January this year, Milei executed his first privatization. The target was IMPSA, a national energy, technology, and metallurgical company. After its stock price dropped in tandem with Milei’s reforms, he sold the firm for a cut-rate $27 million to the U.S.-based Industrial Acquisitions Fund—with a notable nod to Trump. Milei also announced that new nuclear plants will be built to support AI development, all while pushing extraction from the country’s uranium reserves for domestic use and international export.
At the same time, Milei’s government is seeking to transform Argentina’s economic system into a platform economy through Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago, both owned by Marcos Galperin, the Elon Musk of Argentina. The idea is to organize a complete platform—a system of revenues, payments, credits, pensions, social benefits—beyond the traditional banks. This happens to also be Musk’s dream for X, which recently made a deal with Visa for processing financial payments. Coincidentally, DOGE has gone after the agency that would regulate X’s new features. Much like Tesla, however, the prospects for X as an “everything app” appear less rosy these days.
Trump, like Milei, has pursued a struggle within and against the state—but one that inverts the political valence of what theorists like Nicos Poulantzas once described as socialist strategy. Though Project 2025 laid out a detailed plan for much of this weaponization of the administrative state—not so much in order to destroy it, as James Goodwin has argued in these pages, as to repurpose it for “archconservative rule”—Milei has been both an inspiration and an ally to Trump. Russell Vought, head of the powerful White House budget office and Project 2025 coauthor, said his aim is to put federal employees “in trauma.” White House budget documents suggest the administration hopes to cut some agencies and departments by as much as 60 percent. The Environmental Protection Agency recently backtracked on plans to cut 65 percent of its staff; the Department of Education announced cuts of nearly 50 percent; and Robert F Kennedy Jr. is cutting at least 25 percent at Health and Human Services.
Milei is an exemplary case of how far-right leaders maintain support through promises of greatness premised on sacrifice. While dispensing with democratic procedures, they capture the complaints about formal democracy from the daily experiences of the majorities and feed its anti-democratic radicalism. Milei’s campaign slogan—“there is no money”—must be understood not simply as an argument for balanced budgets and inflation reduction, the “achievement” that Western media glorifies at the expense of suffering populations. It is above all a justification for sacrifice. Meanwhile Milei turns the whole country into a “sacrifice zone”—to borrow a term from scholarship on extractivism—by offering up land to businesses for further plunder and environmental degradation.
In this way, individual sacrifice and national sacrifice zones are two sides of the same coin. Sacrifice is a rhetoric that seeks consent for dispossession. You are neither exploited nor dispossessed, it says; you are part of a greater sacrificial project that must be embraced to be successful. Your suffering is necessary and will ultimately do you well. While land, resources, and peoples must be sacrificed—that is, gifted—to international capital, the ethos of speculative competition is imposed on individuals as a general law, transforming subjectivities and exhausting social reproduction.
Milei’s gift to Musk was indicative not only of a policy package. It also reflected a strategy for maintaining legitimacy. The photo op with Musk came at an opportune time, days after Milei promoted the $Libra memecoin on X. Inspired by the $Trump memecoin, $Libra rocketed in value and then, a few hours later, crashed and created a national scandal. More than 40,000 people were affected, with a loss of more than $4 billion, and Argentina’s main stock index fell 5.6 percent. Milei Estafador, people started calling him: Milei the Scammer.
But anytime his legitimacy takes a hit at home, Milei courts favor abroad—often with great success. Having previously labeled him a far-right extremist and danger to democracy, liberal bastions like The Economist and the Financial Times now prescribe Milei’s policies as a cure for other crisis-ridden countries—even for European economic stagnation. So too have heads of state, from Emmanuel Macron to Olaf Scholz, integrated Milei into whatever remains of the Western establishment. The far-right fringe is thus normalized, altering common sense about what is out of bounds in democratic politics and reinvigorating far-right leaders back home.
Mutual admiration expressed over social media serves similar purposes. Milei, Musk, and Bukele have cultivated an authoritarian love triangle—a “Pan-American Trumpism,” as historian Greg Grandin has called it. After meeting on X, Milei and Musk took first their friendship offline in a number of meetings that look more like trade negotiations between heads of state. Their plans include extensive lithium extraction for Tesla’s EV batteries as well as increasing the usage of Starlink satellites for internet access in Argentina. Milei has visited the other U.S. titans to entice them to partner with Argentina, breaking records for state spending on personal travel, despite all his talk of austerity. His focus is partnering with the finance, technology, and mining sectors. Milei’s tours of Silicon Valley have included conversations—always documented in selfies, two thumbs up—with Sundar Pichai of Google, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Tim Cook of Apple, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, in addition to the meetings with Musk.
On the way back from a visit to Silicon Valley last year, Milei made a pit stop in El Salvador for Bukele’s second presidential inauguration, which required the Supreme Court to reinterpret the constitutional ban on consecutive terms. (Trump recently said he was “not joking” about considering a third term.) The self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” Bukele also hosted Donald Trump Jr., the Spanish King, and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa. Like Bukele and Milei, Noboa uses social media spectacles of violence in the service of authoritarianism, and he is now striking a deal with Blackwater founder Erik Prince to pursue a war on crime through American-style militarization. Ahead of the April 13 presidential runoff in Ecuador, Noboa visited Trump in Florida to discuss a bilateral trade deal, with the hope of shoring up his electoral chances. The Trump-Milei-Bukele triangle apparently aspires to become a square.
When it comes to authoritarian media strategy, Trump’s team has also been innovating. After striking the deportation deal with Bukele, the official White House account on X posted a self-described ASMR video showing shackled men being prepared to board a deportation flight—cruelty repackaged as relaxation aid. Soon thereafter Bukele circulated a cinematic video, filmed by drones with dramatic background music, showing Venezuelan men, alleged to be gang members, being taken from the plane to Bukele’s prison complex. (The families and lawyers of several of these men vigorously contest the allegation.) The White House posted a corresponding video of a shackled Venezuelan man set to “Closing Time,” before later deleting it. To justify sending prisoners to El Salvador, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798; federal courts enjoined the deportation flights, but ICE proceeded anyway. Bukele posted “Oopsie… Too late,” prompting a retweet from Rubio. Days later Bukele claimed that “the U.S. is facing a judicial coup,” to which Musk added “1000%.” In these exchanges we glimpse the new authoritarianism in its purest form: culture war as shitposting spectacle, constitutional crisis as viral entertainment.
This is the flip side of the systemic attack on the courts, the suppression of protest, and detentions of citizens and non-citizens alike. In 2021 Bukele’s party fired five Supreme Court justices and replaced them with loyalists; this February, Milei pushed through two Supreme Court judges by decree while Congress was on summer recess. And after Trump called for the impeachment of dissident judges, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson floated the idea of completely eliminating disobedient district courts. All the while, Bukele and Noboa accelerate law-and-order authoritarianism through mass incarceration, Milei uses police repression against waves of mass protest, and Trump sics ICE on migrants and international students.
From the United States to Argentina, El Salvador to Ecuador, the wager of the resurgent right is that these spectacles of revenge—trolling the zurdos, owning the libs—can mask or even compensate for material dispossession. When citizens start balking at the sacrifices demanded of them, these governments simultaneously deflect, deepen their cuts, and demand anticipatory obedience. How long the wages of cruelty can substitute for real wages remains to be seen. But so long as they do, popular resistance will be necessary to contest the chainsaw’s right to rule.
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