Argentina’s President Javier Milei has declared war—not just on the political “caste,” but on the very institutions that safeguard public welfare. In just over a year, he has slashed pensions, gutted university budgets, and deployed an anti-protest protocol that legalizes brute force. Despite his campaign promise to wield his economic “chainsaw” against the political “caste,” the hardest-hit sector has been “piss-soaked” pensioners (in the President’s own words), accounting for 30.6% of the total budgetary cuts. Far from hiding, Milei embraces a sheer spectacle of repression and cruelty. His version of neoliberalism is unapologetically violent.

And he’s not alone. From Milei’s frantic use of metaphors to Trump’s advertisement of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, a transnational far-right is testing just how much violence the public will tolerate in the name of market “freedom.” Across contexts, these leaders promote a model of governance that handcuffs the state of its redistributive functions while clearing the field for the AI-crypto-corporatism to operate freely—at times even promoting its use as an official state policy.

What binds these figures is not just a socially conservative ideology, but also a shared style. The performance of strength, the disdain for complexity, and the scapegoating of selected minorities, constitutes a shift, as labeled by Gareth Watkins, toward “postmodern conservatism”:

The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the reactionary movement (…)—if anything, they believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation altogether.

The abandonment of rationality and its replacement with personal attributions are trademarks of a new form of governance that needs, in turn, to discard checks and balances altogether. This form of governance departs from the soft-spoken language of the 1990s technocracy. Today, it is highly ideologized, distilled of personal mythologies, loud, theatrical, and punitive.

When Milei brags about conducting “the largest fiscal adjustment in human history,” he is doing more than announcing policy. He is advertising a new Darwinistic political morality: pain is proof of courage, collapse is a prerequisite for a messianic rebirth, and those left behind are simply unfit for the times.

Austerity is no longer an economic necessity but a moral imperative: To talk about budgets today is to dive into the core of the social contract. The nation is merely another dependent variable in a game where corporate power has a first-mover advantage.

Argentina’s healthcare system makes a good example: One of the first decisions by the self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist was to deregulate the private healthcare system, which automatically skyrocketed their prices up to 235% in 2024. At the same time, the state-run healthcare system began limiting access to free medication for retirees and closing specialized services, such as AIDS programs and functioning public hospitals.

Cruelty comes as no surprise from a president who openly declared that “it is wonderful when companies go bankrupt,” inviting Argentine enterprises to “adapt” to his radical economic liberalization agenda or “perish.” Milei was referring to the competition between national businesses and US companies that, in his words, “deliver better goods at a lower price.” It’s a narrative that pits the weak against the strong—where the weak are not only expected to be eliminated but are seen as deserving of it. There is no acknowledgment of the structural inequalities and precarities that place Argentine companies at a disadvantage—nor of the broader benefits that come from strengthening domestic production, such as job creation, economic stimulation, and strategic development for the country as a whole.

Similarly delusive, by the time Trump gave his inaugural speech claiming that “the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair,” he was receiving the best socioeconomic inheritance of any elected president since George W. Bush came to power in 2001. The US economy has surpassed other major economies in the post-pandemic period, outpacing pre-pandemic growth forecasts even amid surging prices and aggressive interest rate hikes.

Even so, Trump may be hitting the nail on some shared notion; that American democratic institutions are at an all-time low in terms of credibility. As Aziz Rana puts it, they have:

Allowed Trump to gain office in 2016 without winning the popular vote and then to reconstruct the Supreme Court along lines that were wildly out of step with public opinion. When Trump tried to overturn the election result in 2020, the existing institutions made it exceedingly difficult to impose any sanctions on him, whether through impeachment, prosecution or removal from future ballots.

Around the world, institutions built on informal norms and elite consensus are proving incapable of resisting leaders who don’t pretend to follow etiquette, and in turn expose how susceptible the institutional scaffolding was. After all, how much of stability depended, in fact, on consensus of elites?

In Argentina, this looks like Milei’s sweeping use of executive decrees, including a constitutionally dubious new debt agreement with the IMF. It looks like the criminalization of protest, the attempt to weaken collective bargaining rights, and the targeting of public education. When students and workers protest, they are met with tear gas and rubber bullets. The state does not attempt to conceal violence, rather broadcasts it.

In the US, Trump’s targeting of universities and activists signals a broader ambition: to check the vital signs of democratic institutions. The case of Mahmoud Khalil—a Palestinian activist and green card holder detained without charge has raised several alarms. Many see his case as a test run for suppressing political dissent, especially on university campuses. While Khalil’s detention is being legally contested, it has already signaled that critique of US foreign policy may carry personal risk, particularly among student activists. The irony that this crackdown on speech violates the First Amendment once invoked by conservatives to defend hate speech is irrelevant to a right-wing bloc that no longer bothers with consistency. In Argentina and the US, what is being tested is not just how far these governments can go, but also how elastic the rule of law can become in service of power.

Regardless, any demand for accountability falls on deaf ears as these leaders exercise boundless authority over media, and restrict and criminalize dissent. This infrastructure of repression is not incidental but foundational to corporate governance that treats dissent as an obstacle to market logic.

“Everything that can be privatized will be privatized” might as well be the global hit of the moment—echoing from Javier Milei’s Casa Rosada to Elon Musk’s declarations near the White House. But the goal isn’t really to shrink the state, it is to genuflect the whole of collective life to market logic.

What remains to be seen is whether the spectacle of strength will continue to seduce those who first brought these figures to power. For now, the message has been made clear: Winner takes all.