The science journal Nature has reacted badly to the Argentine president-elect’s pledge to take a chainsaw to public spending.
Javier Milei, who describes global warming as “another socialist hoax”, assumes office on December 10 as the 2023 UN Climate Conference draws to a close in Dubai.
Milei’s 56 per cent to 44 per cent win over Peronist candidate Sergio Massa appears to have caught left-wing establishments on the hop. For the rest of us, it has reinforced the impression that COP 28 is being held in a bubble. In the real world, the political tide is moving forcefully in the opposite direction.
Milei intends to close the country’s leading science agency, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, raising the prospect that the 12,000 bureaucrats and researchers it employs could join the 40 per cent of Argentinians below the poverty line.
Matilde Rusticucci, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Buenos Aires, told Nature Milei would give industry the green light to pollute rivers “as much as they want to” and claims members of his party, La Libertad Avanza, support privatising the high seas.
“Milei is denying the value of science, denying the value of the environment, denying climate change,” Rusticucci says. “His government will be a massive setback for the entire scientific community.”
In the minds of the global intelligentsia, Milei is Argentina’s Donald Trump, one of a growing number of dinosaurs from the imagined far right, roaming the Earth and winning free and fair elections seemingly at will. Their attempt to dignify their criticism of Milei as a threat to the planet cannot disguise a greater fear: the threat to their comfortable, state-funded jobs. The chronic collapse of the country’s economy is but a footnote in The Guardian’s coverage of the election.
Inflation has risen to 143 per cent under Massa’s watch as economics minister, cutting the value of wages by a third. Yet the sobering economic figures have neither weakened the Peronistas’ conviction that their big-government instincts are correct, nor dulled their belief in the rank stupidity of ordinary Argentinians.
How could these people not see their problems would be solved by more currency controls, welfare and generous funding for the arts? Do they not understand the full employment of sustainability consultants, mime artists and central bankers is good for everyone?
On the other side of the Atlantic, commentators have been tweeting like a tree full of galahs since Geert Wilder’s PPV won the popular vote in the recent Dutch election. Almost every woke trope has been used to condemn the revival of Wilder’s fortunes. In their world, it is the beginning of the end for racial harmony, democracy and the planet.
“This outcome will likely mean a rollback of climate measures, new fossil investments, exclusion of marginalised groups, and more,” Extinction Rebellion Netherlands told Euronews.
A Wilders government would herald “four years of climate change denial, exclusion and a breakdown of the rule of law”, predicted Friends of the Earth Netherlands. The comfortable progressive left has seldom appeared less comfortable in the face of rising contempt for its failing technocratic vision. Yet only one governing coalition in Western Europe, Giorgia Meloni’s Italian coalition, is drawn exclusively from parties on the right.
Anti-elitism has gone mainstream. Many European governments despised by the intelligentsia are coalitions led by parties of the left or centre right.
Like Slovakia’s new Prime Minister, Robert Foco, a former member of the Communist Party, they have registered the change in the wind and entered into alliances with nationalist parties.
Sweden’s Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, leader of the Moderate Party, is challenging the woke agenda purely out of pragmatism. He has engineered a historic shift towards nuclear power and toughened internal checks on migrants, much to the disgust of the elite.
The insurrections against the global intelligentsia are neither planned nor co-ordinated. There are common themes of nationalism, but no consistent ideology. The movements, on the whole, are not particularly well-organised or well-funded; their energy and direction come from the grassroots.
Hence, the growing feeling of impotence among the intelligentsia as they stand armed with soft mallets playing a game of political whack-a-mole, uncertain where the next cartoonish pest will pop up and unsure of their ability to squash it.
Worse news might lie ahead for the European elites. The dinosaurs could be on the verge of achieving an outright majority in the European parliament, once the bastion of supranational, technocratic politicians are relieved of the pressure of chasing the popular vote.
The European Climate Action Network has set out the political fault lines in Strasbourg and Brussels, based on the signature woke issue of the climate emergency. ECAN classifies the eight political groupings as defenders, delayers or dinosaurs. The defenders, from the progressive socialist and green alliances, hold 250 votes in the 750-seat current parliament.
The dinosaurs, primarily conservatives, hold 304. The delayers, predominantly social democrats, have the balance of power with 101 seats. Non-Inscrits, or independents, make up the rest.
A net dinosaur gain of 72 seats may be too much to hope for at next June’s election. Yet the appetite for radical climate action among the delayers is weakening as Europe’s energy crisis bites, and popular discontent against mandating electric vehicles, de-stocking farms, the loss of jobs in heavy manufacturing and processing, and rising electricity prices add momentum.
It seems doubtful that an Australian government, led by a self-styled progressive Prime Minister and a cabinet utterly convinced about matters it barely understands, will remain immune from this backlash. Indeed, the dinosaurs, in coalition with the dickheads, have handed the Prime Minister one defeat from which he has barely recovered.
The uprising is getting closer. New Zealand could be the next woke domino to fall, thanks to an unexpectedly united three-way coalition led by the National Party’s Christopher Luxon. Could the mild-mannered former business executive and conservative evangelical break out of his well-tailored suit to bare his scaly limbs and giant claws, ready to rip apart Jacinda Ardern’s limp legacy?
Welcome to Jurassic Park.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
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