Scams of the Right

I saw friends effusing on social media about how Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, was turning his country into a model of libertarian prosperity. Soon after, Milei was facing fraud allegations, and calls for impeachment, over his promotion on X of $LIBRA, a cryptocurrency that crashed. Critics suspected the incident might’ve been a “rug pull,” a scam in which crypto developers draw investment and then quickly withdraw their own stake, leaving the buyers with worthless tokens. That seems to me an apt metaphor for libertarianism and rightism more broadly, sucking people in with visions of a freer society, then explaining that a strongman is needed to fight against big government, and then screwing everybody.

I distrusted Milei since his February 2024 visit to Israel, where he wept at the Western Wall, announced he’d move Argentina’s embassy to Jerusalem, and talked about converting to Judaism after he leaves office, sparking euphoria among Israeli right-wingers and American Jewish right-wing magazines alike. There are few more credulous than people who believe they’re part of a movement to save civilization, in whichever country, from the depredations of the left, and all that’s needed is to give power, adulation and, importantly, money to the leaders spearheading this triumphant rightist revival. This includes ignoring conflicts of interest and accepting at face value claims that tax dollars have gone to bogus uses, notwithstanding how right-wing leaders often themselves massively upped public spending and debt.

On X, my friend Steven J. Giardini, with whom I enjoy ideologically divergent discourse, complained that I, a former Republican, am “unwilling to confer even a scrap of probity” on Donald Trump and his deputies. I replied that indeed I don’t see a scrap of probity there. However, as the term stuck in my mind, and since I’m trying to get my German up to a conversational level, I typed it into Google Translate and got “ein Stück Redlichkeit,” which I like even better and intend to use on an ongoing basis. I recalled my father once saying that my uncle Bob’s then-girlfriend was a Stück Unglück, a piece of bad luck.

I started contemplating why I think Elon Musk is such a verdammtes Arschloch, a fucking asshole. One of many reasons is his advocacy of Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), the German far-right party, in the upcoming German snap election. AfD is, arguably, even further-right than the far-right Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, or FPÖ) in Austria.

I’ll have a chance to vote against FPÖ if Austria holds a snap election soon, now that coalition talks have broken down between FPÖ and the conservative People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP). My Weltanschauung’s most aligned with the centrist party NEOS (Das Neue Österreich und Liberales Forum), but as a new Austrian, I’d been unsuccessful in getting on the voter rolls before the September election,  inspiring a paranoid thought that someone might be slow-walking applications from those who became citizens under Section 58c of the Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz, or Austrian Citizenship Act, based on persecution of their (often Jewish) ancestors. More likely, I mailed the paperwork to the wrong office. A nice guy at the Austrian consulate in New York advised me on re-applying, which worked smoothly.

That earlier suspicion, though, suggested that I too am not impervious to dubious worries that an anonymous bureaucrat is doing something that would wither if only a spotlight shone upon it. From there, it’s a short step toward belief that a demagogic politician is looking out for you, the taxpayer, the normal person, the one who’s not one of those special interests that are sucking at the government teat. Yet it’s entitlements, distributed broadly to the population in accordance with the law, that are the main driver of the growth of government spending and debt. There’s always a need to cut down on “waste, fraud and abuse,” but they’re not the key to the fiscal problem. Nor are foreign aid, grants to scientists, or the staff costs of maintaining bureaucracies; sometimes these are wasteful, sometimes they just seem wasteful when publicized out of context, but they are scapegoats. And a spending freeze that abandoned people in clinical trials with medical devices in their bodies is one of many DOGE disgraces.

Call me a skeptic, a cynic, a pendejo, a Schweinehund if you wish. If you’re cheering for the far-right, in America or around the world, consider the possibility the crypto scheme or constitutional transgression they’ve sold you on might not be entirely in your interests, and that a rug might soon be pulled.

—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky