Opinion Sur
In the swamp: Argentina and USA. May the reader ask, “How do I dare compare the world’s main power with a smaller, weaker country in the confines?” Well, I dare. In the balance of declines, the U.S. can learn something from Argentina.
The reflections that follow were inspired by a diaphanous interview in the newspaper Clarín with the sociologist, thinker, and former official of Raúl Alfonsín’s government, Juan Carlos Torre.[1] The interview focused on Argentina’s peculiarity, a country that for many years, and against great expectations, was swamped down in a much more serious mud than the stagnation that economists call middle-income trap. The country has fallen in all absolute and relative development indicators – something like an underdeveloped country by its own effort. It is on a dangerous slope of survival, or as the tango says “cuesta abajo en la rodada (going downhill).”[2]
The well-known economist and Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets once said sarcastically that there were four categories of countries in the world: developed, developing, Japan, and Argentina. That harsh remark was written in the annals of famous aphorisms. He introduced a great paradox into the common characterization of development, which we can express as follows, moving a little away from the original expression. In fact, we can say that Japan is a poor country that knew how to produce wealth, and Argentina a rich country that produced – and continues to produce – poverty. Japan’s fate presents it with problems (including demographic and economic stagnation at the heights of development), but it is not catastrophic. Argentina’s fate, on the other hand, seems nebulous (if one is charitable) or gloomy (if one is pessimistic).
From the aforementioned interview, I make it clear that a fundamental problem in the Argentine case has been the swing of contradictory or opposing policies even within the historically hegemonic party, which was the Peronist party[3]. Before the return of democracy in 1983, the political alternation in the country was between civilian and military governments, with the Peronist movement as the arbiter of the results, which were never favorable to sustained development. The long survival of the hegemonic party is due to a remarkable flexibility and ideological plasticity, which allowed it to move from right to left and vice versa. However, that same survival in plasticity (short-term and contradictory policies based on which it was voted again and again) was not able to avoid a sclerotic country without a medium or long-term course and without consistency in its development model. Conclusion: hegemony or hegemonic will does not guarantee development but quite the opposite – a going back and forth as a car does in a swamp[4] .
A possible way out (very difficult in a mature country with conflicting interests is that they veto each other out) would be a bi-partisan political formula (or two coalitions) that accepts a grassroots economic path and at the same time an alternation in power. That was, according to Torre, the formula applied once in Israel to “cure” its high inflation (similar then to Argentina)[5]. The formula is not new, although it may seem so difficult to accomplish in Argentina. It was precisely and for many decades the classic American formula, which unfortunately today is in tatters.
Argentina does not know how to get out of the swamp in which it finds itself. Responsibility for such a situation is not democratically shared. It falls mostly on the backs of leaders and especially politicians, who prefer short-term electoral opportunism to rational engineering that requires discipline, patience, and general base consensus. Without a real seriousness at the top of parties, companies, and institutions, the people is left at the mercy of illusory promises or palliatives that are short-lived. Behind it, there is a mixture of fatalism and faith in luck (e.g., new investments from outside, better commodity prices, a good harvest, etc.). However, the basic problem is avoided, denied, or postponed. The country tends to either retreat on itself or, without success (the failure of a semi-closed economy of modest size) ask for external help, which it does not get because of its terrible record of defaults.
The US is about to enter a similar swamp without realizing very well the sad and nebulous fate in which it dives, with the serious aggravating factor that it is not a marginal country at the end of the world, but (still) the first world power. The “argentinization” of the U.S. would be a 21st century tragedy of universal proportions because it would only foster dictatorships and universal anomie in the face of planetary challenges.
The context of the two countries is very different, and so are the causes of the impasse, but there are certain similarities in the dynamics that are installed, which is the dynamics of decadence.
The dynamics of decadence is neither a complex or mysterious mechanism that is difficult to decipher, nor the unappealable fate of a supposed “national being,” or some cultural atavism. It is another thing, in a word, it is polarization, which feeds on the rejection (and consequent failure) of rational solutions of medium and long term (a necessary but politically unpleasant engineering), in favor of more immediate, almost magical solutions, or regressive utopias. It obscures the general interest, which mobilizes little, in favor of the sectarian passions that mobilize more (the hatred regarding external opposition and the persecution of internal heresies in the name of a supposed ideological purity, which is simple intransigence). In today’s USA, it is the difficulty in which the administration of Joe Biden finds itself, who fails to suture the margins of the gap or get great support for his long-term policies. Of ten heads, nine charge and one think[6]. Thus, the prophetic vision of the great Irish poet Yeats is fulfilled, which seems to be tailored to the two countries we compare today:
Everything falls apart; the center cannot be sustained;
Mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world,
The darkened tide of blood is unleashed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack any conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.[7]
To sum up the argument, these are two very different countries and a similar fate, which is the crisis of democracy: Argentina has long been in mud and the United States is about to enter the swamp. If the reader prefers another metaphor, we can look for it in another poet. It is that of Antonio Machado in front of a child who is born:
There is already a Spaniard who wants to
live and to live he begins,
between a Spain that dies
and another Spain that yawns.
Little Spaniard who comes
into the world, God keeps you.
One of the two Spains
must freeze your heart[8]
But let’s go to the issue to which it corresponds, which is the geopolitical consequence of the so-called polarization or “gap” in more or less established democracies (the North American one has more than 200 years; the Argentine one is more recent, with almost 40 years, but that is an achievement for Latin America). Putting it bluntly and badly, I will say that the geopolitical consequence for Argentina is the loss of sovereignty (sooner or later it is devoured by outsiders); for the United States, the geopolitical consequence is the decline of hegemony (sooner or later they are limited by outsiders).
To the Argentines and Americans who come into the world today, we can say to them as Machado “Que os guarde Dios, (May God protect you)” between an old and retreaded model (Anglo-Saxon style democracy) and a new one that can be austere and gloomy (resurgent authoritarianism): one of the two models has to freeze your heart[9].
But all in all, there is a light of hope. Those two models won’t be the only ones. There will be a third, a fourth, and even a fifth. All will be placed in the perspective of a development with justice, more equality, and above all with sustainability. Perhaps, it will take a major crisis for new generations to wake up and take a good path. I believe we will enter it in the five years ahead of us.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToshTpV6N_Y
Torre was interviewed about the publication of his book entitled Diario de una temporada en el quinto piso, Buenos Aires: EDHASA, 2021.
2. Rok Spruk, “The Rise and Fall of Argentina,” Latin American Economic Review volume 28, number 16 (2019)
[3] See Tulio Halperin Donghi, La larga agonía de la argentina peronista, Buenos Aires: Ariel 1994.
[4] It is the thesis of my book The Fitful Republic, Denver: Westview Press, 1985.
[5] See Rudiger Dornbusch, Federico Sturzeneger, y Holger Wolf, “Extreme Inflation: Dynamics and Stabilization,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology,1990.
[6] The expression is used by Antonio Machado, in another context.
[7]William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
About the “passionate intensity” to which Yeats referred, I remember something Jorge Luis Borges told me once in New York: “I would only subscribe to a party incapable of arousing enthusiasm. ” Maybe because of that he wanted to be buried in Switzerland.
[8] Antonio Machado, “Las dos Españas,” 1910.
[9] We must carefully follow the exhaustion of the ancient concertation in Chile. After more than 3 decades of a celebrated stability with neo-liberal growth in the economy, and alternation between two coalitions from the center in terms of politics, a social volcano exploded in the Andean country and opened a gap very difficult to close. Chilean democracy has faced a choice between two extremes. Each seems to lack of a meritorious solution for the other half of the population, and none has governing experience. ¿Would Chile also dive in the swamp? The abundant triumph of the left could lead one to think of some similarity with Argentina. However, it’s not like this. In Chile, the conditions for a new and different concertation are in place, provided that the triumph of the president elected Boric is able to avoid the temptation of establishing a hegemonic movement like Argentina’s. The new government will have to combine the sustainability of the economy with social sustainability. The distinction between these two similar terms is crucial.
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