Influencer Santiago Pliego wrote last year about a historical pivot he referred to as a "vibe shift." "Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition."
Pliego was referring to the cultural earthquake that brought Donald Trump to power in 2024. It also brought Argentina's Javier Milei to power the previous year.
The losers in this vibe shift? The gender nazis, the race hustlers, the "diversity, equity, and inclusion" mafia, and everyone else who lives by the idea that life is a mirage and we can arbitrarily change its outline when it suits us.
Trump hasn't been in office long enough to bring about the macroeconomic changes he wants to make. The inertia that must be overcome in the U.S. is slowing the president's progress to a crawl. But progress there has been, and if Republicans can increase their majority in the House after next year's midterm elections, more of Donald Trump's agenda can be enacted.
Milei, on the other hand, has been able to perform an economic miracle in Argentina. He has eliminated the fiscal deficit, cutting it from 5% of GDP to zero. He reduced the number of ministries from 18 to 8. His deregulation of key industries has had an incredible effect on the overall economy. Milei's policies have brought monthly inflation down from 13 percent to 2 percent. The Argentine economy is now growing at a rate of 7% annually.
Comparing Trump and Milei is apples and oranges, considering Argentina's economy was being propped up by the International Monetary Fund and was in truly dire straits before he took office. And Trump's policies aren't designed to lower the deficit, but rather supercharge the American economy.
Argentina had a much higher ceiling to grow compared to the U.S. Nevertheless, the enactment of Trump's tax cuts and other mechanisms to spur growth promise to give the U.S. economy a shot in the arm, especially in the manufacturing sector.
Milei burst onto the world stage at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, where the elites gather every year to congratulate themselves on what a fine job they're doing running the planet.
Milei turned a firehose of frigid water on the gathering.
"Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inevitably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty," Milei said.
The entire speech needs to be read to be believed. For the president of a country fabulously wealthy in resources but desperately poor in political capital to come and tell the elites that what ails the world is them and their wrong-headed ideology was astonishing.
“The conclusion is obvious,” Milei added. “Far from being the cause of our problems, free-business capitalism as an economic system is the only tool that we have to end hunger, poverty.”
“Long live freedom, dammit,” and he left the stage.
He continued his verbal assault at the 2025 WEF, calling for a cure for "wokeness."
“The common denominator for the countries that are failing is the mental virus of woke ideology. It is the great pandemic of our time that needs to be cured. It is the cancer that must be cut out.”
Niall Ferguson has chronicled Milei's rise with a mix of astonishment and mirth.
Rather than explaining himself in essays, Milei communicates his message through theatrical public appearances and an incessant stream of social media posts. With his leather jacket and late ’60s mop top, he is part–rock star, part–mad professor, dancing, singing, and screaming his catch phrase: ¡VivMila la libertad, carajo!—“Long live liberty, damn it!” It’s as if Joe Cocker had gone onstage at Woodstock and sung “I’ll Get By with a Little Help from My Friedman.” Never in the history of democracy has a tribune of the people won power this way.
Milei has experienced two setbacks in recent months. A long-running court case involving the Argentine national oil company YPF, nationalized in 2012, must transfer a majority stake to a consortium of American companies because the nationalization violated minority shareholder rights. It will cost the Argentine state $16 billion. Milei is appealing the ruling.
Another danger facing Milei's program is the Peronist opposition in Congress passing several ruinously expensive social welfare bills, threatening to upend his budget balancing and start Argentina down an inflationary path.
With elections in September and October, it won't be long until we find out whether Milei's experiment in "radical libertarianism" was a short-lived phenomenon or a harbinger of things to come.
