Wealth, Dynasty, and the Limits of Latin American Democracy
Wealth and lineage are two unmistakable sources feeding the core of political life. They may clash against the more or less successful attempts of popular and social movements, but they are always present. This is as crudely evident as it is inevitable — it is coded in. And when something that does not appear to come directly from wealth and tradition—materialized as power—manages to prevail, it must contend with that power when it runs against its interests, or it ends up absorbed and conditioned by it. In the latter case, one often discovers that there was a hidden genetic relationship all along.
What remains deeply troubling, nonetheless, is the mass social inertia in the face of this historic state of affairs. The absence of resolve to stand firm and say: this far, no further. No more. I am not interested in this electoral ballot. Because we ought to agree, once and for all, that what matters has never been the act of voting itself, but how the offer is constructed — and who holds the power to construct it. Why am I voting for these two candidates, and not for others? Is this really the best available across an entire country? Is this what we deserve?
Look at the candidates and winners of recent electoral cycles just in Latin America, and the pattern becomes unmistakable. Consider what happened in Honduras, Chile, and Bolivia not long ago. Asfura, Nasralla, Kast, Rodrigo Paz—inserted into a severe social crisis—, Samuel Doria Medina, Tuto Quiroga. Much of the political landscape bears the imprint of economic and political dynasties. And that says nothing yet of Peru, with the ongoing case of Keiko Fujimori, or the case of Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia, both pointing strongly toward the continued consolidation of right-wing power across the region.
De la Espriella is a particularly instructive example. He is the son of a former magistrate of the Administrative Tribunal of Córdoba, who is also a close associate of Álvaro Uribe Vélez. His mother is no minor factor in his political trajectory: she comes from a family of cattle ranchers deeply interwoven with local politics.
One must ask where Milei fits into this picture. At minimum, we are speaking of someone who has ended up deeply entangled with the political caste he claimed, during his campaign, to have come to bury. The so-called standard-bearers of the "left" fare no better. Lula has been forced into so many alliances that his government has become a political rainbow barely visible from the favelas or the encampments where the landless movement is rooted. Petro, as we can see, is close to leaving office with little consolidated. But this is not an ideological problem at all. The real question is who comes from the blue corner and who comes from the red corner. Thinking of Peru, the question is: why is it Fujimori again?
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It is fundamentally an ideological problem, and it does not matter which corrupt minion comes from which controlled faction opposed to one another. The problem is that each individual is sovereign. Regardless of which form of government you should seek to advocate, every form of government seeks to claim higher authority over sovereign individuals than they have - and only the individuals themselves have any authority to rule themselves. Every form of government is a crime against humanity, a false claim of authority to rule over inherently inalienable sovereigns.
Even when people agree to obey some external authority, they must will themselves to obey their chosen masters. Individuals cannot delegate, give, assign, sell, or otherwise impart their sole and total authority over themselves to anyone or anything under any circumstances.
The only just form of governance is voluntarism, in which individuals forge agreements with one another to themselves limit their freedom of action in order to effect civil society, and every other form of government claiming to have authority to justly compel sovereigns glaringly falsely claims that power the laws of physics mandate is the sole and utter authority of sovereign individuals. Democratic elections yet claim the majority has the authority to rule a minority, no less than absolute Monarchs claim the minority (even of one) has authority to rule a majority. All forms of government are equally nonconformant with the laws of physics that mandate sovereign individuals alone have authority to will themselves to act.
This is the reason that red and blue, white and black, yellow and green parties are all ideologically opposed to just, lawful government, because all liberal and conservative, nationalist and borderless, plutocratic and environmentalist legal philosophies fall short of recognizing what is the actual fact of sovereign individuals, and seek to claim authority over sovereigns.
Thanks!
I fully understand your premise here, but I don't grasp the specifics on how such a system operates in practice. Can you point me to your historical and theoretical sources on this? It's a blind spot for me.
Since the Younger Dryas, centralization has subsumed humanity because agriculture became necessary to feed populations after the extinction of our preferred food sources, the megafauna that enabled one kill to feed a village for a month. Because agriculture requires centralized management to maintain and disburse stored crops, coordinate labor in the fields, and etc., tech advanced via economies of scale that increased productivity of centralized production, and overlords have continually taken the lion's share of the increase in wealth they parasitized from their workers, consumers, and subjects.
In historical times perhaps the best example of voluntarist governance were the Scythians, that for millennia occupied the Pontic Steppe and dominated surrounding regions, even including the Bronze age empires from Assyria, up to Iron age Byzantium. They did not seek to rule via institutional government, but through civil society and the principles of individual sovereignty that respected the reality of our personal authority over our selves. For a variety of reasons, including that scientific research is fully institutionalized and the power of freedom Scythia exemplified utterly contradicts the power and purposes of institutions, reliable information on Scythian society, it's mores, and the unprecedented duration of that sovereign people, that outlasted all it's imperial neighbors by 10x, is sparse, diffuse, and downplayed.
In a world where slavery was ubiquitous, the Scythian core refused to take slaves. Where empires accounted wealth of gold and silver of more value than principle, Scythian society scorned wealth and sought honor. Because they founded their society on sound principles and were comprised of armed, free men, they for millennia prevented empires from subjugating them, and continually raided and chastised the surrounding polities of slaves and their masters until the innumerable hordes burst out of East Asia and overwhelmed them.
Today advances in economies of scale potential to centralized production are no longer the leading edge of tech advance, and decentralization of production most increases productivity and advances tech. This decentralizes economic wealth, political power, and security, undermining centralization that cannot compete. Centralization is shown not to be necessary to civilization, but rather parasitic, a force that impedes the development and felicity of civil society. I see the horrific crimes against humanity being imposed by pathological overlords today as a desperate attempt to prevent the loss of tyrannical power and sybaritic wealth madmen are determined to keep, though they reduce the world to ashes to keep their status. They care only to rule, and will not willingly watch free men advance the felicity and prosperity humanity enjoys while they are reduced to mere peers of their fellows that must merit the wealth they enjoy, like all free men of our posterity will.
Narcissistic psychopaths have attained to that institutional power by being willing and able to commit atrocities that properly socialized men will not, and cannot acknowledge their own fallibility, nor learn from their mistakes. For these reasons I expect them to wreak horrific havoc with their waning power, until they reap the violence and destruction they have sown, and the laws of physics that mandate decentralization prevail and advance freedom and the felicity of humanity that merit their wealth and freedom by making it.