In 2015, the wealthy, right-wing businessman Mauricio Macri won the Argentine presidency and set about dismantling the ambitious social programs created by his predecessors Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. To the historian Ernesto Semán, the language weaponized by Macri and his followers seemed familiar: the ascendant Right denounced “populism” and aimed its vitriol at “choriplaneros,” lazy, poor people living on government handouts. Semán's new book, an extended essay rather than a scholarly monograph, does more than trace the origins of this language. Written in urgent, sometimes thrilling prose, Breve historia del antipopulismo builds on recent historiography to fundamentally recast Argentine history.The classic versions of the national narrative were written by scholars who considered Juan Perón's first two presidential terms (1946–55) a fateful turning point, the moment when Argentina began a descent into underdevelopment and ungovernability. Many historians have refuted this story, but they tend to accept its chronology, identifying the eruption of Peronism as the fulcrum. Semán breaks with this tradition by centering instead the long struggle of Argentine elites to incorporate the masses into politics. From the moment of independence, Argentina's nation builders sought to include the plebeian population in their dream of a republic, even as they worried that the poor were not ready to exercise the rights of citizens, that they were too easily manipulated by charismatic caudillos. The advent of mass politics in the twentieth century heightened these concerns, as first Radicalism and then Peronism seemed to turn democracy into mob rule.Antipopulism, as Semán describes it, focuses its critique not on wily demagogues but on the masses whom those politicians manipulate: those perennially unprepared for whatever socioeconomic transition that the country is experiencing. Before the choriplanero, the symbol of this unpreparedness was the cabecita negra, the migrant from the countryside easily hoodwinked by Perón. Before that, it was the compadrito, the streetwise ruffian happy to serve as foot soldier for a political boss. The symbolic series began with the gaucho, the rustic figure whose support for provincial caudillos frustrated liberal modernizers. Semán exposes ruptures in this history alongside the continuities: whereas the gaucho and compadrito were romanticized as national symbols as often as they were criticized, the cabecita negra was firmly associated with Peronism and never an object of admiration.Semán carefully unpacks the complex shifts in this discourse following the overthrow of Perón in 1955: the split between Left and Right antipopulisms; the dream of a technocratic solution to populist inefficiency; the authoritarian effort to dismantle the interventionist state and the unions in order to finally create the citizen as autonomous, rational individual; and, perhaps most interesting, the short-lived triumph of “democratic antipopulism” under Raúl Alfonsín, whose movement overcame the long-standing incompatibility of political and social rights.Some of the most fascinating moments in the book occur when Semán sets Argentine developments within regional or global contexts. He draws on his own brilliant scholarship to situate Peronism in the early Cold War and to trace the transnational intellectual exchanges that helped shape antipopulism in the 1950s and 1960s. His account of Argentine reactions to the Cuban Revolution is unusually nuanced, and his discussion of Argentine neoliberalism is attuned to the local ramifications of the Margaret Thatcher / Ronald Reagan revolution. One term that might have been more present in his analysis is cosmopolitanism, since Argentine antipopulism always involved a frustration with the nation's perceived inability to attain European or North American modernity.Drawing on decades of historical scholarship, Semán stresses the agency of the masses in the history of antipopulism. He argues convincingly that the electoral reform law that ushered in the era of mass politics in 1912 was a direct response to two decades of labor organizing and social protest. Similarly, he emphasizes the role of organized labor in defining the ideological content of Peronism in 1945 and in resuscitating the egalitarian promise of populism in the face of repression in 1969. I do think he might have incorporated a fuller account of popular agency into his discussion of more recent decades. The Peronist clientelism of the 1990s was not just a target of antipopulist critique; it was also, in Javier Auyero's phrase, “poor people's politics.” Moreover, one would have liked to read Semán on the role of the piquetero movement of the early 2000s in shaping the populism of the Kirchners and the antipopulism of Macri. Such oversights, if you can call them that, are inevitable in such a sweeping account. But they also testify to the fruitfulness of Semán's approach, which generates dozens of new research questions to inspire historians of Argentina.
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Aug 12, 2024
Rachel Renault 
Open Access