Argentina in the 1800s: the autocratic movement arises before the autocrat
What was true 150 years ago also helps explain the rise of Donald Trump in the USA
Why are people loyal to Donald Trump? Or why did Italy eventually give its loyalty to Mussolini? The most common theory is that the autocratic movement comes first, and then eventually that movements finds a leader. To a large extent, the leader does not matter. We could study every detail about that leader and we still would not understand how they gained power. It is the movement that explains the rise of the leader, not the other way around.
This truth, and this dynamic of movement and leader, have been emerging at least since the time of Napoleon.
There are a hundred examples that we could offer for this thesis, but for now I offer just one, from Argentina in the mid 1800s. I offer this snippet because I think this metaphor is very good: The movement obeys its leader the way a patient obeys instructions from a doctor. This is a new way to think of Donald Trump: he is a doctor, and the movement is listening to him for advice about how to heal. While this might seemed deranged, it does feel like an authentic way to describe the strange affection that his followers seem to have for Trump.
Rumors of War
Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Edited by: Rebecca Earle
Copyright © 2000
Page 44
‘Civil war emanates from forces that have not been properly studied.’ It is principally for this reason that Juan Alvarez ruled out an analysis that put excessive emphasis on the role of caudillos:
Because method has been lacking in research, Argentina’s past appears as a confusing accumulation of moments of violence and disorder, and it is generally believed that thousands of men fought and died on our battlefields simply because of the affection they felt towards a particular leader, there being no cause prepared to act wholeheartedly in their interest, to defend their rights or their usual way of life … Much of the mistake comes from attributing more importance to the outer appearance of things than to investigating the causes. It is as if one were to mistake the detonator for the explosive substance. On nearly all occasions there was a military chief or caudillo who acted as the detonator, and those who followed him actively took the cause to the highest logical level: the revolution, therefore, appears to be the result of the will of the caudillo … The support for the leader is born from the inability of the masses to reform the legislation of the state of things that sparks off the explosion: they obey him, as they would obey the orders of the doctor to cure a sickness that they cannot work out how to fight by themselves. There is room, without a doubt, for the man in charge to make his suggestions, and for the affections of the masses to run away with them; but these two elements are not on their own sufficient to bring about a chronic state of social warfare.