Truth, Power, and the Emergence of a New Political Paradigm in the Americas

Abstract What Trump and Milei stand for seems wrong. The way they speak seems outrageous. How they treat their adversaries and sometimes even their comparatively weaker allies is often symbolically violent—and that violence has moved beyond the symbolic more than once. How they describe events and facts seems incompatible with what we call truth and the way they exercise power unacceptable from a democratic, pluralist perspective. How is it that these leaders and their movements managed to win elections in long standing democracies? How is it that our rudimentary versions of cordons sanitaires have been ineffective in stopping them from acquiring ever more power? Claude Lefort proposed the idea that in democracy, “power” becomes an “empty place” and can no longer be claimed to be permanently embodied in an individual or social group. If the latter were to occur, democracy would be at risk. Andrew Arato, in analyzing the contemporary ways in which democratic power could be threatened by an attempt at re-embodiment, developed the notion of “organ sovereignty” in a critical dialogue with Carl Schmitt. It is through this notion that I will offer an interpretation of the un-democratic understanding of power and truth that Trumpism in the US and Mileism in Argentina actually and fundamentally share.