Smarter and more original than Mamdani by miles
By Roger L Simon
I admit my headline is clickbait and based on a dream that could never happen. Javier Milei is the president of Argentina, not an American.
Further, Zohran Mamdani appears to have a lock on the New York City mayoral election, if only because Republican Curtis Sliwa will not drop out. That his real competition is the tarnished Andrew Cuomo doesn’t help either.
Neither of these men has anything close to President Milei’s charisma, let alone his originality. Neither, for that matter, does Mamdani, whose “democratic socialism” is just the same old, same old in new clothes.
Nevertheless, the victory a couple of days ago of his polar opposite, the libertarian Javier Milei, in his own Argentina, is something to celebrate.
Our supposed betters in the legacy media had told us ad nauseam that Milei was a goner. They fairly chortled about it. The reverse proved to be true. Even the NYT was forced to knuckle under:
“The decisive victory of President Javier Milei of Argentina in legislative elections on Sunday gave him a critical boost, with voters from the mountains of Patagonia to the farmlands in the Pampa casting their ballot to back his sweeping economic experiment.
“Some 8,000 miles north of Buenos Aires, in Washington, the Trump administration was also counting it as a victory.”
It should. Our president, through his superb Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, pumped $20 bn into Argentina’s faltering economy in time for its election.
How Milei and Mamdani are opposites is almost too many to mention. We could start with the obvious: the difference between libertarianism and socialism. Both of these men are remarkably “true to their schools.”
Milei has been giving the Argentinian economy free-market shock treatment of a kind we may never have seen. It had been working up to a point, reducing their catastrophic inflation from years of Peronist-type socialist rule, but then it got difficult.
Milei did not overpromise. He did the reverse, telling the public that, regrettably, things were going to get yet worse before they got better. Evidently, the Argentinian public responded positively to this honesty at the voting booth.
Compare this to Mamdani, who is promising the moon and beyond (free buses, public grocery stores, price controls on virtually everything, etc.) to New Yorkers who seem to gobble it up as if they had never read a history book or heard of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Forget as well Lady Thatcher’s famous comment about socialism’s problem being that at some point you run out of other people’s money.
If Milei were to take on Mamdani, he would do so with much more gusto than Sliwa or Cuomo. Only weeks before the election, the Argentine president, a trained economist, gave a mammoth rock concert—he was also once a member of a Rolling Stones tribute band—and starred in it himself (not Beyonce or someone else). How many politicians have pulled that off?
I admit, too, I am pleased that Milei is anything but an antisemite—no globalizing the intifada for him, a concept that seems to attract Mamdani. The Argentine is, if anything, philosemitic and, though a Catholic, a devoted follower of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menahem Mendel Schneersohn. Every time he comes to New York, Milei seems to stop by the Ohel, the resting place of the Rebbe in Queens, to pay his respects.
Though I was born in New York City, I no longer live there. Needless to say, however, I pay close attention to its politics, which have consistently drifted left. The saddest part of the current election for me is the number of Jews who now say they are voting for Zohran Mamdani. How short memories are and how ignorant these people are.
The upside, if there is one, is that years of socialist mismanagement of America’s most important city would necessitate the sorely needed remaking of the Democratic Party.
Still, I wish Javier Milei were running for mayor of New York, but I am happy for the people of Argentina who have such a brilliant and vibrant new president. I hope to visit there soon.
First published in American Refugees
