Chainsaw and blender: a triunph in the libertarian cultural battle

Abstract

:    In the 2023 presidential campaign, candidate Javier Milei, current president of the nation, used the metaphor of the chainsaw to exemplify his economic policy proposal. The term chainsaw was quickly and uncritically adopted by public opinion, not only by supporters, but by the entire spectrum of politicians, journalists and economists in the country and even foreigners, to expose and debate issues related to the adjustment of a large part of society. Both verbally and visually, a tool evoking terrifying narratives managed to firmly establish itself in the collective imagination, while, complementarily, the blender did so to a lesser extent, but also effectively. Such figures, and others that were added over time, make up a brief repertoire of thematic axes that function as symbolic weapons in the cultural battle that Milei is carrying out, as the influencer of an intense minority, that of the libertarian space, in order to win minds and hearts for the cause of "freedom."

We understand that it was in these new images that Argentine society easily adopted that one could glimpse the violence currently exercised against it, experienced as a sacrifice or an unavoidable step towards well-being.

It is from the emblematic case of the chainsaw that one can see what Eliseo Verón (1995) calls the power of discourses. It is in this sense that we focus on three works written at the same time as the rise, growth and fall of Nazism and published at the end of the Second World War, which illuminate, with the differences of the case, aspects of the libertarian cultural battle against the progressive or woke ideology, a battle that has its battering ram in verbal and visual language - words, phrases and images that convey often novel meanings - and that crosses mass and network media in a dizzying circulation. Works that warn of a possible authoritarian drift of the libertarian government and of society as a whole.