The U.S.-based Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) bills itself as the most influential gathering of conservatives in the world, and last week, the far-right conference touched down in Argentina.
With a headlining address from President Javier Milei, the new darling of the global far right, and, reportedly, Donald Trump’s “favourite president,” it also exposed a particular facet of libertarianism in the South American nation: very young, and very male.
Milei catapulted to fame and into the presidential office of the second-largest economy in the region last year on the shoulders of a youthful voting block. Young men, who had spent years consuming clips of his televised tirades on the internet, became envoys for his message, helping convert their family members into supporters. Proportionally speaking, they dominated the conference room at the Buenos Aires Hilton that hosted CPAC, in a sea of blue suits and, in some cases, red ties and red Make America Great Again caps, in a nod to Trump.
The gathering offers a window into the increasingly hostile rhetoric that is quickly spreading around the world, with the help of organizations like CPAC. The Argentina event included right-wing and libertarian speakers from across Latin America, as well as members of Spain’s far-right Vox party, representatives from Hungary’s nationalist government, and the son of former right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently indicted in his country for his alleged role in a coup plot.
“It is not enough to organize politically,” Milei said during his speech. “It is also necessary to fight a cultural battle, and in that CPAC has a fundamental role, and that is what will help us to coordinate internationally so that the leftists do not get in anywhere.”
For Milei, that cultural battle extends from feminists to climate change activists. In a bold move last month, he pulled Argentina from the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, and then announced that his government was reviewing its place in the Paris Agreement climate accord.
Milei has previously called the climate crisis a “socialist lie,” and since taking office he has shuttered the Ministry of the Environment, among eight other ministries; established new incentives for oil and gas projects; and set his sights on rolling back protections for forests and glaciers.
He has lived up to his campaign promise of taking a chainsaw to the state, cutting expenditures in real terms by almost a third, firing tens of thousands of public employees, cutting subsidies on everything from transit to utilities, and undertaking a major campaign of deregulation.
“We in America look to Argentina to see what we can accomplish,” said Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor turned Republican politician, who spoke at the conference. As far as the Trump administration is concerned, Milei’s radical prescriptions offer a road map, in particular when it comes to slashing government spending. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, a boisterous cheerleader for Milei, now heads up Trump’s planned Department of Government Efficiency alongside pharmaceutical billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote on X that what the United States needs is “Milei style cuts, on steroids.”
Conference attendees seemed giddy at the prospect of a new alliance. “We must stand together, establishing channels of cooperation throughout the world,” Milei said to a cheering audience. “We could call ourselves an international right wing, a network of mutual assistance made up of all those interested in spreading the ideas of freedom around the world.”
