The work of Juan Bautista Alberdi is profuse;
his style, cumbersome;
his ideas changing.
We dare, however, to review his criticism of the presidencies of Miter and Sarmiento, heirs of the reforming convention of 1860.
Its basis of analysis is the absolute power of the Colony that “remains existing even if the presidents replace the viceroys and the republic replaces the monarchy.”
The sum of power persists “in resources and elements of economic and rent-seeking power, more real and effective than the power composed of written and nominal powers.”
It is, therefore, the “replacement of a sovereign government by a sovereign people,” a change that collides with “a people educated in absolute obedience.”
He quotes Washington, for whom “the supreme good is the unity of the nation.”
Questioning the parties that “open the way to corruption and foreign influence,” he advised “the dissemination of knowledge as a means of enlightening public opinion as it takes the government into its hands” and warned: “How can Does freedom of criticism exist where criticism is considered an act of war?
A man who receives criticism as an insult, and who sees his criticism as an enemy, does not understand or know a thing about freedom.
He is not a liberal, but the caricature of one.
He is a tyrant.”
Alberdi reaffirms the importance of alternation in power – “the essence of the republic” – and questions the State with “a life-long and dictatorial government”, to extend his attack towards “the Argentine liberals”: “Being free, for them, is not It is not about governing oneself, but about governing others.
The monopoly of the government: that is all its liberalism.”
It defines the key to self government – “the government of oneself, or freedom” – which implies “obeying oneself” or being a slave;
challenge still pending after the milestones of 1810 and 1852: “That freedom is lacking under tyrants is conceivable;
But let it be missing under the liberals!
Self-government should not be confused with invocations to love of country.
“The government that considers itself as the country is a crime against the country” and he emphasizes: “the two worst plagues of Plata are military glory and war prose.”
For their part, demagogues instill fear in the people “serving only the interests of their selfishness.”
“The past is always the strongest reason for the present.”
That past installed the “omnipotent, omnipotent, unlimited and absolute” government, a model that constitutional presidents repeat given their “faculty or power to raise national loans, of a forced nature, without veto, limitation, or control of the nation, by the issuance of its debt-paper-currency-legal or liberatory”: “Freedom, the liberators, the liberals: three things of the political comedy, which is called the Argentine Republic.”
The “reconstruction of the regime” requires “intelligence in matters of state, science and study of its essential foundations (…) and the waiting, time and patience, which requires the formation of the habits of government and the transformation of the rules into deep-rooted customs.”
The fight will be sustained: “the former rulers are a resistance to any reform.”
Since the most fearsome obstacle “is knowledge, honesty, judgment, prestige, disinterest,” “naturally, their weapon of war against their great obstacle, which is merit, consists of slander, the falsification of truth, in fraud, in intrigue.”
A serious hindrance is enthusiasm, which "Adam Smith considers the enemy of science, drunkenness that gets excited, shouts and runs over, equivalent to barbarism", a vice that is "the first virtue in South America" where "freedom It is the exaltation, the sudden outburst, the heat, the enthusiasm, the faith that does not see and that believes and acts without seeing, without thinking, without waiting.”
All of this “is political backwardness, a remnant of military despotism, which could have been useful in a time of war and which is fatal during ordinary life.
In Plata no one reasons.
because no one is cold.
It is a feast in which each man speaks with the cup of enthusiasm in his hand.
Instead of speaking, he screams.
He who shouts the most is most right, although he emphasizes that in a small and limited space, shouting is useless, uncomfortable, and far from persuading, it indisposes and repels.
He concludes: “Modern education must outlaw enthusiasm, as the most dangerous vice for freedom and for science.”
Finally, Alberdi contains answers in questions: “Can a political issue cease to be a social issue?
Can what is public and political not be social?
In effect, these three great questions are nothing more than one and the same question with three phases: How to distribute wealth?
How is freedom to be distributed?
How to distribute power?
Who does not see that wealth, freedom and power are three names of the same thing?
Politics is “what is most serious in life” conclude the posthumous Writings that we summarize in ten topics when President Milei in turn prefixes ten points of the strategic agenda.
Strictly speaking, in the spirit of Mayo and Alberdi, this debate should not be channeled in a meeting of governors but through the sovereign people through a constituent congress that legislates reforms towards “self-government.”
But the President seems inclined to implement an agreement like that of that “league of governors” that gave rise to Roquismo, a liberal compromise, support for concentrated power and the “unicato.”
Alberdi dixit….