The Herminio Iglesias’ Coffin to Javier Milei’s Chainsaw: A Reading of the Shifts in Political Ethos during the 40 Years of Democracy

Abstract

After 40 uninterrupted years of democracy, little remains of the ethos originated in 1983, of that consensus about what is valid and what is repudiable in the public space. In this paper we will try to understand the long process that led to this slippage of values during these forty years, which has three chapters that are connected to each other. The first moment of this shift occurs during the Menemism, when there is a dislocation between the public and the private spheres, and the political world begins to be irradiated by values, parameters and activities of the private world. The second moment occurs during the second decade of the 21st century when we are faced with an unprecedented political and affective polarization between the two most relevant political spaces. This implied, firstly, a reading of the political enemy in moral terms, and secondly, a mutual delegitimization as democratic actors. The third moment obeys to the crowning of incorrectness as a new political virtue observed in the last years, which generates the articulation of a new system of values that legitimizes expressions that the political ethos of 1983 sanctioned.