ResearchPod
ResearchPod
Carnival and caricature: Javier Milei and populism in Argentina
10 years is a long time in politics. In 2015, Javier Milei was a professor of economics making occasional appearances on Argentinian TV programmes. Today, he is more commonly seen wielding prop chainsaws as Argentina's Libertarian president.
Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria of the University of Bristol speaks with as again about masculinity, memeability, and Milei's version of and populism through the lens of Carnivale. After all, what's a strongman without a circus?
Find more of Dr Santamaria's work on ResearchGate
Listen to her previous episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/582022/17469780
00:00:07 Will Mountford
Hello. I'm Will. Welcome to research pod.
00:00:10 Will Mountford
Though 10 short years ago, the world in 2015 was a very different place. The UK was part of the EU Trading bloc. Barack Obama had a year left in the White House, and Javier Milei was a professor of economics, making occasional appearances on Argentinian TV.
00:00:25 Will Mountford
Today he is more commonly seen wielding prop chainsaws as part of his drive to cut back the state in his role as Argentina's libertarian president, and how many teachers in your life can say they've done that.
00:00:37 Will Mountford
Masculinity, memorability and monetary theory are just a few of the many facets that Milei embodies and employs in his politics and his performances. The day we are joined again by Doctor Sarah Garcia, Santa Maria of the University of Bristol, to discuss Milei and populism more broadly as part of a carnival. After all, what's a strong man without a circus?
00:01:03 Will Mountford
Hello there.
00:01:03 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Hello will how are you doing? Hi everyone.
00:01:06 Will Mountford
I'm very well. We've already had one episode come out about your research into populism. Alt right, Internet communities and Internet cultures and its influence there. But just for a little bit of summary for people who haven't heard that first episode, could you tell me very briefly about who you are and what do you do?
00:01:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, I'm a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol. I've been conducting research for about two years about how politicians use social media to portray themselves as authentic, create clothes and emotional connection.
00:01:43 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
With the followers.
00:01:45 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And kind of that hutch themselves from these elite perception we have and get closer.
00:01:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
To the people.
00:01:51 Will Mountford
We can move from the first episode where we were talking about food and about culture to more about the individuals, the politicians themselves, and kind of the character that they construct. And you've got a couple of examples that we're drawing from in a paper.
00:02:05 Will Mountford
About Javier Milei, who is an Argentinian politician, but we can definitely think of English and American and probably other national leaders who are.
00:02:14 Will Mountford
Constructing the identity of and. This is specifically your work. The fool. Can you tell me in general terms before we get into the specifics about Milei’s history, about who he is in Argentina and what he might broadly represent as a personality more than a politician?
00:02:30 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Of course. So how is kind of like the new bad guy in Latin America
00:02:39 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He himself likes to post pictures of Trump and make references to Trump and Elon Musk. He's kind of a political outsider himself. He ran for the 2021 elections for the first time. There were legislative elections as leader of a newly formed party, which was called La Libertad Advanza,
00:02:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Freedom is advancing, and he won a seat in Congress. His party was the third, was voted force, and that kind of make him think ohh. Maybe I will run in 2023 for the general elections and he did and he won. So he's now Argentina's President.
00:03:16 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He's kind of a polemical figure because he was a showman. He was an economist, and he appeared in a lot of talk shows. And he's kind of like an anarcho capitalist, very libertarian figure that promised to kind of solve all Argentinians.
00:03:36 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Economic problems and economic crisis through magical quick fixes that included dismantling the state and privatizing absolutely everything.
00:03:47 Will Mountford
Now you mentioned briefly there that he was a TV personality and
00:03:52 Will Mountford
Honest to my mind, economists aren't the most outgoing of people. The most gregarious? I don't see them as being performers naturally. Is this something that you think came before his career, or is it something that he grew and developed as a skill?
00:04:08 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, it's interesting because I will, as we will see later on, he kind of impersonates the archetype of a trickster. So he's not just one thing, he's an economist and he can talk about, I don't know, about inflation, about budget cut.
00:04:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And he has another side to it, which is a showman, right, a charismatic person. And he's both things together. He he's able to talk about economics in a way that is entertaining, that is funny, that is convincing. And that is appealing to citizens, which is not easy to do. And as I said, he's very controversial.
Because he has a a temper, you know, he has this kind of violent side to him and he gets very angry. He he gets very mad. He it looks like he's always on the verge of losing it. But that also makes him kind of relatable
00:05:02 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Ohh an authentic leader right? He kind of doesn't play a role. He is just himself and if he gets too emotional he shows it because he cares about the people. He cares about their problems and he's affected by them.
00:05:16 Will Mountford
As I said, we'll get into that trickster archetype later, but to bring things home to the UK.
00:05:22 Will Mountford
With comparisons we've got Boris Johnson, who became Mayor of London after really connecting with the city, with the nation after appearing in TV shows. Have I got news for you and being a journalist for years and years, Donald Trump, of course, coming from the Apprentice.
00:05:38 Will Mountford
In Ukraine, they've got Zelensky who was a comedian before he was a president. I wonder if you could just talk briefly about how being on screens, being in peoples faces, being a media personality, maybe in forms, political choices or political selections. Is there something that is like, this is a way into policy?
00:05:58 Will Mountford
Towards the right wing, spectrum and populism, towards the left wing spectrum, does it favor any which way?
00:06:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, what's very important is that if you are a media personality, you are a political outsider. You are not a career politician. That's very important. People are not going to perceive you as part of the political elite as part of the stethoscope, but as part of something else. And if you know how to play with it.
00:06:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It can really be used in your comps.
00:06:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Pain in a way that it portrays you as part of the people and not part of the elite. I'm not gonna trick you because I'm not part of them. I'm against them. I'm against those politicians.
00:06:37
Who?
00:06:38 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Never see the truth who are completely detached from reality. I am part of the people because I'm not a politician. I'm just that regular citizen.
00:06:46 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
That's one of the important parts. Another side to it, of course, is that you're a comedian.
00:06:52 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You are a good performer. You are charming. You know how to perform. You know how to emotionally connect with people, which is something that professional politicians like. They are often to the touched and this kind of connection that you are able to establish with followers is also very important and can play in your favor.
00:07:13 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Regarding the right or the left, you know a lot of those politicians, they are ideologically ambiguous or they think one thing today and a different thing tomorrow. They're not very politically stable. That's what cosmology calls thin ideologies. But what's very important is the way that in which they.
00:07:34 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Perform right. They might be on the right on the left, but they always perform to be on the side of the people and against the elite, and that's what populism is about, right? Whether.
00:07:44 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And you are Beppe Grillo in Italy, leader of the five Star movement, who was impossible to cast within the right or left because he had elements. He mobilized ideological elements of both sides. So a lot of scholars are saying that, yes, sometimes they're on the right, sometimes they're on the left. But what's more important is another axis, which is the.
00:08:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
High versus the law where they are positioned is on the low on the side of the ordinary people against the high, which would be politics as usual, political corruption and policy.
00:08:16
For elites.
00:08:16 Will Mountford
Well, think about various elements of the characters that have been built in Milei , in Trump and other people there is using entertainment as a cloak, as a shield, and as a chainsaw and as a chainsaw. It's because Milei is running around with a chainsaw as a prop to slash red tape the same way that Elon Musk has done. I think they've probably got the same supplier.
00:08:37 Will Mountford
And to think about it as.
00:08:38 Will Mountford
A weapon to wield, but also as an excuse that something can be just a joke. A lot of comedians who go too far with a joke or who end up attracting negative attention say that it is for entertainment purposes. It's not serious. It's not real. Politics is serious and real, and some of the implications of political choices and policy are very real and.
00:08:59 Will Mountford
So could you maybe tell me a bit about how there is the hiding behind entertainment of oh, you don't take him too seriously. He's just being his character.
00:09:07 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
This is the idea of being serious, not serious, right? So I was thinking about Donald Trump and the memes about Trump. Dress like the Pope that circulated online and nobody really understood, like, why would he do that? That's so weird. It's it's just when Kamala Harris would say you're weird.
00:09:28 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
How do you make sense of that? He was like, oh, I didn't post it. I didn't do it myself. I reposted it because I thought it was funny and Catholics thought it was funny.
00:09:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It's the idea that you can actually make fun of absolutely everything. There's no limits, even religion, right? Even as a Conservative leader, you can mock everything, even a Catholic religion. I think this idea of fun and entertainment is also very linked to the idea of politics as usual as boring. There's a.
00:09:56 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Lot.
00:09:56 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Of work done.
00:09:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Populism and.
00:10:00 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
How it makes a promise of like hope and desire against the boredom of everyday politics that make people be really detached. So something is boring. You know, when it doesn't move us and what these leaders do is they move us. They have this emotional.
00:10:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Appeal to the people. So for instance, in 2019, Donald Trump.
00:10:27 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He.
00:10:28 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So boring while noticing Sleepy Joe Biden giving a speech, and this idea of like they're boring and we're fine is everywhere. I don't know if you remember, but in 2024, during the presidential debate, Kamala Harris had to cross the stage to shake Donald Trump's hand.
00:10:48 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And.
00:10:49 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He said nice to see you. Have fun. This promise of you know, politics as fun as an entertainment, as a show. And I also remember Farage in the UK when he announced his candidacy to play the selections. He said literally like I open quote. Come on guys. Politics can be exciting.
00:11:09 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You know, because I'm back and I want us to have fun. Be successful. Join me. So I think what this leader is doing is this promise of, like, fun, excitement intense.
00:11:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Quality that they're creating with the people and it's gonna overcome like this very boring, very serious political world, but no one cares about and nobody understands any way. And that's that's powerful. That's a powerful tool. It's mobilization of logic.
00:11:41 Will Mountford
Of course.
00:11:41 Will Mountford
The boring and serious.
00:11:43 Will Mountford
Though does continue to happen behind behind the scenes and there is often, to my mind at least, I am often worried about. If someone is attracting headlines. If Trump is posting.
00:11:54 Will Mountford
Means if he is drawing all the focus onto him, what is someone who is determined to work in the background and enact policy doing that we don't hear about. So using look over here. Look over here. Don't worry about the man behind the curtain. How much is entertainment used as a smokescreen as a distraction from.
00:12:15 Will Mountford
To give my own personal opinion would be very negative political decisions being made by the Trump administration. But they're being made by boring people in suits, in closed rooms whilst he's golfing.
00:12:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, I think there's two sides to it. So on the on the one hand, yes, you can use cultural symbols, you can use entertainment as a shield as a way of like, let's talk about Donald Trump impersonating.
00:12:38 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Hope or let's talk about how Donald Trump likes to wash his hair with a lot of water and he's changing regulations so there's more water pressure coming out of your shower, right? Or he's gonna burn paper straws because they don't work. That is obviously distracting, but those are also cultural symbols that mean.
00:12:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
A lot of things and have very specific positions in the cultural wars that we're witness.
00:13:05 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So they have implications in the sense of like climate change and where he stands there immigration and where he stands there out of food policies as we talked about in our latest podcast right, whether heats red meat or hamburgers or not. So on the one hand the other is it's it's a shield on.
00:13:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
On the other hand, it's also a very powerfully saying and symbolically charged cultural trope that you can then mobilize in a way that creates collective identities around shared goals between the leader and his audience.
00:13:40 Will Mountford
00:14:01 Will Mountford
Of character and caricature move from something that is expressly entertainment, like wrestling into politics. That ohh yeah, he's going to tear regulations. It's going to be a wild time and that's as you've said, exciting and fun. Even though people are rooting for.
00:14:16 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Heal. Well, it doesn't matter right where you stand, whether you're the face or the heel, whether you're the hero or the anti hero, as long as it's entertaining and it's intense and it's passionate and it makes you feel something and it makes you identify with that specific persona with that specific narrative.
00:14:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You know, there is storytelling, so populist leader is played very often. This kind of role. They can present themselves as the Robin Hood of the people. But you know Robin Hood, he fought for the people, but he was also a little bit.
00:14:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Of a Rascal.
00:14:53 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And he broke rules and he was clever, but he was not a straight hero, right? He was more complicated than that. So there's something very interesting about the way in which they mobilize this kind of twofold identity.
00:15:08 Will Mountford
Well, that twofold identity comes back to something you mentioned earlier, the trickster archetype of someone who contains contradictions and can change and fold and trick people around them as part of the show. And this is all kind of the carnival.
00:15:23 Will Mountford
You know in your paper you make comparisons for Millay Trump and Beppe Grillo about the various archetypes of not just being a trickster, but also of masculinity in performance. Can we go through some of those in terms of not just the character and the politics, but also the physique of the performance, the body comedy?
00:15:41 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Of course, in my work I cannot use the carnival as an analytical lens that helps us make sense of apparently disconnected weird performances and weird habits and tastes of those politicians. For instance, they're here.
00:15:55 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Or or their partners, or the way in which they speak, they shout, they laugh. The jokes they tell. And I think it's kind of very interesting because from a social, cultural approach, populism is carnivalist or it is not populism. It is something else. There's a lot of debate about, oh, there's a populist.
00:16:15 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Type everybody seems to be a populist now. If you take a social cultural point of view.
00:16:21
So.
00:16:22 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You need to be cannibalist and performing a cannibalist way in order to be a populist, and this means being bombastic, exaggerated all over the top, being emotional and being a little bit weird because weird can make you authentic, right? So when you think of cardio.
00:16:42 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Carnival the body, your body itself, it kind of embodies transgression. You can use your body and other material objects as an embodiment of a transgression of the status quo of the rules of what can be seen of what can be.
00:16:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
That, and I think that's where it gets very interesting, because this is exactly what trickster is. Do they are kind of being very clever and witty, but they are also using that as a way of turning the world upside down and saying.
00:17:18 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Oh, actually, we are against the status school. We are against the custom. We are against the deep state and my body and my taste and my.
00:17:28 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Habits approve of it, so there were some podcasts, New York newspaper headlines saying is populism all about here, and they refer to, you know, Donald Trump, Javier Milei, get Wilder. Is Boris Johnson all having a very weird.
00:17:48 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Like that.
00:17:50 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Why is that? Is that by chance? Well, no, because as I said, your body and how you represent your body is an act of transgression on itself. You have weird hair. OK, that's fine. That's a marker of exceptionality, right. That's going to set you apart from all politicians.
00:18:10 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Gel hair. And that's gonna make you kind of special. And most important thing, not part of the elite. You're gonna look weird, but you're gonna look yourself. You're gonna look authentic, and you're gonna look relatable, right? So this idea that the body itself.
00:18:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Is as I signifier of political transgression. I think it's very interesting to to think of like those very conservative leaders, right, and their partners, their female partners. They are not represented in in the usual way in which you would, you know, cover and hide the female body.
00:18:47 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So that's also kind of a contradiction because they're very beautiful women.
They are very sexy and they don't hide it. It's it's very obvious. So this also kind of breaks all taboos right about political correctness. Like you can be a serious political leader and have a very beautiful and very attractive woman by your side and and that just plays in your favor because it makes you the.
00:19:13 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You know the ultimate alpha male.
00:19:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So we were talking about populism. There is some scholars, such as pierros tegu or Benjamin Moffett, that consider populism as the low, like, culturally low, as opposed to the elite. Oritis political leader is having bad taste and being playful about having.
00:19:42 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Taste an exaggerated taste and this is very much linked to the new trend of camp aesthetics.
00:19:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I mean, you just have to think about Jeff Bezos and Lorene Santa's wedding in Venice. It was so theatrical, so exaggerated. It was really a media spectacle. It was every single bit was really planned. And.
00:20:11 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Most prodigal? Right. So this is something populist leaders such as Donald Trump or Javier Milei also played with.
00:20:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I was thinking, for instance, this mixing of high and low culture. This is something that Susan Sontag has talked about very much. How campus Thetics I kind of teach, but they're also an approach that mixes elements from high culture and low culture in ways that.
00:20:41 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Lead to this kind of coded playfulness and coded humor between the performers or the artists and their pubs.
00:20:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So for instance, during his rally Javier Milei, he was signing this huge dollar bills with his face on them. It was so exaggerated but so playful. And it was such an obvious display of power and money and wealth. In the case of Donald Trump's, I can think.
00:21:11 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
For instance, as his final rally at the Madison Garden when he was dancing to the gay Anthem YMCA and everybody was very confused because they were like, OK, what is this?
00:21:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Or for instance, if you think of all these AI generated short videos and memes about these sort of politicians dancing in a very playful way, all this adds up to this idea of camp. This idea of camp that is very linked to the the bad taste this.
00:21:43 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
The version, the theatricality that come into play during the Carney.
00:21:49 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It's like I'm wealthy, but that doesn't make me your typical politician. I'm not part of the elite, I'm wealthy, and I display my wealth, but I still have an ordinary taste because I'm so part of the people and I still I'm still able to connect with you through those.
00:22:09 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Kind of popular culture consumption habits or lifestyle.
00:22:15 Will Mountford
Which makes the aspirational idea of. I could be that guy all the more real and strong.
00:22:22 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Exactly. I could be that guy, and that guy is still fantic despite his wealth, right? So that can like the idea of camp where the carnival is like it is so.
00:22:35 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Weird, right? It is such a it's so contradictory that it kind of adds up to your authenticity because something that is really planned.
00:22:45 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And is not paradoxical, it's it's more obvious, it's more linear. So this kind of contracts make you more authentic in or can make you more authentic in the eyes of your followers.
00:22:58 Will Mountford
We're thinking about the body and performance, Trump, Johnson. They these people aren't textbook handsome. They are not, you know, your a list. Hollywood to face body. They're not. You know, they're Henry Cavill, Jason Mara. But they both have endured sex scandals about infidelity, cheating, you know, being attractive.
00:23:18 Will Mountford
Enough to have partners outside of their monogamous.
00:23:22 Will Mountford
Patients. So what part of these people is attractive, do you think? Is it just the proximity to power or some other part of their character?
00:23:31 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Being attractive or not attractive is a matter of charisma. Sometimes it's a matter of power, and it's also a matter of performance. So you if you can perform as a sex leader, maybe people will buy it. In the case of Javier Milei, it is kind of interesting because he talked about being bullied at school and.
00:23:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
In one of the unofficial biographies of the leader, they said Ohh. He's lonely and loveless party.
00:24:00 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Except for his sister. Really ever loved Javier Milei. So during the campaign there was this whole strategy of faking lonely Milei into a sexy and attractive men in the eyes of the public. And there were a lot of different campaigns I remember.
00:24:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
00:24:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He beautiful. He appeared in talk shows saying how? Yeah, she had been in a relationship with Javier Milei because, you know, he's gorgeous. And I mean, all Argentinians have fallen in love with him. How wouldn't he? He's just so charming and social media talk shows they.
00:24:45 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Can really work to reinforce these pretended performance and achieve a very specific goal. And if you do that and then you appear surrounded by beautiful women, by money, by powerful people.
00:25:00 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Then here you are. You're an alpha male, right? You do. You kind of become this promise.
00:25:06 Will Mountford
Another element in your work that left out to me was the use of physicality in combat, and there's a cycle of combat and death and renewal. This comes back to what I've said about Trump in WWE. Boris Johnson put in a couple of boxing performances as well that they are.
00:25:20 Will Mountford
Willing to play in the theater of violence and combat? How much does that come back to a political strategy of being a tough guy, perhaps.
00:25:30 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Yes, they're a tough guy. They're restless, but they're also performing in this novelist.
00:25:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
World and you know, in the carnival violent destruction equals joyful renewal. So I'm gonna destroy something, and then I'm gonna create a different, a better world. So make America great again, right. Make make Argentina great again. You have to destroy and you can be violent.
00:25:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Because you're destroying something for a better purpose for a very honorable purpose.
00:26:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
In the case of Donald Trump, there's a lot of work about. He used how he used his hands and how he made this, like the symbol of the gunshot with his hands. In the case of Javier Milei, his campaign was full of very violent symbols. He embodies are lying in presents himself as a.
00:26:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Lion and he was posing with teen sons. The teen saw you know, it represented budget cuts.
00:26:32 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
But it went beyond that. It's not just that it's a weapon of extermination. It's a brutal weapon of extermination. And it was used as a symbol. Yes. If I win, I'm gonna redistribute power. I'm gonna redistribute previous and fear. You know, it's a way of, like, doing everything.
00:26:53 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Together, actually his favorite slogan was Tim La La Casta or the cast trembles it is.
00:27:00 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And using these weapons against those in power and not against the people. So it's dangerous or not, depending on how you look at it. Right. But the choice of a chainsaw, it's so grotesque that also kind of makes you laugh. You think you know this cannot be serious and.
00:27:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
In rallies, he was photographed and reported with fans who made like kind of cardboard chainsaws and give them to me like. And he was like fooling them and laughing. And so it doesn't become. I mean, it's something that is potentially very dangerous, but it also, it's funny and it's.
00:27:40 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Innocent because it's a piece of cardboard. You know it's a game, and if you're my son, you know what we're talking about. You know, it's. I'm not gonna kill anyone. I'm not gonna destroy anything. It's just symbolic, right. It's a symbol of renewal. That's parts laughter and.
00:27:56 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Here.
00:27:58 Will Mountford
Now you've mentioned before that.
00:28:00 Will Mountford
Beppe Grillo didn't really fit on a left right axis. Does melee follow that sink kind of being a tricks of being able to absorb and integrate positions from the left and right. Coming back, we said about the high and low because we've just got here about whether he is more than a simple populist or is he different? How would you characterize him?
00:28:21 Will Mountford
If he can be characterized in a single.
00:28:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
There is a very interesting book written by an Argentinian scholar called Paulo Stefanoni. He's an intellectual. The book is called how rebelliousness became right wing or how the populist right kind of corrupted rebelliousness. And I think that's very interesting.
00:28:45 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
If you look at Donald Trump marine Lepen, Georgia Meloni, Javier Milei, they're all gonna say we support the working people. We are on the side of ordinary people against the elite. And in this way they also said the elites hate us.
00:29:03 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
They make fun of us, they call us crazy. They call us weird. They mock our hair, our looks, the way we talk. And this is proof that we are different. We're not like that. We are also victims of that same elite that is keeping people poor and miserable and easily right in the touch.
From politics, so I think this option of rebelliousness is very interesting and is done through all those symbols and.
00:29:32 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
That we were talking about, right. They're here, you know, looks and the way of talking how they don't want to be perfect or appear perfect, but like flaws make them more relatable and more authentic. That's essential.
00:29:47 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So the idea that they coopted rebelliousness, this idea of them having kind of races, misogynistic, anti pluralist and even fascist ideals, but also being pro working class.
00:30:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It doesn't really fit within the traditional right and left axis. That's what I meant. They take things from very conservative right wing ideologies, but then they also appeal to the people and the working class. For instance, in the case of Javier Milei, one of his symbols was the shovel because he was.
00:30:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Kind of on the side of the hard working people and the the delivery guy, he also appeared in rallies, signing delivery guys bags because those are symbols of like pressurized workers, so they are ambiguous in these sets. That's what I meant.
00:30:47 Will Mountford
Well, you can't have a ring master of an empty circus. They need an audience to perform too. How much does permission given to them by the media to provide them platforms to perform on, you know, to go on. I'm A Celebrity.
00:31:03 Will Mountford
Get Me Out of here to participate in wrestling matches to build that awareness, which then can be leveraged into political power. How does a media personality depend on that broad public reach through mass media?
00:31:18 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, you know that can be understood within the personalization of politics, the intimidation of politics and this notion of like celebrity politics and celebrity politicians that, for instance, John Steele has talked a lot about it looks like everybody wants to be an influencer nowadays, right? And so do.
00:31:39 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Politicians and it's very interesting to see how politicians they play with their celebrity, their influencers state.
00:31:48 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
This, and they mobilize it as a way that brings them political capital, right besides being entertaining and entertaining selling.
00:31:58 Will Mountford
Compared to, say, social media where you don't have to have a huge audience where you can have an engaged audience or a almost addicted audience, it thrives on conflict that if you have a response, positive or negative, that is still a response to the content being presented to you.
00:32:16 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
As you said on social media, of course they bypass traditional media channels, right? They use social media as a way of kind of performing a direct connection and a direct conversation with their followers. And they do have huge audiences, but a huge amount of followers. But it doesn't mean all those followers like we don't really.
00:32:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Know what? That's how it's being up them, right. If you look at the comments, a lot of them are insults. They're making fun.
00:32:43 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
In the case of like quality media, traditional journalism, they don't really care because they see journalists and the media as part of the elite. So if the media is criticizing us, making fun of us, it's because they are part of the elite and they are part of the deep state.
00:33:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And we are challenging them. We are challenging the state school, so it even plays to their face.
00:33:12
OK.
00:33:12 Will Mountford
Well, the flip side of comedy is tragedy. To have that dramatic turn and how the tricks archetype can go from being very silly to very serious. Is it easier for the adherence to an ideology to follow a a leader that they think is a smart person playing a fool or a foolish?
00:33:32 Will Mountford
Person playing at being intelligent.
00:33:34 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well.
00:33:36 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Probably easier to think that you were following a smart person playing the fool because I think what these leaders do very well is to kind of have two sides to them. As we said before, they have this very serious I'm wearing a suit persona. I'm an economist.
00:33:57 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I know about well.
00:34:00 Will Mountford
Allegedly real estate.
00:34:02 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Right, specially economics. I know how to make your beat, right? This is one of a serious promises I can make you wealthy. I can make you beat. But at the same time they are entertaining. They have these two sides to them. So you can believe whichever version of them.
00:34:22 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You won.
00:34:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
00:34:44 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Talents, the status quo and telling. Telling the rules in a way that.
00:34:48 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Favorites.
00:34:48 Will Mountford
And how does that? How does that then help them deflect from when things go wrong? Because it's easy to believe they've been conned by a genius, then an idiot. Elon Musk, for example, playing video games very badly, despite billing himself as a gamer, you know, doing things that anyone who is familiar with the video games that he's playing look and go. This is not a good.
00:35:08 Will Mountford
Player this is not a convincing performance of someone who wants to convince us that they're good at this game. How is that then flipped into? Don't worry about it, it's just a game or no, I'm being very.
00:35:20 Will Mountford
Serious. That criticism bounces off, as you've said, that it doesn't matter if they've been caught in a hypocritical moment.
00:35:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It doesn't matter when Donald Trump said he could kill somebody in 5th Ave. and nobody would care, he's always would still love him and still vote for him, right? Because they are living in a temporary moment of carnival in which everything is allowed and you are actually expected.
00:35:46 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
To challenge sociable norms and social rules and being politically incorrect so it doesn't matter because they can say it's all part of the game. It's part of this very authentic persona that is just trying to.
00:36:03 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
To challenge everything that's been established, even truth, even objective truth.
00:36:09 Will Mountford
It clearly works that these people have succeeded in their campaigns to reach high levels of power and authority. How much is this, then? Something that career politicians who are starting off on a political track from the traditional route should learn from, borrow from, and try and emulate.
00:36:27 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I've been asked about a lot, some people, when they listen to me like, So what should we all should all politicians be? Clowns? Should all politicians behave as fools to be tricksters and be bombastic and mobilized, very polarizing.
00:36:47 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Emotions.
00:36:49 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, the answer isn't clear cut right? But I think it's more like what's more important is the symptom than the explanation, right? The symptom is that people are detached from politics, that they perceive politicians, career politicians as having abandoned them, being extremely.
00:37:09 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
How it is extremely detached from reality and I think that's the real problem. I mean, the real problem lies within politics as usual, and career politicians and how they're unrelatable.
00:37:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And that leaves the space for charismatic, charming leaders to feel, you know, to, to fill that space and say, OK, I'm different, and I'm listening to you and I'm perfect. And I'm not a professional politician. But I'm I'm here. I'm listening, I'm approachable, I'm funny, and I'm going to engage into this.
00:37:44 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Wonderful and intense project with you, so maybe it's not that all politicians need to play the trickster. Maybe it's that politicians need to think about passion, about intensity, and how about emotional connection.
00:38:02 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
With their followers, because very often the left has just appealed to rational arguments to very logical arguments, and we know that we vote with reason and we vote with emotions. We vote with our whole being and maybe with.
00:38:22 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
A lot of political campaigns were forgetting about this emotional and affective side of politics, right? Actually a few days ago, Jose Mujica, who is.
00:38:35 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Or Vice former president died. He was a very love prison, left wing politician who was able to see this, to see that actually you want to if you want people to agree to listen to you, to follow you in the sense of like being your finally.
00:38:56 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
If you want to mobilize people, you have to from Islam, fighting together the idea of like fighting together for something that is relevant and that is worth it. And that is gonna change the world.
00:39:10 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I think we lack this promise of like changing the world and changing the world together in regular politics.
00:39:18 Will Mountford
I think the way we're looking.
00:39:19 Will Mountford
For is hope yeah.
00:39:21 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Yes, hope and excitement and those comedians, those entertainers, they're very good at that.
00:39:29 Will Mountford
00:39:44 Will Mountford
A politician themselves, what can they know from your research about how to do their jobs differently or anything for people involved in policy, or even the public to look out for, to be aware of when they see politicians to think a bit more critically about how they are seeing a performance?
00:40:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You'll think. Oh, wow, you're talking about right wing leaders who are racist, misogynistic, even fascists who are threatening democracy. And you're not focusing on what they say. You're not focusing on what they do. You're focusing on the how right, how they perform, how they say it, how they do it.
00:40:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
That seems kind of superficial and irrelevant, but the main message is those ideologies are successful because of the way in which they present them. They present them in ways that are entertaining that seem.
00:40:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Innocent that use kind of folk loughery as a way of justifying extreme violence. So both things are important. If we understand we we want to know why people are voting for them while they're identifying with them, why they're being so successful. We need to understand also their performance and how they drop.
00:40:57 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
This.
00:40:57 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Very specific message from our political communication point of view, right, how they're being so successful at communicating their ideas and that's why.
00:41:08 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
The idea of the carnival in all social cultural approaches to to the far right and populism matter because they really help us understand how cultural symbols, how performances of transgression of the grotesque of their body, how they are relevant for shaping collective.
00:41:28 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Identities and kind of creating this very strong connection between the leaders and their power.
00:41:36 Will Mountford
And if anyone listen to this, wants to know more about your work and where they can find more from you, is there any website or resource that they can head to 1st?
00:41:43 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
They can look me up on academia and ResearchGate, Tara Garcia, Santa Maria. They can also read some of my papers. So this paper.
00:41:55 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
For instance, on Javier Milei and the carnival will be published the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies in the next few months, and they can listen to our other podcasts on food and populism.
00:42:07
Well.
00:42:08 Will Mountford
I think that's all from us for now. Thank you again so much for your time and I look forward to maybe making another podcast with you soon.
00:42:14 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Thank you very much.
Audio file
Transcript
00:00:07 Will Mountford
Hello. I'm well. Welcome to research bot.
00:00:10 Will Mountford
Though 10 short years ago, the world in 2015 was a very different place. The UK was part of the EU Trading bloc. Barack Obama had a year left in the White House, and Javier Milei was a professor of economics, making occasional appearances on Argentinian TV.
00:00:25 Will Mountford
Today he is more commonly seen wielding prop chainsaws as part of his drive to cut back the state in his role as Argentina's libertarian president, and how many teachers in your life can say they've done that.
00:00:37 Will Mountford
Masculinity, memorability and monetary theory are just a few of the many facets that Milei embodies and employs in his politics and his performances. The day we are joined again by Doctor Sarah Garcia, Santa Maria of the University of Bristol, to discuss melay and populism more broadly as part of a carnival. After all, what's a strong man?
00:00:57 Will Mountford
Without a circus.
00:01:03 Will Mountford
Hello there.
00:01:03 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Hello will how are you doing? Hi everyone.
00:01:06 Will Mountford
I'm very well. We've already had one episode come out about your research into populism. Alt right, Internet communities and Internet cultures and its influence there. But just for a little bit of summary for people who haven't heard that first episode, could you tell me very briefly about who you are and?
00:01:22 Will Mountford
What do you do?
00:01:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, I'm a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol. I've been conducting research for about two years about how politicians use social media to portray themselves as authentic, create clothes and emotional connection.
00:01:43 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
With the followers.
00:01:45 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And kind of that hutch themselves from these elite perception we have and get closer.
00:01:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
To the people.
00:01:51 Will Mountford
But we can move from the first episode where we were talking about food and about culture to more about the individuals, the politicians themselves, and kind of the character that they construct. And you've got a couple of examples that we're drawing from in a paper.
00:02:05 Will Mountford
About Javier Milei, who is an Argentinian politician, but we can definitely think of English and American and probably other national leaders who are.
00:02:14 Will Mountford
Constructing the identity of and. This is specifically your work. The fool. Can you tell me in general terms before we get into the specifics about Milaye's history, about who he is in Argentina and what he might broadly represent as a personality more than a politician?
00:02:30 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Of course. So how is kind of like the new bad guy in Latin America?
00:02:35 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He's kind of the Latin American.
00:02:39 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He himself likes to post pictures of Trump and make references to Trump and Elon Musk. He's kind of a political outsider himself. He ran for the 2021 elections for the first time. There were legislative elections as leader of a newly formed party, which was called La Libertad.
00:02:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Atlanta to freedom is advancing and he won a seat in Congress. His party was the third, was voted force, and that kind of make him think ohh. Maybe I will run in 2023 for the general elections and he did and he won. So he's now Argentina's press.
00:03:16 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
President, he's kind of a polemical figure because he was a showman. He was an economist, and he appeared in a lot of talk shows. And he's kind of like an anarcho capitalist, very libertarian figure that promised to kind of solve all Argentinians.
00:03:36 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Economic problems and economic crisis through magical quick fixes that included dismantling the state and privatizing absolutely everything.
00:03:47 Will Mountford
Now you mentioned briefly there that he was a TV personality and and a.
00:03:52 Will Mountford
Honest to my mind, economists aren't the most outgoing of people. The most gregarious? I don't see them as being performers. Naturally. Is this something that you think came before his career, or is it something that he grew and developed as a skill?
00:04:08 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, it's interesting because I will, as we will see later on, he kind of impersonates the archetype of a trickster. So he's not just one thing, he's an economist and he can talk about, I don't know, about inflation, about budget cut.
00:04:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And he has another side to it, which is a showman, right, a charismatic person. And he's both things together. He he's able to talk about economics in a way that is entertaining, that is funny, that is convincing. And that is appealing to citizens, which is not easy to do. And as I said, he's very controversial.
00:04:46 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Because he has a a temper, you know, he has this kind of violent side to him and he gets very angry. He he gets very mad. He it looks like he's always on the verge of losing it. But that also makes him kind of relate.
00:05:02 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Ohh Unauthentic leader right? He kind of doesn't play a role. He is just himself and if he gets too emotional he shows it because he cares about the people. He cares about their problems and he's affected by them.
00:05:16 Will Mountford
As I said, we'll get into that trickster archetype later, but to bring things home to the UK.
00:05:22 Will Mountford
With comparisons we've got Boris Johnson, who became Mayor of London after really connecting with the city with the nation after appearing in TV shows. Have I got news for you and being a journalist for years and years, Donald Trump, of course, coming from the apparent.
00:05:38 Will Mountford
In Ukraine, they've got Zelensky who was a comedian before he was a president. I wonder if you could just talk briefly about how being on screens being in peoples faces being a media personality, maybe in forms, political choices or political selections. Is there something that is like, this is a way into policy?
00:05:58 Will Mountford
Towards the right wing, spectrum and populism towards the left wing spectrum, does it favor any which way?
00:06:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, what's very important is that if you are a media personality, you are a political outsider. You are not a career politician. That's very important. People are not going to perceive you as part of the political elite as part of the stethoscope, but as part of something else. And if you know how to play with it.
00:06:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It can really be used in your comps.
00:06:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Pain in a way that it portrays you as part of the people and not part of the elite. I'm not gonna trick you because I'm not part of them. I'm against them. I'm against those politicians.
00:06:37
Who?
00:06:38 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Never see the truth who are completely detached from reality. I am part of the people because I'm not a politician. I'm just that regular citizen.
00:06:46 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
That's one of the important parts. Another side to it, of course, is that you're a comedian.
00:06:52 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You are a good performer. You are charming. You know how to perform. You know how to emotionally connect with people, which is something that professional politicians like. They are often to the touched and this kind of connection that you are able to establish with followers is also very important and can play in your favor.
00:07:13 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Regarding the right or the left, you know a lot of those politicians, they are ideologically ambiguous or they think one thing today and a different thing tomorrow. They're not very politically stable. That's what cosmology calls thin ideologies. But what's very important is the way that in which they.
00:07:34 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Perform right. They might be on the right on the left, but they always perform to be on the side of the people and against the elite, and that's what populism is about, right? Whether.
00:07:44 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And you are bebec rilo in Italy, leader of the five Star movement, who was impossible to cast within the right or left because he had elements. He mobilized ideological elements of both sides. So a lot of scholars are saying that, yes, sometimes they're on the right, sometimes they're on the left. But what's more important is another axis, which is the.
00:08:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
High versus the law where they are positioned is on the low on the side of the ordinary people against the high, which would be politics as usual, political corruption and policy.
00:08:16
For elites.
00:08:16 Will Mountford
Well, think about various elements of the characters that have been built in Milei, in Trump and other people there is using entertainment as a cloak, as a shield, and as a chainsaw and as a chainsaw. It's because Milei is running around with a chainsaw as a prop to slash red tape the same way that Elon Musk has done. I think they've probably got the same supplier.
00:08:37 Will Mountford
And to think about it as.
00:08:38 Will Mountford
A weapon to wield, but also as an excuse that something can be just a joke. A lot of comedians who go too far with a joke or who end up attracting negative attention say that it is for entertainment purposes. It's not serious. It's not real. Politics is serious and real, and some of the implications of political choices and policy are very real and.
00:08:59 Will Mountford
So could you maybe tell me a bit about how there is the hiding behind entertainment of oh, you don't take him too seriously. He's just being his character.
00:09:07 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
This is the idea of being serious, not serious, right? So I was thinking about Donald Trump and the memes about Trump dressed like the Pope that circulated online and nobody really understood, like, why would he do that? That's so weird. It's it's just when Kamala Harris would say you're weird.
00:09:28 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
How do you make sense of that? He was like, oh, I didn't post it. I didn't do it myself. I reposted it because I thought it was funny and Catholics thought it was funny.
00:09:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It's the idea that you can actually make fun of absolutely everything. There's no limits, even religion, right? Even as a Conservative leader, you can mock everything, even a Catholic religion. I think this idea of fun and entertainment is also very linked to the idea of politics as usual as boring. There's a lot of work done on populism and
00:10:00 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
How it makes a promise of like hope and desire against the boredom of everyday politics that make people be really detached. So something is boring. You know, when it doesn't move us and what these leaders do is they move us. They have this emotional.
00:10:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Appeal to the people. So for instance, in 2019, Donald Trump.
00:10:27 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He’s so boring while noticing Sleepy Joe Biden giving a speech, and this idea of like they're boring and we're fine is everywhere. I don't know if you remember, but in 2024, during the presidential debate, Kamala Harris had to cross the stage to shake Donald Trump's hand.
00:10:48 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And.
00:10:49 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He said nice to see you. Have fun. This promise of you know, politics as fun as an entertainment, as a show. And I also remember Farage in the UK when he announced his candidacy to play the selections. He said literally like I open quote. Come on guys. Politics can be exciting.
00:11:09 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You know, because I'm back and I want us to have fun. Be successful. Join me. So I think what this leader is doing is this promise of, like, fun, excitement intense.
00:11:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Quality that they're creating with the people and it's gonna overcome like this very boring, very serious political world, but no one cares about and nobody understands any way. And that's that's powerful. That's a powerful tool. It's mobilization of logic.
00:11:41 Will Mountford
Of course.
00:11:41 Will Mountford
The boring and serious.
00:11:43 Will Mountford
Though does continue to happen behind the scenes and there is often, to my mind at least, I am often worried about. If someone is attracting headlines. If Trump is posting.
00:11:54 Will Mountford
It means if he is drawing all the focus onto him, what is someone who is determined to work in the background and enact policy doing that we don't hear about. So using look over here. Look over here. Don't worry about the man behind the curtain. How much is entertainment used as a smokescreen as a distraction from.
00:12:15 Will Mountford
To give my own personal opinion would be very negative political decisions being made by the Trump administration. But they're being made by boring people in suits, in closed rooms whilst he's golfing.
00:12:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, I think there's two sides to it. So on the on the one hand, yes, you can use cultural symbols, you can use entertainment as a shield as a way of like, let's talk about Donald Trump impersonating.
00:12:38 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Hope or let's talk about how Donald Trump likes to wash his hair with a lot of water and he's changing regulations so there's more water pressure coming out of your shower, right? Or he's gonna burn paper straws because they don't work. That is obviously distracting, but those are also cultural symbols that mean.
00:12:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
A lot of things and have very specific positions in the cultural wars that we're witness.
00:13:05 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So they have implications in the sense of like climate change and where he stands there immigration and where he stands there out of food policies as we talked about in our latest podcast right, whether heats red meat or hamburgers or not. So on the one hand the other it’s a shield on.
00:13:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
On the other hand, it's also a very powerfully saying and symbolically charged cultural trope that you can then mobilize in a way that creates collective identities around shared goals between the leader and his audience.
00:13:40 Will Mountford
And then Nazi to come back to the using a joke as a weapon to be on the attack thinking of when Donald Trump was doing his occasional appearances in the WWE. He wasn't there as a hero. He was there getting wrestling moves done to him. He was being a heel to use a wrestling terminology, but people they can root for a bad guy because they know that it's all pretend. Does that same investment.
00:14:01 Will Mountford
Of character and caricature move from something that is expressly entertainment, like wrestling into politics. That ohh yeah, he's going to tear regulations. It's going to be a wild time and that's as you've said, exciting and fun. Even though people are rooting for.
00:14:16 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Heal. Well, it doesn't matter right where you stand, whether you're the face or the heel, whether you're the hero or the anti hero, as long as it's entertaining and it's intense and it's passionate and it makes you feel something and it makes you identify with that specific persona with that specific narrative.
00:14:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You know, there is storytelling, so populist leader is played very often. This kind of role. They can present themselves as the Robin Hood of the people. But you know Robin Hood, he fought for the people, but he was also a little bit of a Rascal.
00:14:53 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And he broke rules and he was clever, but he was not a straight hero, right? He was more complicated than that. So there's something very interesting about the way in which they mobilize this kind of twofold identity.
00:15:08 Will Mountford
Well, that twofold identity comes back to something you mentioned earlier, the trickster archetype of someone who contains contradictions and can change and fold and trick people around them as part of the show. And this is all kind of the carnival.
00:15:23 Will Mountford
You know in your paper you make comparisons for Milei, Trump and Beppe Grillo about the various archetypes of not just being a trickster, but also of masculinity in performance. Can we go through some of those in terms of not just the character and the politics, but also the physique of the performance, the body comedy?
00:15:41 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Of course, in my work I cannot use the carnival as an analytical lens that helps us make sense of apparently disconnected weird performances and weird habits and tastes of those politicians. For instance, they're here.
00:15:55 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Or or their partners, or the way in which they speak, they shout, they laugh. The jokes they tell. And I think it's kind of very interesting because from a social, cultural approach, populism is carnival, is it or it is not populism. It is something else. There's a lot of debate about, oh, there's a populist.
00:16:15 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Type everybody seems to be a populist now. If you take a social cultural point of view.
00:16:22 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You need to be a Carnival, and performing a Carnival-ish way in order to be a populist, and this means being bombastic, exaggerated all over the top, being emotional and being a little bit weird because weird can make you authentic, right? So when you think of
00:16:42 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Carnival the body, your body itself, it kind of embodies transgression. You can use your body and other material objects as an embodiment of a transgression of the status quo of the rules of what can be seen of what can be.
00:16:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
That, and I think that's where it gets very interesting, because this is exactly what trickster is. Do they are kind of being very clever and witty, but they are also using that as a way of turning the world upside down and saying.
00:17:18 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Oh, actually, we are against the status school. We are against the custom. We are against the deep state and my body and my taste and my.
00:17:28 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Habits approve of it, so there were some podcasts, New York newspaper headlines saying is populism all about here, and they refer to, you know, Donald Trump, Javier Milei, Geert Wilders. Boris Johnson all having a very weird.
00:17:48 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Like that.
00:17:50 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Why is that? Is that by chance? Well, no, because as I said, your body and how you represent your body is an act of transgression on itself. You have weird hair. OK, that's fine. That's a marker of exceptionality, right. That's going to set you apart from all politicians.
00:18:10 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Gel hair. And that's gonna make you kind of special. And most important thing, not part of the elite. You're gonna look weird, but you're gonna look yourself. You're gonna look authentic, and you're gonna look relatable, right? So this idea that the body itself.
00:18:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Is as I signifier of political transgression. I think it's very interesting to to think of like those very conservative leaders, right, and their partners, their female partners. They are not represented in in the usual way in which you would, you know, cover and hide the female body.
00:18:47 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So that's also kind of a contradiction because they're very beautiful women.
00:18:53 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
They are very sexy and they don't hide it. It's it's very obvious. So this also kind of breaks all taboos right about political correctness. Like you can be a serious political leader and have a very beautiful and very attractive woman by your side and and that just plays in your favor because it makes you the.
00:19:13 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You know the ultimate alpha male.
00:19:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So we were talking about populism. There is some scholars, such as pierros tegu or Benjamin Moffett, that consider populism as the low, like, culturally low, as opposed to the elite. Or it is political leader is having bad taste and being playful about having.
00:19:42 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Taste an exaggerated taste and this is very much linked to the new trend of camp aesthetics.
00:19:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I mean, you just have to think about Jeff Bezos and Lorene Santa's wedding in Venice. It was so theatrical, so exaggerated. It was really a media spectacle. It was every single bit was really planned. And.
00:20:11 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Most prodigal? Right. So this is something populist leaders such as Donald Trump or Javier Milei also played with.
00:20:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I was thinking, for instance, this mixing of high and low culture. This is something that Susan Sontag has talked about very much. How camp asthetics I kind of teach, but they're also an approach that mixes elements from high culture and low culture in ways that.
00:20:41 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Lead to this kind of coded playfulness and coded humor between the performers or the artists and their pubs.
00:20:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So for instance, during his rally Javier Milei, he was signing this huge dollar bills with his face on them. It was so exaggerated but so playful. And it was such an obvious display of power and money and wealth. In the case of Donald Trump's, I can think.
00:21:11 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
For instance, as his final rally at the Madison Garden when he was dancing to the gay Anthem YMCA and everybody was very confused because they were like, OK, what is this?
00:21:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Or for instance, if you think of all these AI generated short videos and memes about these sort of politicians dancing in a very playful way, all this adds up to this idea of camp. This idea of camp that is very linked to the the bad taste this.
00:21:43 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
The version, the theatricality that come into play during the Carney.
00:21:49 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It's like I'm wealthy, but that doesn't make me your typical politician. I'm not part of the elite, I'm wealthy, and I display my wealth, but I still have an ordinary taste because I'm so part of the people and I still I'm still able to connect with you through those.
00:22:09 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Kind of popular culture consumption habits or lifestyle.
00:22:15 Will Mountford
Which makes the aspirational idea of. I could be that guy all the more real and strong.
00:22:22 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Exactly. I could be that guy, and that guy is still fantic despite his wealth, right? So that can like the idea of camp where the carnival is like it is so.
00:22:35 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Weird, right? It is such a it's so contradictory that it kind of adds up to your authenticity because something that is really planned.
00:22:45 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And is not paradoxical, it's it's more obvious, it's more linear. So this kind of contracts make you more authentic in or can make you more authentic in the eyes of your followers.
00:22:58 Will Mountford
We're thinking about the body and performance, Trump, Johnson. They these people aren't textbook handsome. They are not, you know, your A list. Hollywood type face or body. They're not. You know, Henry Cavill, Jason Mamoa. But they both have endured sex scandals about infidelity, cheating, you know, being attractive.
00:23:18 Will Mountford
Enough to have partners outside of their monogamous
00:23:22 Will Mountford
relationships. So what part of these people is attractive, do you think? Is it just the proximity to power or some other part of their character?
00:23:31 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Being attractive or not attractive is a matter of charisma. Sometimes it's a matter of power, and it's also a matter of performance. So you if you can perform as a sex leader, maybe people will buy it. In the case of Javier Milei, it is kind of interesting because he talked about being bullied at school and.
00:23:51 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
In one of the unofficial biographies of the leader, they said Ohh. He's lonely and loveless party.
00:24:00 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Except for his sister. Really ever loved Javier Milei. So during the campaign there was this whole strategy of faking lonely Milei into a sexy and attractive men in the eyes of the public. And there were a lot of different campaigns I remember.
00:24:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Strong influencer and cosplay artist Lila Lemon Whistler.
00:24:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
He beautiful. He appeared in talk shows saying how? Yeah, she had been in a relationship with Javier Milei because, you know, he's gorgeous. And I mean, all Argentinians have fallen in love with him. How wouldn't he? He's just so charming and social media talk shows they.
00:24:45 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Can really work to reinforce these pretended performance and achieve a very specific goal. And if you do that and then you appear surrounded by beautiful women, by money, by powerful people.
00:25:00 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Then here you are. You're an alpha male, right? You do. You kind of become this promise.
00:25:06 Will Mountford
Another element in your work that left out to me was the use of physicality in combat, and there's a cycle of combat and death and renewal. This comes back to what I've said about Trump in WWE. Boris Johnson put in a couple of boxing performances as well that they are.
00:25:20 Will Mountford
Willing to play in the theater of violence and combat? How much does that come back to a political strategy of being a tough guy, perhaps.
00:25:30 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Yes, they're a tough guy. They're restless, but they're also performing in this novelist.
00:25:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
World and you know, in the carnival violent destruction equals joyful renewal. So I'm gonna destroy something, and then I'm gonna create a different, a better world. So make America great again, right. Make make Argentina great again. You have to destroy and you can be violent.
00:25:58 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Because you're destroying something for a better purpose for a very honorable purpose.
00:26:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
In the case of Donald Trump, there's a lot of work about. He used how he used his hands and how he made this, like the symbol of the gunshot with his hands. In the case of Javier Milei, his campaign was full of very violent symbols. He embodies are lying in presents himself as a.
00:26:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Lion and he was posing with teen sons. The teen saw you know, it represented budget cuts.
00:26:32 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
But it went beyond that. It's not just that it's a weapon of extermination. It's a brutal weapon of extermination. And it was used as a symbol. Yes. If I win, I'm gonna redistribute power. I'm gonna redistribute previous and fear. You know, it's a way of, like, doing everything.
00:26:53 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Together, actually his favorite slogan was Tim La La Casta or the caste trembles it is.
00:27:00 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And using these weapons against those in power and not against the people. So it's dangerous or not, depending on how you look at it. Right. But the choice of a chainsaw, it's so grotesque that also kind of makes you laugh. You think you know this cannot be serious and.
00:27:20 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
In rallies, he was photographed and reported with fans who made like kind of cardboard chainsaws and give them to me like. And he was like fooling them and laughing. And so it doesn't become. I mean, it's something that is potentially very dangerous, but it also, it's funny and it's.
00:27:40 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Innocent because it's a piece of cardboard. You know it's a game, and if you're my son, you know what we're talking about. You know, it's. I'm not gonna kill anyone. I'm not gonna destroy anything. It's just symbolic, right. It's a symbol of renewal. That's parts laughter and.
00:27:56 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Here.
00:27:58 Will Mountford
Now you've mentioned before that.
00:28:00 Will Mountford
Beppe Grillo didn't really fit on a left right axis. Does melee follow that sink kind of being a tricks of being able to absorb and integrate positions from the left and right. Coming back, we said about the high and low because we've just got here about whether he is more than a simple populist or is he different? How would you characterize him?
00:28:21 Will Mountford
If he can be characterized in a single.
00:28:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
There is a very interesting book written by an Argentinian scholar called Paulo Stefanoni. He's an intellectual. The book is called how rebelliousness became right wing or how the populist right kind of corrupted rebelliousness. And I think that's very interesting.
00:28:45 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
If you look at Donald Trump marine Lepen, Georgia Meloni, Javier Milei, they're all gonna say we support the working people. We are on the side of ordinary people against the elite. And in this way they also said the elites hate us.
00:29:03 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
They make fun of us, they call us crazy. They call us weird. They mock our hair, our looks, the way we talk. And this is proof that we are different. We're not like that. We are also victims of that same elite that is keeping people poor and miserable and easily right in the touch.
00:29:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
From politics, so I think this option of rebelliousness is very interesting and is done through all those symbols and.
00:29:32 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
That we were talking about, right. They're here, you know, looks and the way of talking how they don't want to be perfect or appear perfect, but like flaws make them more relatable and more authentic. That's essential.
00:29:47 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
So the idea that they coopted rebelliousness, this idea of them having kind of races, misogynistic, anti pluralist and even fascist ideals, but also being pro working class.
00:30:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It doesn't really fit within the traditional right and left axis. That's what I meant. They take things from very conservative right wing ideologies, but then they also appeal to the people and the working class. For instance, in the case of Javier Milei, one of his symbols was the shovel because he was.
00:30:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Kind of on the side of the hard working people and the the delivery guy, he also appeared in rallies, signing delivery guys bags because those are symbols of like pressurized workers, so they are ambiguous in these sets. That's what I meant.
00:30:47 Will Mountford
Well, you can't have a ring master of an empty circus. They need an audience to perform too. How much does permission given to them by the media to provide them platforms to perform on, you know, to go on. I'm A Celebrity.
00:31:03 Will Mountford
Get Me Out of here to participate in wrestling matches to build that awareness, which then can be leveraged into political power. How does a media personality depend on that broad public reach through mass media?
00:31:18 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, you know that can be understood within the personalization of politics, the intimidation of politics and this notion of like celebrity politics and celebrity politicians that, for instance, John Steele has talked a lot about it looks like everybody wants to be an influencer nowadays, right? And so do.
00:31:39 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Politicians and it's very interesting to see how politicians they play with their celebrity, their influencers state.
00:31:48 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
This, and they mobilize it as a way that brings them political capital, right besides being entertaining and entertaining selling.
00:31:58 Will Mountford
Compared to, say, social media where you don't have to have a huge audience where you can have an engaged audience or a almost addicted audience, it thrives on conflict that if you have a response, positive or negative, that is still a response to the content being presented to you.
00:32:16 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
As you said on social media, of course they bypass traditional media channels, right? They use social media as a way of kind of performing a direct connection and a direct conversation with their followers. And they do have huge audiences, but a huge amount of followers. But it doesn't mean all those followers like we don't really.
00:32:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Know what? That's how it's being up them, right. If you look at the comments, a lot of them are insults. They're making fun.
00:32:43 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
In the case of like quality media, traditional journalism, they don't really care because they see journalists and the media as part of the elite. So if the media is criticizing us, making fun of us, it's because they are part of the elite and they are part of the deep state.
00:33:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And we are challenging them. We are challenging the state school, so it even plays to their face.
00:33:12
OK.
00:33:12 Will Mountford
Well, the flip side of comedy is tragedy. To have that dramatic turn and how the tricks archetype can go from being very silly to very serious. Is it easier for the adherence to an ideology to follow a a leader that they think is a smart person playing a fool or a foolish?
00:33:32 Will Mountford
Person playing at being intelligent.
00:33:34 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well.
00:33:36 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Probably easier to think that you were following a smart person playing the fool because I think what these leaders do very well is to kind of have two sides to them. As we said before, they have this very serious I'm wearing a suit persona. I'm an economist.
00:33:57 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I know about well.
00:34:00 Will Mountford
Allegedly real estate.
00:34:02 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Right, specially economics. I know how to make your beat, right? This is one of a serious promises I can make you wealthy. I can make you beat. But at the same time they are entertaining. They have these two sides to them. So you can believe whichever version of them.
00:34:22 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You won.
00:34:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You can look at Donald Trump and Javier Milei and see them wearing a suit, and they're being, like, serious, successful men and good leaders. Or you can look at them and see somebody funny, imperfect and relatable. That is actually gonna care about you.
00:34:44 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Talents, the status quo and telling. Telling the rules in a way that.
00:34:48 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Favorites.
00:34:48 Will Mountford
And how does that? How does that then help them deflect from when things go wrong? Because it's easy to believe they've been conned by a genius, then an idiot. Elon Musk, for example, playing video games very badly, despite billing himself as a gamer, you know, doing things that anyone who is familiar with the video games that he's playing look and go. This is not a good.
00:35:08 Will Mountford
Player this is not a convincing performance of someone who wants to convince us that they're good at this game. How is that then flipped into? Don't worry about it, it's just a game or no, I'm being very.
00:35:20 Will Mountford
Serious. That criticism bounces off, as you've said, that it doesn't matter if they've been caught in a hypocritical moment.
00:35:26 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
It doesn't matter when Donald Trump said he could kill somebody in 5th Ave. and nobody would care, he's always would still love him and still vote for him, right? Because they are living in a temporary moment of carnival in which everything is allowed and you are actually expected.
00:35:46 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
To challenge sociable norms and social rules and being politically incorrect so it doesn't matter because they can say it's all part of the game. It's part of this very authentic persona that is just trying to.
00:36:03 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
To challenge everything that's been established, even truth, even objective truth.
00:36:09 Will Mountford
It clearly works that these people have succeeded in their campaigns to reach high levels of power and authority. How much is this, then? Something that career politicians who are starting off on a political track from the traditional route should learn from, borrow from, and try and emulate.
00:36:27 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I've been asked about a lot, some people, when they listen to me like, So what should we all should all politicians be? Clowns? Should all politicians behave as fools to be tricksters and be bombastic and mobilized, very polarizing.
00:36:47 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Emotions.
00:36:49 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Well, the answer isn't clear cut right? But I think it's more like what's more important is the symptom than the explanation, right? The symptom is that people are detached from politics, that they perceive politicians, career politicians as having abandoned them, being extremely.
00:37:09 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
How it is extremely detached from reality and I think that's the real problem. I mean, the real problem lies within politics as usual, and career politicians and how they're unrelatable.
00:37:23 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
And that leaves the space for charismatic, charming leaders to feel, you know, to, to fill that space and say, OK, I'm different, and I'm listening to you and I'm perfect. And I'm not a professional politician. But I'm I'm here. I'm listening, I'm approachable, I'm funny, and I'm going to engage into this.
00:37:44 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Wonderful and intense project with you, so maybe it's not that all politicians need to play the trickster. Maybe it's that politicians need to think about passion, about intensity, and how about emotional connection.
00:38:02 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
With their followers, because very often the left has just appealed to rational arguments to very logical arguments, and we know that we vote with reason and we vote with emotions. We vote with our whole being and maybe with.
00:38:22 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
A lot of political campaigns were forgetting about this emotional and affective side of politics, right? Actually a few days ago, Jose Mujica, who is.
00:38:35 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Or Vice former president died. He was a very love prison, left wing politician who was able to see this, to see that actually you want to if you want people to agree to listen to you, to follow you in the sense of like being your finally.
00:38:56 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
If you want to mobilize people, you have to from Islam, fighting together the idea of like fighting together for something that is relevant and that is worth it. And that is gonna change the world.
00:39:10 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
I think we lack this promise of like changing the world and changing the world together in regular politics.
00:39:18 Will Mountford
I think the way we're looking.
00:39:19 Will Mountford
For is hope yeah.
00:39:21 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Yes, hope and excitement and those comedians, those entertainers, they're very good at that.
00:39:29 Will Mountford
That brings us to the end of that outline, and I think we're almost out of time as well. But to look back over everything that we've covered in terms of politics and the carnival, is there any way that we'd like to wrap this up in terms of anyone listening to this, be they?
00:39:44 Will Mountford
A politician themselves, what can they know from your research about how to do their jobs differently or anything for people involved in policy, or even the public to look out for, to be aware of when they see politicians to think a bit more critically about how they are seeing a performance?
00:40:04 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
You'll think. Oh, wow, you're talking about right wing leaders who are racist, misogynistic, even fascists who are threatening democracy. And you're not focusing on what they say. You're not focusing on what they do. You're focusing on the how right, how they perform, how they say it, how they do it.
00:40:24 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
That seems kind of superficial and irrelevant, but the main message is those ideologies are successful because of the way in which they present them. They present them in ways that are entertaining that seem.
00:40:37 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Innocent that use kind of folk loughery as a way of justifying extreme violence. So both things are important. If we understand we we want to know why people are voting for them while they're identifying with them, why they're being so successful. We need to understand also their performance and how they drop.
00:40:57 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
This.
00:40:57 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Very specific message from our political communication point of view, right, how they're being so successful at communicating their ideas and that's why.
00:41:08 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
The idea of the carnival in all social cultural approaches to to the far right and populism matter because they really help us understand how cultural symbols, how performances of transgression of the grotesque of their body, how they are relevant for shaping collective.
00:41:28 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Identities and kind of creating this very strong connection between the leaders and their power.
00:41:36 Will Mountford
And if anyone listen to this, wants to know more about your work and where they can find more from you, is there any website or resource that they can head to 1st?
00:41:43 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
They can look me up on academia and ResearchGate, Sara Garcia Santamaria. They can also read some of my papers. So this paper.
00:41:55 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
For instance, on Javier Milei and the carnival will be published the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies in the next few months, and they can listen to our other podcasts on food and populism.
00:42:08 Will Mountford
I think that's all from us for now. Thank you again so much for your time and I look forward to maybe making another podcast with you soon.
00:42:14 Dr Sara Garcia Santamaria
Thank you very much.