Foot Soldiers in the Battle for Democratic Language: Examining Rhetorical Productions Within an Argentine “Liberal-Libertarian” Think Tank

Since the election of “libertarian” president Javier Milei and his party La Libertad Avanza (LLA) in 2023, Argentine democracy has shown signs of authoritarian drift. While the executive and part of the international press highlight the government’s economic performance, particularly inflation control, several international indicators point to an illiberal turn. Between 2023 and 2025, Argentina fell from 40th to 87th place in the Reporters Sans Frontières Press Freedom Index and from 34th to 53rd in the Varieties of Democracy Liberal Democracy Index, entering the category of countries “undergoing autocratization”. This emphasis on economic performance aligns with the conception of democracy articulated by Alberto Benegas Lynch, a leading figure of the Austrian School in Argentina and Milei’s intellectual mentor. He links democracy to a liberalism defined as “the unrestricted respect for others’ life projects… defending the right to life, liberty, and property.” This conservative reformulation provides the discursive matrix through which the Milei administration justifies dismantling social rights, labour protections, and gender-equality policies in the name of a strictly negative conception of “freedom”. In this context, governmental rhetoric resembles democraticwashing: a decoupling between symbolic commitments to democratic language and practices that erode democratic foundations. Attacks on the right to strike (via el protocolo antipiquetes) are framed as protecting the “freedom to work and circulate”; redistributive policies are recast as “discriminatory” or “clientelist”; and the right to abortion is described by Milei as “aggravated homicide due to kinship”. This reconfiguration of democratic principles is actively produced and circulated by an Argentine libertarian ecosystem consolidated on social media over the past decade, shaped by Hayekian critiques of socialism and Rothbardian right-wing populism. This ultra-conservative constellation structures itself around the motto of “cultural battle,” led by figures such as streamer El Gordo Dan and his YouTube program Carajo, or conservative essayist Agustín Laje and his Faro Foundation, which aims to “wage the cultural battle” and train political cadres and cultural leaders to promote the “ideas of liberty”. This contribution analyzes strategies of appropriation of democratic discourse developed within the Faro Foundation, which explicitly frames itself as a site of linguistic and ideological struggle. The corpus includes textual and audiovisual materials produced on the Foundation’s social-media channels, as well as conferences and training activities, including materials collected through direct observation in October and November 2025. The analysis focuses on rhetorical repertoires mobilized to legitimize two central policy axes of the Milei government: the dismantling of labour rights, framed as illegitimate privileges granted to organized interest groups; and the offensive against feminist and anti-discrimination agendas, portrayed as products of a “postmodernity” hostile to truth, equality before the law, and the “right to life.” It combines the study of lexical and semantic reappropriation strategies with a situated examination of how these repertoires are produced and circulated within the Faro Foundation. Drawing on the socio-history of political ideas, the analysis shows how democratic language is reappropriated through the strategies of sociologically situated actors.