The 2016 presidential election sparked a wave of historical and comparative reflection in in the United States. Almost two years after the earliest primary races, we are still hearing analogies between Trump's rise to power and the careers of populist leaders and fearsome caudillos in Latin America. Professional historians and amateur commentators (and more than a few professional historians acting as amateur commentators) dive into the same deep waters of political turmoil and social upheaval in the region. And they inevitably fish out the same names, a mixed bag in which Venezuelan Hugo Chávez joins Peruvian Alberto Fujimori, all of them under the shadow of the ever-present Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón.

The analogy is always pedagogical, which encourages absurd simplifications. “Is Donald Trump a Peronist?” asks one article in which the author justified the comparison by contending that this kind of leadership “refuses to be shackled by the restraints of organized political structure.” Scholars argue in the Washington Post that “Juan Perón shows how Trump could destroy our democracy without tearing it down,” attributing to populists in general, and Trump in particular in the US, the discursive push for “turning [a] complex society into the old fascist notion of one people, one nation and one leader.”Footnote ¹ The familiar narrative is that of a personalistic demagogue who exploits the (irrational) fears of those marginalized by liberal democratic institutions and offers a delusive confrontation between “the people” and the powerful as the solution to their grievances. According to this oddly appealing narrative, the rise of populism denotes the end of democracy, whether in 1945 Argentina or 2016 United States.

While few people actually claim that Trump is Perón, we assume that a comparative perspective will help us illuminate something we could not appreciate otherwise. But this is exactly why it is not always wise to incorporate a comparative analysis into our work; but rather only when it is possible, and useful. Yet, the Latin American analogy is resilient. It is one year into the Trump Administration, and the populist monster is still strong. When warnings about it recede, it's mostly because the conversation shifts towards another foreign element lodged in American politics, such as the Russian hacking and meddling in the election. Both are telling of the formidable intellectual obstacles to exploring the intrinsically home-grown components of Trumpism. Even if the comparisons between Trump and Perón are flawed at best, they do reflect something interesting about the intellectual scope of those who proclaim the similarities and their consequences. The analogy with Latin American populism obscures not only what is fundamentally American about Trumpism, but more importantly blinds us to the possibility that populism not only is not the problem but, as Thea Riofrancos proposes, can be part of the solution.Footnote ² In the case of Argentina, what populism injected into the country's political culture was one of the most dynamic components of democracy: the plebeian surge, the heretical, collective demand for dignity and workers’ rights that seems to be perpetually ready to call into question certain social and cultural hierarchies.”Footnote ³

The history of parallels being drawn between popular movements in the US and Latin America reveals that the category of populism is ubiquitous and elusive, but at the same time no less meaningful. In 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession, I was doing research about Peronist international labor activism when I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio commenting on the imminent government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler: “The president of the United States, Barack Perón, will announce his Argentinian-like takeover of Chrysler.” He was not the only conservative voice to compare President Obama with a Latin American caudillo. The executive orders issued in 2014 favoring the regularization of some undocumented immigrants, for example, earned him the nicknames of “el Jefe” and “American Caudillo.” In both cases, the fears about the end of democracy were provoked by government intervention in the economy, the role of organized labor in decisions related to ownership and production, and locating the political will of the executive power above the law.Footnote ⁴

Just a few years later, it is those from the Obama Administration, the Hillary Clinton camp, and the broad spectrum of liberal thinking, who endorse the analogy as a warning against the rise of Trump and his resemblance to Latin American populists. How can both Obama and Trump evoke the image of Perón? What does it say about those who make the comparisons?

A World Leaders series from 1987 dedicated one of its books to Perón (portrayed on the cover in military fashion, with a Bonapartistic, if unusual, military cape coat included). The general introduction, by none other than Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., explained that the extension of universal rights and popular sovereignty laid the groundwork for the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorships. “Tocqueville explained how the revolution of equality could lead to the ‘Führerprinzip’ and more terrible absolutism than the world had ever known,” he argued.Footnote ⁵ Liberals like Schlesinger converged with different and competing traditions in their fear of the unwanted consequences of social equality. After World War II, conservative Friedrich Hayek also pointed to the risks of social justice and stressed the lack of any real single social goal, any pre-established notion of what is fair for the community. For him it was impossible to establish any rational criteria that would provide us with an idea of how much any individual should have of anything. Strongmen with the blank-check mandate to decide in the name of the common good what that goal might be would only harm the freedom of the individual and provoke society's slide into authoritarianism.Footnote ⁶

In Latin America, Perón stands out as representative of that kind of strongman, and of the perils of such power. Elusive as its meanings might be, “populism” has been the label applied to “Peronism” as a historical phenomenon, and Peronism has become the paradigmatic example of populism, a radical expression of the “classic” Latin American cases that also include Varguismo in Brazil and Cardenismo in México. In the Latin American context, populism refers specifically to movements that swept the region in the 1930s and 1940s with the rise of mass politics. Characterized by strong personalistic leadership, and yet highly effective in expanding economic and political citizenship for the working class, these movements produced what can be called a form of authoritarian democratization.Footnote ⁷ Since its emergence in 1945, Peronism, as a category of analysis, has come to represent, for scholars and policymakers, a form of mass politics with a new and dangerous edge formed around the specific tie between the leader and the masses.

Though the trajectories of the idea of the caudillo and populist leader from nineteenth century Latin America to 2017 United States are different, they overlap and nurture each other in similar ways. During the first decades of the twentieth century, as the era of mass political participation was taking shape, scholars warned about the uniquely Latin American form of attachment developed between caudillos and gauchos throughout the previous century. Environmental conditions in the borderlands disposed the gauchos to idleness and violence, shaping their political behavior: abundance of land and cattle, lack of clear limits to property, expertise with the knife, familiarity with killing animals and the blood that killing produces—the gaucho was a perfect subject for a clientelistic relation with the caudillo, who offered food and protection in exchange for political allegiance and military service. Mestizos inhabiting the border region, gauchos were not exactly savages but rather the rough-hewn bodies produced by the rough brush of the nation state with the wilderness it was conquering.Footnote ⁸

With this conceptual baggage, intellectuals and policymakers understood Peronism as a different creature within the same populist genre. The foundational works by Argentine sociologist Gino Germani focused on the idea of an incomplete modernization that had lured rural migrants to the cities without the necessary preparation or protection. Having lost their usual stable references and the kinship ties that gave meaning to their activities, workers in the anonymous and bureaucratic city were easy prey for a demagogue who offered benefits (real and not) in exchange for their freedom. Labor unions were, in this narrative, the vehicle for this new, modern socio-political bond.Footnote ⁹

In the US, Seymour Martin Lipset studied Peronism as something specific (after meeting with another Argentine sociologist, Torcuato Di Tella Jr.), and in his exchanges with Germani sought to come up with a more precise definition of what it was. Among the many options were a “Fascism from the left,” “working class authoritarianism,” “lower class Fascism,” and, the most ambitious one, “anti-capitalist populist nationalism that attracts the lower strata as well as the army.”Footnote ¹⁰ Or, as he tried to clarify in the late 1960s, summing up the place of Peronism in Cold War social science: “working class authoritarianism is Communism, and to a lesser extent, Peronism.”Footnote ¹¹ Perhaps the intellectual trajectory of Lipset himself—who elaborated on the features of American exceptionalism, nurtured the early conversations among neoconservative intellectuals, and later advised the Democratic Leadership Council that pushed for the Clintonian reform of the Democratic Party—opens a window onto the journey of Latin American populism in the US modern political imagination. Always looming on the horizon were the domestic concerns that would inspire Lipset's efforts at categorization: the threat of Peronism was added to Communism and Fascism as warning signs in debates about the dangers lingering in the United States if the New Deal legacies of strong organized labor and an interventionist government were not rolled back. In the postwar era as with today, Peronism offered for social scientists and commentators what Eldon Kenworthy, analyzing the persistence of Peronism in comparative analysis, argued that any global theory needed: “the little known case which, bent to the requirements of theory, imparts an aura of universality” to some very locally grounded concerns and processes.Footnote ¹²

As stated previously, comparative perspectives should help us see what we cannot detect by studying cases isolated from each other. Rather than just finding minimum common denominators that allow us to extrapolate general principles (I breath, Trump breathes, Olof Palme breathes, George Clooney breathes; we all have something in common), a comparative view can help us to see singularity and the particular. Unfortunately, when Peronism has been added to the comparative mix, it has almost always served to bury specificities under sweeping generalizations about strong leaders and irrational masses overwhelming Republican institutions.

Far from a methodological problem, this tension between democracy and the masses is intrinsic to a specific understanding of political liberalism. Every definition leaves something out, every definition is always a bit deceptive, but the idea that democracy is mostly the defense of political institutions and individual rights has its own baggage that can be traced to the beginning of debates about how American democracy should work. So does the idea that these institutions primarily need to be defended from the masses’ unpredictable behavior when they connect with the leader.

In the case of Peronism, at the center of that connection between people and the leader is not the idea of citizenship, but the notion of social rights. For Peronism, some economically disadvantaged groups such as “workers” were seen as historically delayed in the fulfillment of their political rights and well-being. Because of that, they were entitled to some specific benefits, rights, and protections as a “class,” above and beyond their individual rights, so its members could achieve the same influence in society that others were able to forge individually. Their role in politics was not only to defend their interests (salaries, working conditions), but also to participate in deciding what the society at large should look like. A crucial component of such a belief was the centrality of collective action in achieving those goals. The adjective “social” radically altered the noun “rights” the way “civil” would do in the US some decades later, also in relation to those groups systematically excluded from the polity. And likewise, this was not presented as undermining the importance of individual political rights, such as voting, but as the only way to enforce its universality.

The idea that rights were not exercised only by individual citizens disrupted long-standing premises of liberal democracy, yet it was particularly appealing in a region like Latin America, where peasants and the urban working classes claimed that they were being denied a fair share of the fruits of modernization. The immediate consequence of this understanding of democracy is the centrality of unions and the expanding representation of workers in political institutions. That was the real change in Argentina with the arrival of Peronism, something that Perón both encouraged and then sought to contain by trying to discipline and subsume labor leaders under the state's power. This, “sobrerepresentación del movimiento obrero organizado” in politics produced by the rise of Peronism, in the classic definition by Juan Carlos Torre, is the single most important feature of modern Argentine politics. But what is crucial to remember is that the centrality of unions and the resistance they generated, expressed two competing understandings of freedom. Liberals and conservatives opposed this new arrangement, not by calling for the preservation of order and authority, but in the name of freedom, the same way Henry Ford in the US had justified his vitriolic anti-unionism by saying that “the safety of the people today is that they are unorganized and therefore cannot be trapped.”Footnote ¹³ Those pushing for the growing power of unions, instead, conceived workers’ organization as the ultimate form of social solidarity that would guarantee the universal exercise of freedom.

The widely shared belief that populism thrives in periods of economic crisis is plainly wrong. This decisive phase of a nascent, Peronist populist identity occurred at a moment of economic expansion in Argentina. Crisis-leads-to-populism is a trope that feeds into the narrative of workers’ irrationality when cornered by economic constraints (unlike bankers or architects who supposedly absorb setbacks with the utmost sobriety). More to the point of this essay, this trope also helps build the argument that the case of Peronism might somehow illuminate the relationship between Trump and workers in the US.

Hunger did not lead the masses to populism; Argentine workers were well fed before Perón. When Peronist labor activists went to Washington in 1948 to demonstrate the merits of the populist formula, they reminded their audience that the “the daily per capita dietary intake in Argentina was of 3,275 [calories] per inhabitant, surpassed only by New Zealand with 3,281, and immediately above the United States with 3,249.”Footnote ¹⁴ It was an impressive number, but the statistics they chose in order to illustrate the merits of Peronism were actually from 1939, six years before the arrival of Perón and at the zenith of the fraudulent governments of the década infame against which Peronism had built its identity. In Argentina, populist beliefs in a fairer share of the national wealth for workers were the product of various conflicting trends that converged in a single moment: a growing economy, a protected but robust national industry, the prevalence of progressive labor activism that was able to obtain benefits from employers and the government, and the failure of the old fraudulent system to lead to an opening in the political structure it controlled in order to make it sustainable. To perceive this, you only need to see the pictures and clips from the time: Those workers marching from the suburbs to the Parisian downtown of Buenos Aires were a hopeful crowd, motivated as much by a realistic prospect of a better collective life as by rage against elites.Footnote ¹⁵

In 1945 Berisso, the birthplace of Peronism in the working-class suburbs of Buenos Aires, it was not desperation but consciousness forged around intense labor activism that moved workers and housewives to go out into the streets to demand the release of Perón from jail, launching his epic political career. These industrial workers sought to participate in the benefits of an industrial economy that had been growing for almost a decade, and to secure the gains they had obtained with Perón as Secretary of Labor during the previous two years. Of course, Argentina changed profoundly after the Peronist victory in 1946, as the centrality of unions affected not only wealth distribution but also the institutions and practices that defined the country's political and social contours. But before all that happened, Perón was particularly effective in constructing a discourse that created the historical watershed of 1945. It recounted the past as a long and mostly unchanging history of postponements for Argentine workers. And it presented his populist policies as the first full realization of workers’ rights. In the context of the postwar industrialization boom, the Peronist narrative was powerful and appealing. And from those discursively productive first years came a symbology that relied much more on hope for the future than the Fascist models from which it drew some inspiration. Peronism was optimistic to the point of historical erasure.

To put it differently, Perón would never have said “Make Argentina Great Again” because he was making it anew. By contrast, Trump's recycling of Ronald Reagan's slogan is pure nostalgia, memory without history, welfare without the forces that produced it, the repackaging of the shared feelings among white working-class families of the prosperity of the 1950s. At the opposite extreme of what happened in Argentina, Trumpist memories of the postwar conflate US economic muscle in the world with the living standards of white industrial workers in a way that erases the factors that made that prosperity available to a sizeable part of the population: the very legacy of the New Deal policies from the 1930s and 1940s with respect to government regulation of economic activity, workers’ rights, and union power. Not surprisingly, the factors that are left out of national recollections are those targeted by the Trump Administration as the main obstacles to be dismantled.

The cradle of Trumpism is not 1945 Berisso, but 2011 Wisconsin. From today's perspective, the bill promoted by Republican Governor Scott Walker that restricted the collective bargaining power of public sector unions was a blueprint for a larger agenda. Walker's victory was also about the bargaining power of unions in general, the extension of similar initiatives nationwide, the power of the business sector to set the public agenda, the resistance that unions would be able to exert, and about the extent to which the Democratic Party would put up a fight for organized labor. The fact that recall-vote organizers were not able to win over union households to get rid of the worst antiunion governor in recent memory was a good indicator that the alliance between Democrats and unions was in crisis. And it suggested a larger picture, beyond Wisconsin and into the Rust Belt at large, of a public debate set not by collective organization from below, but by a billionaire-machine campaign for individuals in distress, disappointed with their unions and abandoned by their party. The ineptitude of the mainstream Republican oligarchy, and the effectiveness of the Democratic one in shutting down internal change, did the rest.Footnote ¹⁶

What makes Trumpism the opposite of Latin American populism is its connection to declining union power and growing inequality. In sharp contrast to the relative significance of organized labor in American politics in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, union membership and bargaining coverage have dwindled since the 1970s to historical lows: only 11.45 percent of workers are unionized, and only thirteen percent are covered by collective bargaining agreements, among the lowest rates in the world. Liberalization pressures are shaping capitalism everywhere, but there's a reason why the Anglo-Saxon model in particular is called the “cutthroat alternative.” As Kathleen Thelen has shown in her comparative study of different forms of liberalization, the collapse of unions in the US was accompanied by the decline of collective regulations in labor relations. Violently opposed to any institutional and political manifestation of social solidarity, the trend in the American economy has been toward the individualization of wage bargaining against a backdrop of an ongoing erosion of the minimum wage and a de facto “privatization of risk in which bounds are set primarily by laws regulating individual employment contracts.”Footnote ¹⁷ Trump surfs the waters of political de-engagement and economic inequality as his second nature.

Wisconsin has served (explicitly) as a blueprint for the labor policies of the Trump Administration, forcefully oriented toward the standard Republican doctrine of getting rid of the obstacles that would preclude businesses from deploying their full force. Not surprisingly, labor relations have been one of the areas in which the conservative agenda has been more effective than discursive. The government has reversed its position in a landmark Supreme Court case, one that would restore employers’ ability to force workers to forfeit the right to bring class-action lawsuits. It has also set aside an Obama-era guideline on enforcement of employment laws, proposed a forty percent cut in the agency that carries out research into workplace hazards, and sought to eliminate a $10.5 million program that helps unions to educate workers on how to avoid injuries and illness.Footnote ¹⁸

With the accidental leadership of Trump, the Republican Party has formed a conservative coalition that virulently rejects government interventions that either promote income and wealth redistribution (reviled as a legacy of the New Deal) or enforce collective rights of disadvantaged groups (disdained as a legacy of the civil-rights era). Based on the resulting idea of small government, Republican administrations (especially those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) cemented a political force that is economically neoliberal and bitterly against the expansion of economic and social rights. This true marrow of the Republican identity has elicited a series of different political projects, the Tea Party being the most notorious during the Obama years, but at the core of all of them is, divested of ornaments, the individual. It is tempting to locate Trump's apparently easy connection with some form of the common man as a populist sign, but that would be short-sighted. Trump's repetitive claim about the masses that voted him into office and his obsession with the size of the crowd during his inauguration are more a question of a narcissistic wound than a populist or even a classic fascistic political position. From the very beginning, the main political subject of Trumpism is not so much organized labor but individual (white) men and women reacting against the power of organizations (from civil-rights associations to pro-choice groups to unions) and what those organizations have supposedly obtained from the government. The fate of his project has less to do with how many people he mobilizes, and more with how many people the government can exclude while still holding on to political power.

In this context, the notion that any rhetorical claim against billionaires and elites is enough to put together disparate political phenomena under the conceptual umbrella of Latin American populism is not comparative analysis, certainly not at its best. It brushes aside the different and opposing solidarities that their discourses generate, the dissimilar causes that bring them to power, and the radically different forces that they set in motion. Above all, it perpetuates the liberal illusion that the catastrophic state of American politics is due to exogenous causes and not to the obstacles and shortcomings that they have produced within the system itself. There is nothing in Trump's rise to power that suggests the slightest meaningful analogy with the society and politics that produced Perón (even less in the case of Cárdenas in Mexico, and very little in the case of Vargas in Brazil, who is less known outside his country, so he's been granted the privilege of being overlooked). Just to be clear: unless you're living in some sort of magic bubble that takes you to Argentina in the 1940s or Mexico in the 1930s, your problems are capitalism and liberal democracy, and the Fascist progenies they conceived out of wedlock, not populism and the warning signs that we can draw from Perón's years in power. The only tangible role that Latin American populism plays in studying Trump is to disguise the intrinsically American form of authoritarianism that democratic institutions have produced and that they are now trying to absorb.