Natalio Botana: "That one of the targets of the hatred emanating from government offices is against journalism is a very serious matter."

Natalio Botana retraces his steps, works, and thoughts to elucidate a shared concern and understand how we arrived at an unprecedented political situation in Argentina and the world today. He is concerned about governments that neglect values and rights such as freedom and truth. In the reissue of The Republican Tradition (Edhasa), with a masterful prologue by historian Hilda Sabato , Botana reaffirms his principles and analysis of the pillars of liberal (and republican) democracy.

He also released a reissue of The Democratic Experience ; there he adds an epilogue in which the great historian explains the bad weather brought by "the reactionary storm looming over Western democracies." This international wave of ultras sweeping the world worries him, and he pauses to reflect on the precariousness of political options that no longer propose the center as a possibility: "When I was trained in Europe (in the 1960s), the center was very dynamic because it was open to both the right and the left. There was a balance proposed by what I call the politics of the three liberties: civil, political, and social; it was the great promise of the welfare state. This is not just a superficial attack through the barbarity of insults; it is a profound attack on a concept of democracy that prevailed for almost a century."

Under the expectant gaze of a portrait of Thomas More, a small bust of Sarmiento, and sculptures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in his studio, Botana emphasizes: “What is seriously affected in Argentina is this combination of republican democracy with economic freedom. There is a repository of republican tradition, but we must not forget that for long periods in the 20th century, that tradition was extinguished. We have tried to rebuild it in these 40 years of democracy. Alfonsín's synthesis is very clear in 1983; it is a paean to democracy based on human rights. There we had a huge momentum that, unfortunately, has been extinguished in the last 20 years.”

–Has the idea of freedom that Alberdi and Sarmiento conceived in the 19th century been transformed over the centuries, or is it still the same?

–The republican tradition is a concept that has been enriched over the centuries. The first great battle of the republican tradition was the restoration of civil liberty, which benefited civil rights, from access to property to freedom of speech and mobility. Alberdi and Sarmiento rode on an innovative Industrial Revolution : the railroad, the steam engine, the refrigerator that would come later. Just as we are riding on this scientific-technological mutation, we don't know where it will lead us.

They were very clear that the Industrial Revolution would inevitably pave the way for progress. What they failed to resolve—and what would be the great battle at the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century—is political freedom. It is the right of citizens to elect authorities according to a Constitution. This only achieved stability around a minimal concept of democracy in 1983 with the third freedom, that is, with the establishment of public goods capable of shaping their full validity, a vision of the interest of the general good of the Republic. Sarmiento introduced education as a public good, common to all at the primary level . Mitre said it was not enough, that secondary education was necessary, and so he planted national schools in every provincial capital. Then came healthcare as a public good.

In the 20th century, even within a framework that was not specifically republican, but democratic in origin, we saw the development of social security through Peronism. The important thing is that this dialogue between Alberdi and Sarmiento is the seed that will sprout strongly, but it has deteriorated in the last 50 years.

–In the 18th and 19th centuries, we had the democratic beacon that was the United States for the continent. What remains of that great democracy today with Trump as president?

–With Trump at the helm, we are suffering a reactionary storm, the most painful example of which is the rise of the far right in Europe. This phenomenon is occurring today in Argentina, which is the combination of what is called libertarianism—which does not respond to the republican tradition or to that of historical Argentine liberalism—combined with very complicated authoritarian remnants.

–Do you think liberal democracy in particular is under attack or in crisis?

–In reality, it's republican and liberal democracy, and, yes, it's under attack. The underlying problem we have in Argentina is Milei's ideological alliances: with Vox in Spain; AfD in Germany; Viktor Orbán in Hungary; Giorgia Meloni in Italy; and the privileged relationship with Trump. Here we see the combination of this unstable formula between a delegative liberalism, since they aim for fiscal balance, and a policy of cleansing the privileges embedded in the state during Kirchnerism, but which is linked to an international coalition that is clearly far-right.

–What you call a “reactionary storm”...

–Yes. Storms pass; we'll see how long this one lasts. The interesting thing about the 19th-century republican tradition, especially since it began, is its durability. Until 1930, the year of the first coup d'état, it was successful. It was a very difficult process because it involved starting from civil liberty, waging the great battle for political liberty, and sowing the seeds of social liberty. I would like to see Argentina's educational development today at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when we were the leaders in education in Latin America! And now, according to the PISA 2022 survey, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru have surpassed us. There's a phenomenon of decline here that the 19th-century republican tradition didn't experience. Even though Sarmiento and Alberdi, in the last years of their lives, saw with concern that there were signs of institutional decline in Argentina.

–I just mentioned education and the extremely low results we've had on international assessments. Does this accentuate issues like the lack of tolerance?

–The problem is twofold. We are currently experiencing a climate of verbal violence that seems to surpass that of Kirchnerism. It's what Pope Leo XIV called "the war of words." The ideals of education were not only to produce educated people, but also citizens with a capacity for dialogue and argumentation. Hence the importance of the flourishing of journalism at that time: Sarmiento and Mitre were journalists, writers, and exercised governmental responsibility.

The style of this government responds to and reinforces a deeply rooted tradition of intolerance in the political arena. It's not Milei's invention; rather, it's a radicalization of a tendency already established in the country. One need only cross Montevideo to see that intolerance as a style is incomprehensible. There, two great adversaries, Julio María Sanguinetti and Pepe Mujica, embraced each other after they stopped being security guards and wrote a book of conversations. What dialogue can there be in Argentina today? The education that can be acquired in school or university is one thing, and practical education is another.

Customs and ways of being legitimize a republic and a democracy that is seriously under scrutiny in our country. The fact that one of the targets of the hatred emanating from state offices is directed against journalism is a very serious matter. It's said that freedom is the right to say what I want, but what happens when that's an insult? What we're experiencing is this phenomenon of rulers who claim to have a monopoly on truth and virtue . It would seem that those of us who question the truth upheld by the government—which is very pragmatic and changes with circumstances—are mistaken.

–It's striking how much time the president and his teams spend thinking up these strategies and spreading them across social media. It's not just about defeating the other, it's also about humiliating them.

–I'm talking about the era of humiliation. It's the civilizational mutation that has generated serious problems at the level of political representation, particularly those occurring through parties in crisis around the world. And this crisis is highly dependent on the scientific and technological transformation we are experiencing in the area of communications. La Libertad Avanza has understood this very well. A formidable instrument for advancing and destroying the enemy, for them, is the cell phone integrated with networks. This doesn't mean that this has given them a definitive victory, because Argentine society, with its capacity for mobilization, for questioning, for what I call "negative pluralism," is already underway. There are public assets severely affected, such as the Garrahan or Posadas in public health.

We are experiencing a reactionary storm, a tendency toward authoritarianism, combined with the scientific and technological situation in terms of communication. And they have achieved a fatally interesting thing: the escrache typical of violent politics has now transformed into a communicational escrache. Each change of the Industrial Revolution corresponded to a type of representation. In Alberdi's time, there was representation of notables, intellectuals. The Second Industrial Revolution, which is that of aviation and the motor vehicle, had the major mass political parties as political representation. Now, what will be the mediation in this new industrial revolution that is proposing a civilizational mutation?

What we see is a great fragmentation, a fragmentation of the political center, and an attempt to manage things from the top of the state. I have hope that the center will be rebuilt, but, gosh, politics isn't a question of the ends an intellectual can set, but of the practical means a political leader and a political leadership can achieve.

–How far away is the possibility of an alternative forming a solid political coalition?

–That coalitions tend to form quickly is a position of thought open to conjecture. We won't emerge from this Argentine decline without building coalitions capable of lasting and undertaking long-term policies. Argentina's decline is a long-standing phenomenon, and the indicators are clear: education, hospitals that don't function, infrastructure indicators that are very low. They show a very strong distrust not about the future, but about the intermediate term of things; that uncertainty persists.

This is a call to political rationality: democratic politics must recover its republican capacity and the civilization of speech against barbarism. And since I don't believe in the prophetic power of history, in history, I remain at this level of more modest concern.