“Culture out!” Far right against cultural policy: The case of the Milei government in Argentina and the cultural war against state cultural spending

Abstract

The Milei government in Argentina represents a hostile turn towards cultural policy that is unparalleled in its dimension and depth in other countries. Certainly, for the last ten years, a new farright current has been challenging the state’s cultural policy, which emerged from the post-war consensus of the welfare state, with a neo-Gramscian reading of it as a ‘cultural war’. The case of Milei represents a prominent case within this current, given the centrality of Milei’s discourse on the retrenchment of cultural policy on the government’s agenda and its aggressive promises to eliminate cultural spending, which have been accused of being ‘Gramscian’ political instruments of the Left. Based on a mixed methodology, the paper examines the Milei government’s cultural policy discourses and decisions, focusing on film policy and its agency INCAA. It argues that Milei’s government represents a new cultural populist discourse that transforms a hostile cultural policy into an instrument of cultural warfare.