[Salon] [Friends_of_Bruce] Perfil: Argentina Will Be Used as a Paradigm to Discipline American Irresponsibility



 

Dear Friends:

 

Bruce Ackerman: "Argentina will be used as a paradigm to discipline American irresponsibility."


Interview by Jorge Fontevecchia on his weekly broadcast (May 17, 2025) on Perfil – an Argentine media site that has a wide following throughout Latin America

 

at

 

https://www.perfil.com/noticias/periodismopuro/bruce-ackerman-argentina-sera-utilizada-como-paradigma-para-disciplinar-la-irresponsabilidad-estadounidense-por-jorge-fontevecchia.phtml

 

This interview appears in both English and Spanish – and so I thought I would send along each version separately, given the length of the discussion.

 

***                                                     

Fontevecchia—In your constitutional theory, you speak of dualist democracy and make a distinction between normal and constitutional moments in people's political lives. I ask you to share this perspective with our audience, please.

 

Ackerman—There are revolutionary movements. For example, the effort to imbue Brazil is a revolutionary movement. Lula has been the leader of a revolutionary movement for fifty years. This isn't the case in Argentina, which is a good example of adaptation. We have Perón—I don't need to go into this—but then we have a transition to democracy. Nothing is perfect, but we have a gradual transition, and the key actors in this transition are Menem and Alfonsín. I don't say in my books what I think is good; what I present is a framework for comparative analysis. What is the relationship, for example, between the type of transition we see in Argentina and the type of transition we see in Germany? After all, after the fall of Hitler, there is a Konrad Adenauer who didn't leave Germany during the war. He's a transitional figure followed by other transitional figures, and the courts play a complex role. We can compare Germany with Argentina. No one ever does, and that's the point. When we compare, we usually compare with neighboring countries, and of course, that's also very important. We have two basic forms of transformation, one of which we can call adaptation through democratic politics. Within that framework, Milei is not that. Milei is a revolutionary. Of course, not a revolutionary in the sense of Joseph Stalin, but a revolutionary like Lula, although they are at very different stages. Lula has been a revolutionary for fifty years, with a movement. Milei is a revolutionary who wants to repudiate the Ancien Régime, but does he have a movement? I ask that question because I am a reader of Latin American newspapers, and it's not entirely clear to me that he has a broad-based popular movement, anything resembling the kind of movement Lula or even Donald Trump has. But Donald Trump and Milei are similar in that they want to repudiate the old regime, institutionalized and bureaucratic, with the implementation of fundamental decisions by the Legislature and enacted after a large and strong popular movement to support one or the other change.

 

—Professor, there is a constant tension between the Constitution and the exercise of democracy. How is this tension resolved within constitutional theory, and what should matter most to us? Preserving the limitations established by our ancestors in the form of constitutional norms or living according to our presidential agreements or our democratic will?

 

—I must say, these are excellent questions. What is a Constitution? Too often, people assume a Constitution is a piece of paper, and that's it. No. The American piece of paper was constructed 250 years ago. How has it survived as a way of channeling and institutionalizing the democratic will of the people? Through revolutionary transformation and adaptation. What we're seeing right now, for example, is President Trump issuing hundreds of executive orders. When did executive orders begin? That's a fascinating question. I can give you the answer in a couple of minutes instead of an hour. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the office of the president was the president and exactly two assistants. Usually, almost always, one of the assistants was the son of an important senator, and the other was a relative of an important congressman—it was these young people who did the work. There was no institutional capacity for the president to issue orders. The only time the president exercised extraordinary authority was during wars. For example, the war in which the United States took over half of Mexico. President Polk exercised extraordinary authority, in fact. Even today, it's an issue whether Congress ever declared war at the time. Then we have the Civil War, then we have the second war of American imperialism; the first was the Mexican War. And under President McKinley, we conquered Hawaii, which was independent, Alaska, which we had bought from the Russians, but we didn't really do anything, and we had to accomplish a military occupation. We conquered the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Why? Because the Spanish empire was weakening, and McKinley took this as an invitation to imperial ascendancy. But the executive office of the president, in which there were real human beings operating in a meaningful way and who could inform the president in normal, or relatively normal, times what was happening and then implement it, was established just 75 years ago, just before World War II. And the question of whether the president can issue executive orders, such as instructing an institution like the Office of Education, which Congress created, to cease to exist. This would have been incredible, even during the era of Ronald Reagan, who, of course, intended a limited revolution. The problem with the New Deal and the civil rights revolution was that the central government was too strong; we were moving in the direction of dictatorship. The government, he famously said, “is the problem, not the solution.” Ronald Reagan would never have dreamed of exercising his presidential authority, even though he won two elections in a row and enjoyed the support of Congress until the last two years of his eight-year term.It never occurred to him to order one or another government department to cease to exist. On the contrary, according to the theories now being proposed, President Trump can assert his authority to abolish the Federal Reserve Board and thus destroy the foundations of monetary stability in the United States. And here there is a direct intersection with Argentina, because I see that the International Monetary Fund just approved $20 billion to support Milei. Again, I'm not referring to Milei, but if Donald Trump, as he has done in many other cases, fires the ten members of the Federal Reserve Board, putting ten people who agree with him in power, this would be far more damaging to the global economy than this tariff issue. But it would also put enormous pressure on the International Monetary Fund to say, "You can't do that. We don't recognize this new Federal Reserve. We're going to have to have a new stability system for international relations." And who are they going to use as an example? Argentina. I want to try to make these non-obvious connections, which is precisely what I've been trying to do for decades, to be honest. And here, suddenly, Argentina will be used as a paradigm to discipline American irresponsibility. Will Trump do it? Well, I don't know. I've routinely discussed matters with high-ranking members of the government, including presidents, but I'm afraid, for one reason or another, I haven't been asked to do so in this case.I don't know. I've routinely discussed matters with high-ranking members of the government, including presidents, but I'm afraid, for one reason or another, I haven't been asked to do so in this case.I don't know. I've routinely discussed matters with high-ranking members of the government, including presidents, but I'm afraid, for one reason or another, I haven't been asked to do so in this case.

 

—Professor, do you think Trump, by officially stating that he intends to be reelected and have a third term, needs a war to create the situation that, for example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had, with the possibility during the war of being able to be reelected even more than twice? Do you think the president is trying to create this situation to be reelected at the end of his second term?

 

—Let me answer in two different ways. The big precedent was set by George Washington, who was a war hero, the equivalent of Napoleon in France. Except he wins, and Napoleon doesn't quite win in the end, a big difference. He could have run for a third term, but he refuses—why?—and this is made very clear originally, because this is a republic, not a monarchy. In monarchies, when the leader dies, and only when they die, are they relieved by a successor who is related to them by blood. This isn't America; we're a republic, not a monarchy, and we have to set a precedent. We have a common-law tradition, so setting a precedent is no less important than putting it on a piece of paper. So, as you say, we're going to skip over a lot of things. Franklin Roosevelt is a profoundly disabled individual. Beginning in 1925, he's unable to walk. Yet he is elected in 1932 and 1936. Will he run again? He doesn't want to do it. The truth is, he doesn't. He knows he's getting old, and why is he doing it? Well, if we have time, I'll get there, but we'll just say that he thinks the country needs a national leader, since Adolf Hitler represents such a clear and present danger to democracy. So, very reluctantly, he runs a third time, and then a fourth time, and he selects Harry Truman as his vice president, because he knows it's going to be hard for him to win a fourth time. The United States is about to win the war, and this is really terrible—it has a president for life. He nominates Harry Truman for the traditional reason for presidents to select... Harry Truman is from a swing state, and it's going to be a very close election because of the opposition to a president for life. Harry Truman takes office after a year, a little less, and he's involved in a number of pivotal activities: the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. He's been very creative in building the foundations that Trump is now destroying. But he insists on having a new constitutional amendment, explicitly saying—I mean, basically, in context—that no one can now attempt to do what Roosevelt attempted and succeeded in doing, by running for more than two terms. And that's the 22nd Amendment. Also, amendments are known to be difficult to enact because you need two-thirds of both houses of Congress, but then you need the states. Three-quarters of the states—impossible. Not in this case. There's an enormous consensus that we're not going to repeat this. Then we have the truly extraordinary election of another war hero, Dwight Eisenhower. He makes it absolutely clear to his admirers: “I'm not going to run for a third term. We'll have Richard Nixon run for it.” And they say: Richard Nixon is not going to win. And they're right. Richard Nixon loses to John F. Kennedy.If Eisenhower had run again and ignored this piece of paper that says only two terms, well, he might have won against Kennedy, who is, after all, the youngest president in the history of the United States. So, we have to understand that this text is part of this century-long process of affirming that a republic is not a monarchy. And this is precisely what Donald Trump is claiming. In fact, he even went so far as to say, "I'm so glad this happened," that the assassin who shot him didn't kill him. And then he publicly proclaimed that God had made him president of the United States. Shocking. That's one part of the answer. Let me give you a second part of the answer, with my apologies. The crucial issue isn't 2028 right now, it's the so-called off-year elections of 2026. Donald Trump is carrying out these blatantly unconstitutional practices, but he's doing so in a way that is having and will have, unsurprisingly, and I say this regrettably, terrible short-term consequences for millions of American workers who will be left unemployed. Because, regardless of what you think about the merits, even he agrees that there will be short-term problems, but there will be long-term glory for the United States. Well, we'll see later, but the short term is 2026. Every member of the House of Representatives, 436 of them, is up for re-election. One-third of the Senate is up for re-election. Currently, Republicans hold a three-member majority in the House of Representatives. Of course, the Democrats aren't just going to run a campaign saying that these president's policies have led to severe unemployment, creating misery for millions of working-class Americans and some middle-class Americans who have been laid off from the federal government, laid off from universities, all of this. Well, these people will vote. At the same time, the leaders of the senators and congressmen who are trying to run for office will also say that President Trump is acting like a dictator, imagining he can ignore Congressional decisions enacted and approved by previous presidents. That's one of the most notable accents—there are many. Congress allocated money for this year, last year. And President Trump is ordering USAID, which has allocated $2 billion in foreign aid around the world to help people who are starving, much of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, to cut off the money. Right now, there's a case before the Supreme Court challenging this law. But regardless of what the Supreme Court does, there will be many people in the United States,who has relatives in one part of Latin America or another who can tell stories about people dying of hunger because of Trump. This is different from being fired from your job. It's quite possible—I don't have a crystal ball—that Trump could face Congress in 2027. I'm not going to talk about historical things, where there's a fifty-fifty majority for the Democrats. And on the Senate side, a tie vote, or something like that. Well, what I'm going to argue is that President Trump should be removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. This is much worse than on January 6, when then-President Trump encouraged his followers to use physical violence and invade the Capitol and try to kill the Vice President of the United States. He's acting, not on one occasion, however terrible that occasion was, but acting as if he were ruling the United States as a monarch. This is the paradigmatic "high crimes and misdemeanors," this is precisely what George Washington stood for. So will he be impeached? I'll be among those who argue that if Republican leaders, as they say, are originalists, who want to reclaim the founding understanding, then this is the absolute foundation of our American republic. If that happens, that he be impeached, but perhaps not convicted by the Senate, the idea being that the mere fact of being impeached would be enough to discredit him so much that the Republican Party would not nominate him again. And that would be much better than him saying, "Well, after considering all the arguments, I've decided not to run again since I'm 82 years old. After all, Joe Biden did that... I'm older than Joe Biden." So this would be a much more decisive commitment on the part of the American people and their leaders to rebuilding American democracy, just as Milei is trying to rebuild Argentine democracy. It may be successful, or it may generate a backlash. That's better for you to say, but the point of our conversation is to compare cases that seem very different, because they are, even if institutionally and in terms of ambition, they aren't that different. Milei, of course, is much smarter and can think. After all, you have to remember that President Trump couldn't pass his university exams. He paid someone to help him pass them.or something like that. Well, what I'm going to argue is that President Trump should be removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. This is far worse than on January 6, when then-President Trump encouraged his followers to use physical violence and invade the Capitol and attempt to kill the vice president of the United States. He's acting not on one occasion, however terrible that occasion was, but acting as if he were ruling the United States as a monarch. This is the paradigmatic "high crimes and misdemeanors"—this is precisely what George Washington stood for. So will he be impeached? I will be among those who argue that if the Republican leaders, as they claim, are originalists, who want to reclaim the founding understanding, then this is the absolute foundation of our American republic. If that happens, that he's impeached, but perhaps not convicted by the Senate, the idea is that the mere fact of being impeached would be enough to discredit him so much that the Republican Party won't nominate him again. And that would be much better than him saying, "Well, after considering all the arguments, I've decided not to run again since I'm 82 years old. After all, Joe Biden did that... I'm older than Joe Biden." So, this would be a much more decisive commitment on the part of the American people and their leaders to rebuild American democracy, just as Milei is trying to rebuild Argentine democracy. It may succeed, or it may generate a backlash. That's better for you to say, but the point of our conversation is to compare cases that seem very different, because they are, even if institutionally and in terms of ambition, they're not so different. Milei, of course, is much smarter and can think. After all, you have to remember that President Trump couldn't pass his university exams. He paid someone to pass his exams.or something like that. Well, what I'm going to argue is that President Trump should be removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. This is far worse than on January 6, when then-President Trump encouraged his followers to use physical violence and invade the Capitol and attempt to kill the vice president of the United States. He's acting not on one occasion, however terrible that occasion was, but acting as if he were ruling the United States as a monarch. This is the paradigmatic "high crimes and misdemeanors"—this is precisely what George Washington stood for. So will he be impeached? I will be among those who argue that if the Republican leaders, as they claim, are originalists, who want to reclaim the founding understanding, then this is the absolute foundation of our American republic. If that happens, that he's impeached, but perhaps not convicted by the Senate, the idea is that the mere fact of being impeached would be enough to discredit him so much that the Republican Party won't nominate him again. And that would be much better than him saying, "Well, after considering all the arguments, I've decided not to run again since I'm 82 years old. After all, Joe Biden did that... I'm older than Joe Biden." So, this would be a much more decisive commitment on the part of the American people and their leaders to rebuild American democracy, just as Milei is trying to rebuild Argentine democracy. It may succeed, or it may generate a backlash. That's better for you to say, but the point of our conversation is to compare cases that seem very different, because they are, even if institutionally and in terms of ambition, they're not so different. Milei, of course, is much smarter and can think. After all, you have to remember that President Trump couldn't pass his university exams. He paid someone to pass his exams.Will he be impeached? I'll be among those who argue that if Republican leaders, as they say, are originalists, who want to reclaim the founding understanding, then this is the absolute foundation of our American republic. If that happens—that he be impeached, but perhaps not convicted by the Senate—the idea is that the mere fact of being impeached would be enough to discredit him so much that the Republican Party would not re-nominate him. And that would be much better than him saying, "Well, after considering all the arguments, I've decided not to run again since I'm 82 years old. After all, Joe Biden did that... I'm older than Joe Biden." So this would be a much more decisive commitment on the part of the American people and their leaders to rebuild American democracy, just as Milei is trying to rebuild Argentine democracy. It may succeed, or it may generate a backlash. That's better for you to say, but the point of our conversation is to compare cases that seem very different, because they are, although institutionally and in terms of ambition, they aren't that different. Milei, of course, is much smarter and can think. After all, we must remember that President Trump couldn't pass his university exams. He paid someone to help him pass them.Will he be impeached? I'll be among those who argue that if Republican leaders, as they say, are originalists, who want to reclaim the founding understanding, then this is the absolute foundation of our American republic. If that happens—that he be impeached, but perhaps not convicted by the Senate—the idea is that the mere fact of being impeached would be enough to discredit him so much that the Republican Party would not re-nominate him. And that would be much better than him saying, "Well, after considering all the arguments, I've decided not to run again since I'm 82 years old. After all, Joe Biden did that... I'm older than Joe Biden." So this would be a much more decisive commitment on the part of the American people and their leaders to rebuild American democracy, just as Milei is trying to rebuild Argentine democracy. It may succeed, or it may generate a backlash. That's better for you to say, but the point of our conversation is to compare cases that seem very different, because they are, although institutionally and in terms of ambition, they aren't that different. Milei, of course, is much smarter and can think. After all, we must remember that President Trump couldn't pass his university exams. He paid someone to help him pass them.

 

—Professor, you also talk about social movements and assign them a leading role in developed democratic societies. How do you describe these social movements and what role do you assign them within your constitutional theory?

 

—A very important feature of my constitutional framework is that we must consider time as a fundamental element in the development of a revolutionary transformation and its legitimation. Let's take a different example, about which I've written quite a bit: France. We have here Charles de Gaulle, who was a general in Vichy France, who refuses to surrender—to France—who refuses to give in and goes to the United Kingdom to speak on behalf of the French people, urging them to resist and repudiate German Nazism and the Vichy government. And he's in Britain, on the radio. How many people actually joined him at the beginning as he urged soldiers and others to follow him and get to Britain so we could have a Free French Army? In the next six months, he manages to gather six or seven thousand followers, inspiring the real movement. It's not about Charles de Gaulle himself, but about the French resistance within France. What do they do? They act in secret. And they're sacrificing their lives. They go out, sabotage a plant, and then flee. This is a criminal action. This is how things play out over a fairly long period of time. Eventually, de Gaulle manages to generate a huge amount of support in North Africa, and the Free French army that marches through Paris in 1944 is made up, to a huge percentage, of North Africans. And they want to have a new constitution for the Fourth Republic, they draft it, but it has to be an improvement over the constitution of the Third Republic. The Constituent Assembly meets, and de Gaulle thinks it's going in the wrong direction. He resigns as provisional president, the Constituent Assembly moves forward with his proposal, and it's rejected. The second time, a new Constituent Assembly puts forward its proposal, de Gaulle campaigns against it. However, it wins by a narrow margin, and de Gaulle retreats to his mansion and basically writes books condemning French traitors and insisting that the Fourth Republic is doomed. He only returns in 1958, when the Algerian war is undermining the Fourth Republic. And he gains support, very reluctantly, from the Fourth Republic. Then he has six months, and he proposes a new Constitution. And this time, he wins resoundingly. Well, you can't understand this movement, the Third Republic, without understanding this story I've just recounted, which begins with an act of courage in 1941, several defeats, and finally, a vindication. But then, of course, he is challenged in democratic elections, and finally loses and resigns in despair, condemning the victors for betraying the Fifth Republic, of which he is the author. Although in reality he is not the author but its leader. But who then is the author? It is the French people, who have mobilized in different ways at different times, fulfilling the objectives of the revolutionary tradition that began with the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1978. Then, in 2015, Patanou's constituent assembly revised the Constitution. So, considering that de Gaulle is dead, and that there will never be another de Gaulle—nor should there be—that should be said to Marine Le Pen. She's trying to revive the Constitution, and all that, but she lost in the last election, and in the ones before that too, to someone who was not at all a revolutionary. It's the same with Argentina: there was Juan Perón, and then he comes back, he fails. And then we have this effort, very admirable, I think, to build a democracy, and then a revolutionary, who may or may not have a movement. But even if Milei doesn't have a movement and fails, he will be remembered for the next ten or fifteen years, and the burden will fall on the next generation of democratic leaders who believe in the state. That's, basically, what Milei doesn't believe in. He's a radical libertarian. Well, then, my fundamental approach is one that takes generations as the fundamental unit. Every thirty or thirty-five years, it usually happens that the world changes enough for leaders and ordinary citizens to say, "We have to make a big change," or not. And they disagree about that. The idea of ​​unity is precisely what we don't have in a democracy. When they win 55 to 45, that doesn't mean the 45 are disloyal. They could win the next time, because there's a plausible margin.They could win next time, because there is a plausible margin.They could win next time, because there is a plausible margin.

 

—Let me ask you about another of your books, “Social Justice in the Liberal State.” Social justice is a concept that has been widely used in Argentine politics, beginning with Peronism, which understands it as a means of wealth redistribution. But it has also been strongly discredited by the current government, which claims that social justice is an aberration, the same as taxes and subsidies, which it considers a form of theft. Therefore, social justice is a difficult term to define. The Vatican, for example, was one of the creators of the social theory of economics in the 19th century. How would you define social justice, and what is your current vision, 40 or 45 years later, of what social justice should mean today?

 

—This is actually the issue that took me quite a while; I've been wrestling with this for a long time, as you're saying. My most recent book is called The Postmodern Predicament, and it's an effort to confront the questions I've raised about social justice and ask how to understand its meaning in the 21st century. When I wrote the book on social justice, it was a watershed moment in political philosophy, both in the Anglo-Saxon world and in Europe. For the first 65 years—let's focus only on Europe, because it's actually more important for Argentina—it was existentialist thought that dominated the understanding of the nature of oppression and justice. People like Jean-Paul Sartre—there were a lot of people like that—engaged in a long debate about the real-world conditions under which people in the real world are stripped of their dignity, let's put it that way. However, when I was writing and thinking as a young man, this existentialist tradition in Europe, and also in England, was overwhelmed for the moment by a different approach to justice in the English-speaking world associated with John Rawls. He says: don't think about the conditions under which you yourself are struggling for a meaningful life. Think of yourself as if you were in the original position where you don't even know who you are. How would you choose? What principles would you choose at that moment if you were like that? And Jürgen Habermas in Europe did the same thing. He, instead of thinking about the ideal situation of choice, thought about the ideal situation of discourse. If you really had a lot of time and you reflected on the great minds of the past, what would you say is just? I entered this debate in that spirit. I imagined a world in which we're on a spaceship and colonizing Mars for the first time. How would we divide this up? How will we organize society? That's the kind of question I was asking myself then. And that's not what I'm asking now. My postmodern predicament says that I want to revive the tradition of existentialism to adapt to the postmodern situation. And what is characteristic of this postmodern situation? Let me point out a couple of characteristics. One is that, for the first time in human history, you and I can speak face to face, even though we are separated by thousands of miles. In 1990, this was impossible. Today, the basis of existentialism, for me, is that you only have 24 hours and you have to sleep, let's say, six. In the modern world, until 1990, you had these 18 hours and you lived in many different spheres of life: you were with your intimates at home, you were working, you were in one or another religious and cult place, you were helping your neighborhood soccer team as a coach. And you may have also been involved in some public project in your neighborhood. This is how you've had a meaningful life. The only problem, of course, It's that each of these spheres imposed more demands on you than you could meet in eighteen hours. So your boss says, you have to work overtime, and your son at home says, you have to help me with my homework, and you can't do both. Well, how do you manage this conflict? With difficulty, which often leads to divorce, misery, being fired by bosses, and so on. Now, 30 years later, people spend four hours a day, on average, in a place like Argentina or the United States, on the internet. So they have 14 hours to solve these problems for which you had 18 hours. Sartre says: this is a crisis of fundamental proportions, and politics must respond to it. How can we solve these problems? The aim of this book is to provoke a serious conversation about this, because, of course, the great existentialist thinkers of the 20th century only imagined this in George Orwell, or Huxley in Brave New World. We are living through that novel. My most recent book just came out. I think it's going to be translated into Spanish. I don't know, I hope so. I hope so. I write two kinds of books: for people in universities and for people who read ten or twelve serious books a year, because they have many other spheres to fulfill, not that they don't want to. But then I try—and this is one of them—to write a book that ordinary people can read. So this book is relatively short, but it's written without mentioning the name of Husserl or Heidegger or John Rawls for the first half of the book. Then I have the second half talking about this crucial dilemma, asking the question, what forms of meaningful activity are impossible on the internet? So, sexuality is obviously one of them. Although sexuality happens all the time, it is by definition disgusting, pornographic. Why? Because one of the phenomena today that really has to concern us is the fact that many sincere couples live 1,500 kilometers away from each other. In the United States, these couples—one spouse lives in California and the other in New Haven—see each other three times a month. They talk every day. What do they miss there? Something truly fundamental. What is it? Well, that's what I try to talk about in terms of existentialist thinking in this second part. But the third part, now that we see the dilemmas of the postmodern era, how can we respond responsibly to them in a way that makes it much less plausible for someone like Trump or Milei or Marine Le Pen to say, "The whole system is terrible, it needs to be thrown out?" And this leads to a topic—not the only one—called the course of vital needs. To end with an example, I have a discussion about the great progress made in France. Today, every child at the age of 3 goes to a neighborhood childcare center for four hours a day,where he or she meets with a trained social worker who works with these same children for three years before they go to primary school. There are 60,000 centers across France. What does this do? It allows families to stay together, because with gender equality, these people at age 35, when they really commit to each other, are both going to have jobs, and are they going to have children? Let's assume the answer is yes. This is almost impossible, except for rich people who can hire someone. But what France has done in the last 35 years is say no, everyone should have it. And Macron, who is a conservative, strengthened this and made it a centerpiece of his campaigns to beat Le Pen both times. Why? Because universal childcare, if we were willing to do it and it brings us together, a very rich person like you or I fully understands the problem of raising children. We have many more resources, but we understand it. Most of Macron's program is perfectly plausible, a set of conservative social and economic policies, and he adds this. Those who support him support this, too, to the point that public opinion polls show it played a crucial role, especially the second time he defeated Le Pen. But this is just one example of the course of life. Take the fact that the life expectancy of the typical Argentine is now 79 years. Argentina ranks fifty-eighth in the world in that regard. Suppose it shares in the overall increase and that people who are now 60 or 65 will live to 90 or 95. This is already happening in Japan. This is a different phase of life than in ancient times, before the 21st century, when most people were dead by 70 or 75. Now they can expect to live to 90, then they retire, and their children leave them and go to Mendoza from Buenos Aires or whatever, and they come back to see them at least four times a year. How can they make their lives meaningful? They can go to daycare and help the social worker raise the next generation and fill that void of meaning. If we were willing to do so and it unites us, a very rich person like you or I fully understands the problem of raising children. We have many more resources, but we understand. Most of Macron's program is perfectly plausible, a set of conservative social and economic policies, and he adds this. Those who support him support this, too, to the point that public opinion polls show this played a crucial role, especially the second time he defeated Le Pen. But this is just one example of the course of life. Take the fact that the life expectancy of the typical Argentine is now 79 years. Argentina ranks fifty-eighth in the world in that regard. Suppose it shares in the overall increase and that people who are now 60 or 65 will live to 90 or 95. This is already happening in Japan. This is a different phase of life. In ancient times, before the 21st century, most people were dead by 70 or 75. Now they can expect to live until they're 90, then they retire, and their children leave them and go to Mendoza from Buenos Aires or wherever, and they come back to see them at least four times a year. How can they make their lives meaningful? They can go to daycare and help the social worker raise the next generation and fill that void of meaning.If we were willing to do so and it unites us, a very rich person like you or I fully understands the problem of raising children. We have many more resources, but we understand. Most of Macron's program is perfectly plausible, a set of conservative social and economic policies, and he adds this. Those who support him support this, too, to the point that public opinion polls show this played a crucial role, especially the second time he defeated Le Pen. But this is just one example of the course of life. Take the fact that the life expectancy of the typical Argentine is now 79 years. Argentina ranks fifty-eighth in the world in that regard. Suppose it shares in the overall increase and that people who are now 60 or 65 will live to 90 or 95. This is already happening in Japan. This is a different phase of life. In ancient times, before the 21st century, most people were dead by 70 or 75. Now they can expect to live until they're 90, then they retire, and their children leave them and go to Mendoza from Buenos Aires or wherever, and they come back to see them at least four times a year. How can they make their lives meaningful? They can go to daycare and help the social worker raise the next generation and fill that void of meaning.

 

 

_______________________________________________
Friends_of_Bruce mailing list
Friends_of_Bruce@mailman.yale.edu
https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/friends_of_bruce


This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail (Mailman edition) and MHonArc.